Maurice Tuchman

In 1912 Paul Klee declared that the art of the mentally ill, as well as the art of children, "really should be taken far more seriously than are the collections of all our art museums if we truly intend to reform today's art." What Klee found most fascinating and instructive about the art of "outsiders"--those self-taught individuals, sometimes mentally disturbed, who create while isolated from mainstream culture--was the sincerity, depth, and power of their un-adulterated, unmediated expressions. Parallel Visions, an exhibition and catalogue organized and produced by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, reveals the considerable influence that outsider art has had on the development of twentieth-century art. The work of such "marginalized" artists and compulsive visionaries as Antonin Artaud, Ferdinand Cheval, Henry Darger, Howard Finster, Madge Gill, Martin Ram!rez, P. M. Wentworth, Adolf Wlfli, and Joseph Yoakum is juxtaposed with the work of devotees of outsider art among modern artists. Essays by the curators of the exhibition, Maurice Tuchman and Carol S. Eliel, and by other commentators offer a history of this phenomenon as well as an exploration of issues crucial to the formation of our aesthetic and critical judgments and our notions of creativity. In addition to the curators, the contributors include Russell Bowman, Roger Cardinal, Barbara Freeman, Sander L. Gilman, Mark Gisbourne, Reinhold Heller, John M. MacGregor, Donald Preziosi, Allen Weiss, Jonathan Williams, and Sarah Wilson.… (mere)

Catalog for the first major museum survey devoted exclusively to the Russian Avant-Garde. Describes the goals and effervescence of Russian Modernism and its waning in the late 1920's when the avant-garde impulse was no longer tolerated by the Soviet government. 288p. Bibliography. Checklist for exhibition. Artists range from Marc Chagall, Naum Gabo and Vassilii Kandinsky to Eli Lissitzky, Kazimir Malevich and Alexandr Rodchenko. Several essays. Includes photographs and many b/w reproductions of paintings.… (mere)

THE SPIRITUAL IN ART :
ABSTRACT PAINTING 1890-1985

FOREWORD

The great epoch of the Spiritual which is already beginning,
or, in embryonic form, began already yesterday. .
provides and will provide the in which a kind of
monumental work of art must come to fruition

Wassily Kandinsky's words, written in 1910-11,
prophesied the breadth and ambition of the
artists whose careers are explored in this exhibition,

The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985.
Countless generations of artists have been intrigued
by the mysteries offered by spiritual writings and
belief systems. In the 1890s interest in the
occult and mysticism fused with the genesis
of abstract painting, then in its "embryonic
form." Kandinsky in Germany, František
Kupka first in Czechoslovakia and later in
France, Kazimir Malevich and others of his
circle in Russia, and Piet Mondrian in the
Netherlands created a purc abstract vision that
embodied their in volvement with esoteric
thought. Their legacy was spread by many of
their contemporaries to subsequent generations
of artists who found new means to unite
abstraction with mystical concepts, thereby
creating meaningful images, a fact that has
largely been overlooked in much of the
scholarship devoted to this period. This
exhibition, in its international scope
and conception, focuses on this issue.

As the inaugural exhibition in our new Robert
O. Anderson Building, The Spiritual in Art:
Abstract Painting 1890-1985 signals the
ongoing commitment of the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art to presenting innovative and...… (mere)