Giotto: Trecento Master

Giotto
Giotto di Bondone

There is a story about Giotto that was told by another artist, Cimabue. Cimabue was walking through the countryside to visit the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. He saw a young boy drawing his sheep flock with a stone in the sand. Cimabue said, “This boy will be a Prodigy,” and then asked Giotto’s parents if Giotto could become his apprentice. That is the beginning of Giotto's career as the inventor of realism and detail in painting.

Giotto, born 1267 – January 8, 1337 is an Italian painter and architect from Florence in the late Middle Ages. He is said to be the founder of the Italian Renaissance. He brought his own sense of what he thought a painting should look by rejecting the Italo-Byzantine form of stylized painting and brought a sense of realism and naturalism to his work. The late-16th century biographer Giorgio Vasari describes Giotto as making a decisive break with the prevalent Byzantine style and as initiating "the great art of painting as we know it today, introducing the technique of drawing accurately from life, which had been neglected for more than two hundred years. Not only was he noted for his realistic human figures but he brought a new vision to perspective. His knowledge of painting influenced those High Renaissance painters that came after him like Michelangelo and Raphael. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists, trans. George Bull, Penguin Classics, (1965)

Giotto is known for his clear, simple solutions to the basic problems of the representation of space and of the volume, structure, and solidity of 3-dimensional forms, and above all the human figure. He was also a genius at getting to the heart of whatever episode from sacred history he was representing,  finding the compositional means to express its innermost spiritual meaning and its psychological effects in terms of simple areas of paint. 


After leaving his home to go work as an apprentice for Cimabue he went on to become of the most famous painters of Tuscany. Cimabue was one of the first Italian painters to make a make from the Italo-Byzantine style but he still relied on some Byzantine models. While Giotto brought his sense of realism to a work, Cimabue clearly painted in a style that is clearly Medieval with stylized elongated figures. Giotto worked on Cimabue’s paintings while Cimabue was absent from the studio. Giotto had extraordinary skill and rendered his subjects with lifelike precision. While working on one of Cimabue’s paintings he painted a fly on one of the faces with such a realistic representation that Cimabue tried brushing it off.

You can see the differences in the two works below. The one on the left was done by Cimabue. It has the gold background typical for Byzantine works, elongated figures on a flat plane with little dimension to them. On the right is Giotto's work, Ognissanti Madaonna, where he has created a feeling of depth, the figures occupy a deeper space as compared to Cimabue's work. Even the Madonna's throne recedes in depth.

                                         

Maesta. 1280-1285, Uffizi Gallery, Florence

There is a lot of disagreement about Giotto’s life. Many speculated on his place of birth, his appearance and there are arguments about what he did and did not paint. One of these arguments surrounds the Basilica of St Francis of Assisi. Cimabue was commissioned to paint many of the large frescoes at this newly built basilica and it is said that Giotto accompanied him. The attribution of the fresco cycle of the Life of St. Francis in the Upper Church is a hotly debated topic among art historians.

Basilica of St Francis of Assisi

From Wikipedia:

“From Rome, Cimabue went to Assisi to paint several large frescoes at the newly-built Basilica of St Francis of Assisi, and it is possible, but not certain, that Giotto went with him. The attribution of the fresco cycle of the Life of St. Francis in the Upper Church has been one of the most hotly disputed in art history. The documents of the Franciscan Friars that relate to artistic commissions during this period were destroyed by Napoleon's troops, who stabled horses in the Upper Church of the Basilica, and scholars have been divided over whether or not Giotto was responsible for the Francis Cycle. In the absence of documentary evidence to the contrary, it has been convenient to ascribe every fresco in the Upper Church that was not obviously by Cimabue to Giotto, whose prestige has overshadowed that of almost every contemporary. Some of the earliest remaining biographical sources, such as Ghiberti and Riccobaldo Ferrarese, suggest that the fresco cycle of the life of St Francis in the Upper Church was his earliest autonomous work. However, since the idea was put forward by the German art historian, Friedrich Rintelen in 1912, many scholars have expressed doubt that Giotto was in fact the author of the Upper Church frescoes. Without documentation, arguments on the attribution have relied upon connoisseurship, a notoriously unreliable "science."However, technical examinations and comparisons of the workshop painting processes at Assisi and Padua in 2002 have provided strong evidence that Giotto did not paint the St. Francis Cycle. There are many differences between the Francis Cycle and the Arena Chapel frescoes that are difficult to account for by the stylistic development of an individual artist. It seems quite possible that several hands painted the Assisi frescoes, and that the artists were probably from Rome. If this is the case, then Giotto's frescoes at Padua owe much to the naturalism of these painters.”

Detail from a fresco at the Basilica of St Francis in Assisi that is said to be done be Giotto. Click on the image for more information about this work.

More information about this at Cimabue and Giotto Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists

Detail: Scrovegni Chapel

Around 1305 Giotto completed what is considered to be the masterpiece of Early Renaissance, Scrovegni Chapel also known as the Arena Chapel in Padua, This cycle’s theme is Salvation with emphasis on the life of the Virgin and the life of Christ. This cycle was commissioned by Enrico degli Scrovegni. The chapel is dedicated to the Annunciation. The theme is Salvation, and there is an emphasis on the Virgin Mary, as the chapel is dedicated to the Annunciation and to the Virgin of Charity. As is common in the decoration of the medieval period in Italy, the west wall is dominated by the Last Judgement. On either side of the chancel are complementary paintings of the Angel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary, depicting the Annunciation. This scene is incorporated into the cycles of The Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary and The Life of Christ. The source for The Life of the Virgin is the Golden Legend of Jacopo da Voragine while The Life of Christ draws upon the Meditations on the Life of Christ by the Pseudo-Bonaventura. Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona, The Usurer's Heart: Giotto, Enrico Scrovegni, and the Arena Chapel in Padua, University Park, 2008; Laura Jacobus,Giotto and the Arena Chapel: Art, Architecture and Experience, London, 2008; Andrew Ladis, Giotto's O: Narrative, Figuration, and Pictorial Ingenuity in the Arena Chapel, University Park, 2009

The cycle is divided into 37 scenes, arranged around the lateral walls in 3 tiers, starting in the upper register with the story of Joachim and Anna, the parents of the Virgin and continuing with the story of Mary. The life of Jesus occupies two registers. The Last Judgment fills the entire pictorial space of the counter-façade.

Detail: Last Judgment

Giotto paid a great deal of attention to detail and his figures draw on classical sculpture. Unlike Cimabue Giotto reject styling figures and rejected the elongation of the figure as byzantine models often did. His figures are solid, have three-dimensional qualities and gestures that are taken from observation. The clothing is not formalized but have dimension and weight. With these frescoes, Giotto gained a reputation for setting a new realistic standard in painting.

Florence Cathedral

Along with attaining fame as a painter, Giotto was also commissioned as an architect. In 1334 he was as given a major architectural commission as the architect of the new campanile (bell tower) of the Florence Cathedral. This bell tower is a free-standing structure that is part of other buildings that make up Florence Cathedral on the Piazza del Duomo in Florence, This masterpiece of Gothic Architecture was designed entirely by Giotto and is encrusted with polychrome marble and sculptural decoration.

Giotto’s life and work is argued among scholars with many is disagreeing on his birthdate, birthplace, his apprenticeship, the order in which he created his works, and whether or not he painted the famous frescoes at Assisi, (see above) and his burial place. Two things about his life that are agreed upon: his Scrovegni Chapel frescoes and his design for the campinale of the Florence Cathedral.

Giotto died in January 1337. According to Vasari,Giotto was buried in Santa Maria del Fiore, the Cathedral of Florence, on the left of the entrance and with the spot marked by a white marble plaque. According to other sources, he was buried in the Church of Santa Reparata. These apparently contradictory reports are explained by the fact that the remains of Santa Reparata lie directly beneath the Cathedral and the church continued in use while the construction of the cathedral was proceeding in the early 14th century.

During an excavation in the 1970s bones were discovered beneath the paving of Santa Reparata at a spot close to the location given by Vasari, but unmarked on either level. Forensic examination of the bones by anthropologist Francesco Mallegni and a team of experts in 2000 brought to light some facts that seemed to confirm that they were those of a painter, particularly the range of chemicals, including arsenic and lead, both commonly found in paint, that the bones had absorbed.

The bones were those of a very short man, of little over four feet tall, who may have suffered from a form of congenital dwarfism. This supports a tradition at the Church of Santa Croce that a dwarf who appears in one of the frescoes is a self-portrait of Giotto. On the other hand, a man wearing a white hat who appears in the Last Judgement at Padua is also said to be a portrait of Giotto. The appearance of this man conflicts with the image in Santa Croce.

Vasari, drawing on a description by Boccaccio, who was a friend of Giotto, says of him that "there was no uglier man in the city of Florence" and indicates that his children were also plain in appearance. There is a story that Dante visited Giotto while he was painting the Scrovegni Chapel and, seeing the artist's children underfoot asked how a man who painted such beautiful pictures could create such plain children, to which Giotto, who according to Vasari was always a wit, replied "I made them in the dark."

Forensic reconstruction of the skeleton at Santa Reperata showed a short man with a very large head, a large hooked nose and one eye more prominent than the other. The bones of the neck indicated that the man spent a lot of time with his head tilted backwards. The front teeth were worn in a way consistent with frequently holding a brush between the teeth. The man was about 70 at the time of death.

While the Italian researchers were convinced that the body belonged to Giotto and it was reburied with honor near the grave of Brunelleschi, others have been highly skeptical. (Wikipedia article).

Peruzzi Altarpiece, about 1309–15, Giotto di Bondone and His Workshop.
Tempera and gilded gesso on poplar panel, 41 5/8 x 98 1/2 in. (105.7 x 250.2 cm).
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, Gift of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, GL.60.17.7Click on image for more information

More information on Giotto here at the Athenaeum

At Duke University

Click on images below for more information about the exhibit at the J. Paul Getty Museum

Left: The Virgin and Child with Saints and Allegorical Figures, about 1315–20, Giotto di Bondone (Italian, about 1267–1337). Tempera and gold leaf on panel. Private Collection. Courtesy of Wildenstein & Co., Inc., New York. Right: The Crucifixion, about 1315-20, Giotto di Bondone. Tempera and gold leaf on panel. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Strasbourg, photo M. Bertola

Some books at the Central Library's Art Division about Giotto
Click on image to connect with the library catalog

The boy who drew sheep 

The Limners: Early American Portrait Painters

Unidentified artist, seventeenth century, Elizabeth Clarke Freake (Mrs. John Freake) and Baby Mary, about 1671 and 1674, oil on canvas, 42 1/2 x 36 3/4 in. (108 x 93.3 cm), Worcester Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Albert W. Rice, 1963.134. More about this painting can be found at the Worcester Art Museum

The Limners: Early American Portrait Painters  

Limner painting took place in early 17^th century America.  A limner painter had little or no formal training; sometimes they are called naïve painters or folk painters. The word limner or limning comes from the old English word for drawing or making images with lines. The old English word comes from the Latin word, illuminaire, to make bright or to light up.

During the middle ages before printing the word limning meant manuscript illumination. These early manuscript illuminators used bright colors without shadowing which caused their work to take on a flat appearance. The Limner’s painted in much the same way, as they were untrained, their work tended to be very flat, with very little shading which caused the figures to take on that flat look. The figures they painted did not appear to have life in them.

In Early America much of the painting that was being done was sign painting. Signs were hung out of storefronts and other businesses. As many Americans could not read signs were painted not with words but with images.  As American colonists began to prosper they looked for things that could brighten up their lives so purchased things that could bring happiness into their homes, and they began to hang portraits of themselves and their family. Guess who painted these portraits; yes it was those sign painters.

Many of these sign painters became the first painters of early America, now known as the Limners. These portraits took on the same qualities as their signs, portraits were simple, flat and tended to be posed in awkward positions that no human could attain. The portraits looked as though the artist had drawn lines and then filled them in with color. As these paintings took on an unsophisticated look, many times they are referred to as primitive works. The clothes painted in these portraits went from one extreme to the other, one would be simply dressed and another elaborately clothed with lace, ribbons, and fancy fabrics. The faces tended to be expressionless with a lifeless stare, the children did not look like children but like miniature adults. Each limner painters had their own style of painting but most often the eyes of the sitter were heavily accentuated and very often included things like books, birds, pets, household objects. The artist often used crushed burnt walnuts, ground chicken bones, boiled eggshells, blueberries and even local clays to create their works with. 

Limner artists were not revered like cabinetmakers or silversmiths, what they produced was not necessary but an item that was considered frivolous. As a result these artists travelled and moved from one location to another to earn a living, and as they weren’t considered important many of them are unknown and many of the works they did went unsigned.

If you are interested in reading about the Limners and early American art here is a selection of books from the Art Division.

Volume 1

American folk art and decorative arts from the early years of the Republic are telling indicators of family traditions, aesthetic values, and household customs of the young nation. Showing us how creative and consumer cultures from the old world were transformed in the new, Expressions of Innocence and Eloquence presents more than two hundred examples of American folk art and decorative arts created in New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia in the 18th and 19th centuries. Drawn from the extraordinary Jane Katcher Collection, the book features familiar expressions of American folk art—portraits and carvings, quilts and needlework, weathervanes and whirligigs, family records and calligraphy, ceramics, furniture, baskets, and toys—as well as the unexpected—valentines, friendship albums, and keepsakes woven from the hair of loved ones.

Volume 2

The two books below do not have book jackets so the title page was scanned

 

Although from a different time period than Limner painting, this book has excellent reproductions of early American folk art

 

 

Below is a children's book on Limner painting

 

 

The Stanley Burns Archive, Mourning Photography, & The Mütter Museum

Mourning Photography

Post-mortem photography is photographs of the recently decreased and is sometimes referred to as memento mori.  During the Victorian period it was quite common and an accepted way of memorializing the dead from infants to the elderly.

Around 1839 the daguerreotype made photography cheaper and easier for the middle class who could not afford to have paintings done of their loves ones. This photography invention allowed people to have an image of their family member, many of who most likely never had a photo taken of themselves.

It was during the Victorian era that post mortem photography really became commonplace. Mortality rates were quite high particularly among infants and young children. Many children died suddenly and parents would have to get a photographer to the body quickly to photograph the body. Parents took photos of their deceased children as a keepsake to remember them by; often these children were posed as if they were sitting with their eyes open or in a restful sleep. Many times children were in a crib or a bed, surrounded by flowers, and these photos were never taken with the deceased in a coffin. Children were often dressed in white or ordinary clothing and many photographers added a rosy color to their cheeks. Many times in those photos the mother is holding her deceased child while
she is covered in a black shroud. This was done to put emphasis on the deceased.

These photos were supposed to portray the deceased as if they were still alive so many times they were also posed with everyday things such as toys and usually other family members posed with the dead. As the eyes are the first things to deteriorate after death, many photographers learned to paint false eyes on closed lids if they could not keep the eyes open. It all sounds very macabre but these photos were taken with love and admiration for the deceased. The Victorians did not view death as a macabre experience; instead they found beautification in death and sought to have their loved one memorialized in peaceful images.

The origins of memento mori photographs can be traced back nearly to the beginning of photography itself. During the nineteenth century, post-mortem portraits were used to acknowledge and mourn the death of a loved one, especially a baby or child. All social classes engaged in the practice, which became more widespread after the introduction of the daguerrotype in 1839. The subjects of the photos were generally arranged to appear as if peacefully asleep, all their earthly suffering ended. Displayed prominently in the household alongside other family photographs, the portraits helped heal grieving hearts by preserving some trace of the deceased.

The ritual of photographing the deceased is not a practice that continues in mainstream culture today as many consider it morbid and disrespectful to the corpse. Not so for those who are member of the group, Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep. This non-profit group in Colorado specializes in infant bereavement photography and their photographs of children are special and comforting to the parents by no means morbid.

The Burns Archive

Although there are those that find photographing the deceased terribly morbid there are many collectors of Victorian mourning photography throughout the world. One of the largest collections belongs to Stanley B. Burns, M.D. He is an ophthalmologist who claims to have been a visual person his whole life which led him into the field of seeing and vision. In the 1970s he began collecting post mortem and medical photography to document medical and social conditions. He owns about half a million photographs from the that daguerreotype originated in 1839 through 1939.

As stated above Burns began collecting as he wanted a record of the social conditions at those times. He also has another reason that has to do with documenting how practicing medicine has changed from those times to today. Burns does not have a great fondness for the healthcare system today where doctors are called healthcare providers and patients are called clients or customers. He wanted his collection of medical photography to document want he refers to as, “medical individualism, when special care was paid to the individual as a medical patient. His collections have been published in the books he has written.

Burns has written books enabling readers to view his vast collection. One of these books, entitled, Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America, takes the reader into the world of mourning photography. Many of these photographs are the only images the families will have of the deceased. The images from his collection show a common practice in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Post mortem photography according to Burns, “make up the largest group of nineteenth century American genre photographs” and they are very much unseen. In this book you will find sepia and black and white photos. Burns collaborated with photographer Joel-Peter Witkin on this book. There are two other accompanying books,   Sleeping beauty II : Grief, Bereavement and the Family in Memorial Photography, American & European Traditions, and Sleeping Beauty III: Memorial Photography: The Children which focuses specifically on peaceful images of children. The book also has a section on contemporary memorial photography and images from Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep.

If you are interested in Burns’ medical photography archive, you can view them in A Morning’s Work, Medical Photographs from the Burns Archive & Collection, 1843-1939.

Clicking on the book covers below will bring you to our catalog.

Not from the Stanley B. Burns archive but covers medical photography

The Mütter Museum

The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia is a museum that specializes in the history of medicine and has a large collection of medical photography. Their goal at the museum is to help the public understand the mysteries and beauty of the human body and to understand the history and treatment of diseases.

Mid-nineteenth century saw a beginning of medical photography where physicians were able to share information with their students about their patients. As photography became simpler with the introduction of the Kodak camera in 1888, physicians were able to communicate to their patients as well about their medical conditions.

The museum is part of the The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Along with their collection of medical photography the museum’s collection contains, anatomical and pathological specimens, wax models, and antique medical equipment. Along with the Burns Archive The Mütter Museum has a large medical photographic collection dating from the 1850s to the 1940s.

The two images at either end are items the library owns. Clicking on the image will direct you to our catalog.

Everything is display in a dark 19^th century cabinet museum setting. The Mütter is not for everyone. Many find the photographs and collection disturbing while others find a beauty and aesthetic value in the collection. If you go to the Mütter be prepared to see photos and specimens of human oddities and deformities. Remember while you are at the museum or viewing one of their books, the photographs were never meant to put these patients on display as a side show would. Instead these photographs were taken as a way for physicians to understand how to help their patients. The camera makes us see these afflicted people as human beings ravaged by disease and is empathetic to the afflicted. Today these historic photographs provide the viewer a look at how medicine was practiced.

August 2012.NN

Art of the Peculiar, the Creepy, and the Beautiful

Elizabeth McGrath     Mark Ryden     Jessica Joslin    Louie Travis

   

Elizabeth McGrath

Creepy, beautiful, romantic, grotesque, and sad are just some of the words used to describe the art of Elizabeth McGrath. McGrath is a musician and an artist who creates dioramas and sculpture that fall into those creepy and grotesque categories. Yes she creates creatures with articulated arms and legs, bulging eyes, and pointy teeth. But look again and you may see beauty made with feathers and felt. Sometimes even pretty pink creatures appear, even though they may have two heads. Her world is both disturbing and alluring. McGrath is drawn to Catholic iconography and the carnival life. Take a look at her funhouse world filled with strange beauty and dark specimens. Along with creating sculpture and animation McGrath also fronts the band Miss Derringer.

Mark Ryden

Mark Ryden is an artist who creates his own fantastic worlds inhabited by pretty creatures. but his are on canvas. Surreal pretty worlds are created and finished down to the last intricate detail. Some have compared his works to warped Golden Book world of the 1950s. His colors are bright and cheerful; his children are alien-like yet pretty and his animals cute. For The Tree Show , his strongest influences came from European and American landscape painters of the 19^th century such as John Constable, Caspar David Friedrich, Albert Bierstadt, and John James Audubon. His paintings are playful with sweet looking girls in pretty dresses yet disturbing as they have a tea party with fish on their heads with small infants sitting on the table in a birds nest. There is a Botticelli Primavera look to his paintings yet they take on a mysterious Dutch still life quality.

Jessica Joslin

Metalwork Taxidermy, that’s the work that Jessica Joslin creates. She creates strange hybrid creatures modeled after real animal anatomy. These skeletal forms are made animal skulls, satin, velvet, glass, leather, metal and sometimes metal parts from lamps and other objects. Strange Nature is a book of species that are unknown. Don’t call her work Steampunk, as she associates her work more with the worlds dreamt up by authors HG Wells and Jules Verne that are articulated with the extravagant exactitude of the Victorian era. You can read an interview with Joslin here in Hi-Fructose.

  

Louie Travis

  

Travis Louie’s world is full of Victorian and Edwardian creepiness. He works meticulously in black and white acrylics and graphite. His paintings are inhabited by human oddities and mythical beings that may have one eye or even three eyes. They dress in elegant suits and ties while others have painted their fang lips and are dressed in high neck black dresses. One of his characters carries a fish where ever she goes and another was found living inside a garden hole. We question how these grotesqueries ended up looking the way they do, what unusual circumstances led them to this look like ghosts in a Civil War tintype?  Painted in ornate frames almost looking like cameos, these creatures look dignified and quite content with their physical peculiarities. Influenced by watching atomic age" sci-fi and horror movies and looking at 1950s memorabilia, Louie creates creatures that are trying to get along in the world despite their unlucky fate of being born without physical “beauty.”

Art Brut and Outsider Art

Art Brut, Raw Art, The Outsiders, The Visionaries 

You hear the word Art Brut, what sorts of images does that word bring you your mind? For most raw or rough images come to mind and that’s it, raw art or art created outside the boundaries, hence the name, Outsider Art. Art Brut, translated from French means "raw art"; 'Raw' in that it has not been through the cooking process, those works uncooked by cultural and artistic influences. Art Brut, Outsider art or any of the terms used above aren’t limited to just painting. The artists that work within this genre may work in many mediums, drawing, painting, sculpture, fabric, some may create dolls or toys and soil whereby they create large visionary gardens, and others express themselves in writings laid out in a primitive format.

This type of creative expression began in the insane asylums in the 1920s. A patient in a Swiss asylum named Adolf Wolfli produced thousands of works in his cell that were eventually collected by his doctor, Dr. Morganthaler. As Wolfli worked he created intricate drawings of geometric patterns, combined with writing, primitive figures, and musical notation. Wolfli imagined his drawings to be “sound pieces” or “musical compositions.” These brightly colored detailed drawings from a person with no artistic training make us question, what is the connection between art, creativity, and madness?

  

Art of Adolf Wolfli

Some Books from the collection about Adolf Wolfli

 

  

French artist Jean Dubuffet was an artist that created Art Brut. He was the artist who came up with the phrase Art Brut after being influenced by the works of Wolfi and Hans Prinzhorn’s book, Artistry of the Mentally Ill. Dubuffet saw art works by psychiatric patients, prisoners, and children to be work that rebelled against traditional standards of beauty and to be more human than those that hung in museums and galleries. Dubuffet worked in many times in blacks, blues, reds, and whites, with the paint thickened with sand and tar.

 His works were created with thick heavy strokes that appear to be done by an untrained artist. Like many Outsider artists working today, his work appears childlike and primitive. As with Wolfli, Dubuffet’s work conveys a sense of intense energy and movement.

  

Art of Jean Dubuffet

  

  

  

  

   

  

  

  

  

  

Some books from the collection about Jean Dubuffet

  As these Art Brut artists rejected established modern values and created their own visual language; almost anything can and does happen in their work. As they work on a piece they allow for what they call chance operations to happen in their work, they have no set plan and whatever happens will happen. Sometimes but rarely do these artists care about conveying a political, historical, or social message. The messages they convey are allegorical or mythic.

 Within Art Brut are different genres depending on how the artist. Raw Vision, a leading magazine in Outsider and Brut came up with a vocabulary to help understand some of the genres; Art Brut, Folk Art and Contemporary Folk Art, Neuve Invention, Outsider Art, Art Singulier and Marginal Art, Naïve Art, Visionary and Intuitive Art, and Visionary Environments. All of the artists who work within these genres have one thing in common; they are creating their own vision, visual language and visual content.

 A well known Outsider artist is Henry Darger. Darger was another creator of visions who was institutionalized and considered psychotic. He may have suffered from Tourette Syndrome as he emitted strange noises. Darger himself felt that much of his problem was being able to see through adult lies.

 After serving in the army for a short time he returned to Chicago in 1930. at 851 W. Webster Avenue, in the Lincoln Park section and become a recluse. It was here he began creating his art. It was in massive books that he created become famous for his posthumously-discovered 15,145-page, single-spaced fantasy manuscript called The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, along with several hundred drawings and watercolor paintings illustrating the story. The length of the title reflects the length of the book.

  

Art of Henry Darger

This work 15,145 pages, bound in 15 volumes. It is densely typed with several hundred illustrations, with scroll-like watercolor paintings that he got from magazines and coloring books. He created this work over six decades and most of the book. It follows the adventures of the daughters of Robert Vivian, seven princesses of the Christian nation of Abbieannia who assist a daring rebellion against the evil regime of child slavery imposed by John Manley and the Glandelinians. Children take up arms in their own defense and are often slain in battle or viciously tortured by the Glandelinian overlords. The elaborate mythology includes the setting of a large planet, around which Earth orbits as a moon (where most people are Christian and mostly Catholic), and a species called the "Blengigomeneans" (or Blengins for short), gigantic winged beings with curved horns who occasionally take human or part-human form, even disguising themselves as children. wiki). He also went on to create another work titled, Crazy House: Further Adventures in Chicago that contains over 10,000 handwritten pages.

 Darger’s work was discovered by his landlords upon his death on in 1973. Darger's work has become one of the most celebrated examples of outsider art. He is represented in many permanent collections throughout the world. Darger’s works are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the American Folk Art Museum in New York, Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the  Collection de l'art brut, the Walker Art Center, the  the National Museum of American Art, High Museum of Art, and the Lille Métropole Museum of Modern, Contemporary and Outsider Artin Villeneuve d'Ascq.

Some books from the collection about Henry Darger

There are so many Outsider artists it is difficult to pick the ones to write about. The artists mentioned above, Wolfli, Dubuffet, and Darger worked mostly with pencils or paint on paper but there are those Outsiders who create surreal environments. These visionary environments are usually large scale including gardens, sculpture, and buildings. Many times these environments are created due to the artist wanting to create a or define a personal space for themselves or to tell a story about their life.

 So many artists that have created visionary spaces that it is hard to focus on just a few. In Sheboygan, Wisconsin, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center is dedicated to preserving these colorful, sublime, and fantastic spaces. The Center dedicates themselves to preserving these creations on their original sites.

Two artists who create very different yet personal environments are Nek Chand and David Butler. The worlds they create are indeed personal with a sense of their personal histories.

Nek Chand was born in India in 1924. His most famous creation is the Rock Garden of Chandigarh, an eighteen acre sculpture garden in the city of Chandigarh, India.

During the Indian partitionof 1947 his family fled everything behind. They landed in Punjab, Chandigarh, a city being redesigned as a modern utopia by architectLe Corbusier.  It was here Chand found work and began building his own vision of utopia. He began collecting rocks and other materials from construction sites around the city and created his divine kingdom of Sukrani. Chand’s work was illegal, but he was able to hide it for eighteen years before it was discovered by the authorities in 1975. By this time, it had grown into a 12 acre complex full of gardens and structures, interlinked courtyards, each filled with hundreds of sculptures of colorful dancers, musicians, and animals. In keeping with Hindu ideology, Nek Chand believes everything in life is regenerative. He views the Rock garden not as an offering to, “God but as a gift from God. Every rock has a life, Every rock is a being.” (from Sublime Spaces, see book below, p.332).

  

Art of Nek Chand

Some books from the collection about Nek Chand

David Butler (1898-1997) created his own vision of utopia. His vision was an incredible garden of color, form, and motion outside his home in Patterson, Louisiana. Butler dreamed extraordinary dreams of images from his daily life but also dreams of mythological creatures and turned these dreams into a place that he felt safe.

While growing up Butler worked in sugarcane fields, his free time was devoted to drawing what he saw everyday and also the carving objects. Although slavery had passed racial intolerance had not and many African Americans sought safety in prayer and folk practices. Butler sought his solace in African and Christian beliefs which he translated into his sculptures and garden.

Butler could neither read or write turned to making colorful gardens full of flowers and sculptures. Many of his creations were made of metal that helped earn him the name Tin Man. While working Butler was always in search of how to create his nightly visions. His metal works eventually include wood, wire, chalk, and house paint. His tools were a meat cleaver, hammer, and axe head. Many of the animals in his vast garden menagerie drew from biblical sources. Eventually his garden turned into dream-like kinetic creations of animals that eventually broadened into three dimensional creations.

Butler had a 1982 exhibition entitled, "Black Folk Art America, 1930-1980" at the Corcoran Gallery, In Washington, D.C. A year later an illness caused him to move and take remove all the work in his yard.

  

Art of David Butler

  Unfortunatley there are not any books published about David Butler and his work. The book listed below contains a chapter about him with some good representations of his work and other outsider artists.

 Some other books in the collection about Art Brut and Outsider Art

The Arts Division subscribes to Raw Vision magazine, the authoritative source for Outsider and Visionary Art.  Division magazines do not circulate.