Unlike a previous review of this monumental show, this piece puts Michelangelo’s art in a biographical context. At age 30 his drawings for a fresco The Battle for Cascina constituted a “zenith”. Thereafter his art became more personal, seeking to express the dreamlike but unattainable “unbodied beauty” of the human form. “Hence the air of melancholy and sorrow that pervades so much of his art.”
As widely reported, the Berkshire Museum is in a dispute over the sale of key works. Adjacent to this is perhaps a more important public interest issue – should museums sell artworks that they rarely, if ever, put on display? Why not deaccession the “bottom 1%” to fund free admission? “[Museum directors], how much more art that you can’t afford to conserve, and have no space to display, do you really want?”
Something of a reminiscence of 1960’s California, and Wayne Thiebaud’s emergence as an important artist. Being labelled (incorrectly) a Pop artist probably helped draw some attention but the appeal of his art was evident almost immediately. Commented one critic “the world … isn’t perfect, except perhaps one little part of it, to which we can briefly retreat via these paintings and glimpse the way all things ought to be.”
Leonilson died young, suffering not just from AIDS but also loneliness. He had come to prominence in post-dictatorship Brazil by giving his work a uniquely personal tone. Then came an AIDS diagnosis and his work focused even more closely on selfhood. He “frequently framed imagination as fact and fact as imagination, all while maintaining the confessional or diaristic tone of his autobiographical project.”
Outsider art goes back at least to Jean Dubuffet’s Art Brut and probably earlier. It’s the work of artists – variously self-taught or suffering from particular ailments – who sit outside the mainstream. Their art, too, is unorthodox but often astonishingly imaginative. Few of these artists, it seems, transition into the mainstream but that hasn’t stopped this category of art enjoying growing recognition.