Outsiders: An Art Without Precedent or Tradition

In May 1977 the poet and filmmaker Victor Musgrove approached the Arts Council with the suggestion of mounting an exhibition of outsider art, or ‘what Dubuffet calls Art Brut’. Musgrove, who had recently helped artist Jean Dubuffet establish his museum dedicated to Art Brut in Lausanne, France, proposed ‘a large documented exhibition, including photographs and large objects, as well as paintings and drawings.’ 

Victor Musgrove and Roger Cardinal used Jean Dubuffet's definition of Art Brut as a starting point for their selection, but broadened and enlarged Dubuffet’s strict criteria. The press release for the exhibition stated that: ‘Outsider art is not a movement but in each case a highly personal creation of individuals of prodigious talent whose work and even existence is usually unknown to each other, and for the most part little known even to the “official” art world.’ For Cardinal and Musgrove, outsider artists were also defined by what they were not: ‘They are not naives or Sunday Painters … Nor do they produce “psychiatric” art via the intermediaryship of art as therapist.’

The exhibition featured drawings, paintings, sculpted wood, stuffed sculpture, mobile objects and large-scale architectural structures. Musgrove described the work in the exhibition as, by turns, ‘lyrical, powerful, delicate’ and ‘violent’. Among the works in the lower galleries – which had been painted black, orange and purple for the exhibition – were Chicago-based artist Henry Darger’s large-scale drawings of a fantasy war between child-slaves and adults, led by seven teenage sisters.