Category: art brut

Esther Hammerman

Esther Hammerman, Untitled (East River), post 1950, Oil on Canvas, 59.1 x 44 cm, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Esther Hammerman, Untitled (Football), Date Unknown, Mixed Media, Private Collection

Born Esther Wachsmann in Wieliczka, Poland in 1886, Esther Hammerman and her husband Baruch owned a small import business in Vienna, Austria. Along with raising four daughters, Hammerman stitched wall hangings and needlework tapestries. The family fled the Nazis during their takeover of Austria in 1938, first landing in Trinidad, and then the British West Indies where they spent the war years interned in a camp. Upon the end of the war, Esther Hammerman and her family managed to immigrate to New York City. 

Encouraged in her artwork by her youngest daughter and son-in-law, Esther Hammerman began painting. She entered two works in a national competition at New York’s Whitney Museum, winning a prize and beginning her career, at the age of sixty, as a serious painter in New York. In 1950, Hammerman joined her youngest daughter’s family in San Francisco, where her exhibited work was again well received. 

During her twelve years in the Bay Area, Esther Hammerman had one-woman shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, and the Oakland Museum of California. In 1963 she returned to New York in failing health, living with her daughter Nadja’s family, but continued painting and showing her work both in New York and California.

Esther Hamerman painted somewhat naturalistically; although. she also abstracted forms and flattened the perspective of her compositions. Her palette was jewel-like and beautifully nuanced. Hammerman  devised a personal style by painting in oils on canvas or canvas board, and then outlining the forms in India ink. Occasionally, she used photographs or printed images for reference; but she then transformed the subject in a personal way. 

Esther Hammerman died in New York in April of 1977. Completing some seventy-five works that include paintings, drawings, and watercolors, she received recognition and several honors during her lifetime. Fifty pieces of Hammerman’s work remain with her family who withdrew her work from public view in 1993.

There were solo exhibitions of her paintings in the later 1950s and early 1960s at the De Young Museum in San Francisco and the Oakland Museum of Art. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Santa Rosa Junior College, the Oakland Museum of California, the Judah L. Magnes Museum, and The Ames Gallery are among the places that featured her work in retrospective solo or in group shows in the 1980s.

T. Marie Nolan

T. Marie Nolan, “Rabbit Run”, Date Unknown

Self-taught artist, T. Marie Nolan, lives in the basement of a church near the Mississippi River in Mark Twain’s hometown, Hannibal, Missouri. She was born, the eighth of eleven children, in Connecticut on February 28, 1954.  Library work of all kinds, story teller, book repairer and bookmobile driver, occupied her until the mid-1980’s when art became her full time obsession.

Nolan constructs her art from materials salvaged from local construction dumpsters, using them as her canvases. Her colorful paintings employ a narrative, sometimes humorous approach to such topics as Adams and Eves, Cats and Fishes, Saints and Sinners and the various unique characters that inhabit her mind.

Nolan’s work has been exhibited at outsider folk art events such as Slotin Folk Fest, the House of Blues, and the Kentuck festival.

Jean Dubuffet

Jean Dubuffet, “Paysage aux Argus”, 1955, Collage with Butterfly Wings, 20,5 x 28,5 cm, Collection Fondation Dubuffet, Paris

“The things we truly love, the things forming the basis and roots of our being, are generally things we never look at. A huge piece of carpeting, empty and naked plains, silent and uninterrupted stretches with nothing to alter the homogeneity of their continuity. I love wide, homogenous worlds, unstaked, unlimited like the sea, like high snows, deserts, and steppes.”

“Art doesn’t go to sleep in the bed made for it. It would sooner run away than say its own name: what it likes is to be incognito. Its best moments are when it forgets what its own name is.”                                                                             ― Jean Dubuffet

Calendar: July 31

A Year: Day to Day Men: 31st of July

Oh, Happy Day

July 31, 1901 was the birthdate of French painter and sculptor Jean Dubuffet.

In 1945, Jean Dubuffet, impressed with painter Jean Fautrier’s abstract paintings, started to use thick oil paint mixed with materials such as mud, straw, pebbles, sand, plaster, and tar. He abandoned the tradition use of the brush; instead, he worked with a paste into which he could create physical marks, scratches and slashes. These impasto paintings, the ‘Hautes Pâtes’ series, he exhibited at his show in 1946 at the Galery Rene Drouin. He received some backlash from the critics but also some positive feedback as well.

Jean Dubuffet achieved rapid success in the American art market, largely due to his inclusion in the Pierre Matisse exhibition in 1946. His association with Matisse proved to be very beneficial. Dubuffet’s work was placed among the likes of Picasso, Braque, and Rouault at the gallery exhibit; he was only one of two young artists to be honored in this manner. In 1947, Dubuffet had his first solo exhibition in America, in the same gallery as the Matisse exhibition. Reviews were largely favorable, and this resulted in Dubuffet having a regularly scheduled exhibition at that gallery.

In his earlier paintings, Dubuffet dismissed the concept of perspective in favor of a more direct, two-dimensional presentation of space. Instead, Dubuffet created the illusion of perspective by crudely overlapping objects within the picture plane. Dubuffet’s “Hourloupe” style in later paintings developed from a chance doodle while he was on the telephone. The basis of it was a tangle of clean black lines that forms cells, which are sometimes filled with unmixed color. Dubuffet believed the style evoked the manner in which objects appear in the mind. This contrast between physical and mental representation later encouraged him to use the approach to create sculpture.

Between 1945 and 1947, Jean Dubuffet took three separate trips to Algeria—a French colony at the time in order to find further artistic inspiration. He was fascinated by the nomadic nature of the tribes in Algeria, particularly the ephemeral quality of their existence. The impermanence of this kind of movement attracted Dubuffet and became a facet of the new Art Brut movement.

Dubuffet coined the term art brut, meaning “raw art”, for artwork produced by non-professionals working outside aesthetic norms, such as art by psychiatric patients, prisoners, and children. He felt that the simple life of the everyday human being contained more art and poetry than did academic art, or great painting. Dubuffet found the latter to be isolating, mundane, and pretentious,  He sought to create in his own work an art free from intellectual concerns; and as a result, his work often appears primitive and childlike.

Joyce Pensato

The Work of Nat.Brut Artist Joyce Pensato

Brooklyn born artist, Joyce Pensato’s skill for accumulation has become central to her identity and, consequently, her approach to art-making. Mess, dirt, and detritus – these are the properties that are ingrained in the artist’s work. To Pensato, pop culture, it transpires, equates to troublesome histories indicated by soiled physical appearances.

Her large-scale enamel paintings and charcoal drawings mimic the mess of her studio. The faces of her comic-book characters appear through a vigorous blast of layered drips and scratches, mainly in black, white and silver. Her brushstrokes are fierce and unending, often giving the impression of having been sprayed on at great speed.​

Leonardo Lanzolla

Leonardo Lanzolla, “Visionary Influences to Believe”, Date Unknown, Mixed Media on Board, 12 x 16 Inches

From Torino, Italy, Leonardo Lanzolla was born in Torino, Italy, in 1958. He is a self-taught artist, influenced by Miro, Cobra avant-garde, art brut, folk art, Dubuffet, Basquiat, urban graffiti and cave paintings. His practice is very direct and unpretentious, displaying keenness for experimentation.

Leonardo Lanzolla studied in Torino and moved in 1986 to Seattle where he now lives and makes art. His timeless, colorful and original works are in private collections around the globe and have been featured in notable exhibits in France and Sweden.

Jean-Daniel Allanche 

Art Brut: Jean-Daniel Allanche

Born in Tunisia, Jean-Daniel Allanche returned to France for his studies, and ultimately became a professor of physics at the Faculty of Sciences Paris 7. In 1975 he bought an apartment on the Rue des Ciseaux, a small street in Paris’s central area of Saint-Germain.

In the late 1970s Allanche began embellishing his apartment with his paintings. After working for years, ultimately all available surfaces, including the ceilings, floors, cabinet doors, and step treads, along with the walls, were covered with polychrome works featuring whimsical motifs.

There are also occasional texts interspersed with the visuals, offering Allanche’s personal views, and on one of the doors he has painted his surname. The majority of the paintings, however, appear to have a more targeted decorative function; this is in line with a notation in one of his vast collection of notebooks, where he wrote that he believed he had managed to reveal the intimate relationship between musical harmony and colors.

Others of his notebooks included additional texts and aphorisms, but also hundreds of pages with sequences of numbers, referencing Allanche’s passion for gambling and his efforts, as a professor of physics, to model disorder.

Although Allanche’s artistic activity must have played an important role in his life, he was not very talkative about it, so his decorated apartment remained largely unknown. After Allanche died in Paris in August 2015, his heirs decided that they would retain it as a private apartment. Removable frescoed elements such as the doors have been preserved and the remainder of the apartment has been basically restored to its original state.

Sawada Shinichi

Figurative Sculptures by Sawada Shinichi

Shinichi Sawada was born in Shiga Prefecture, Japan. Diagnosed as autistic, he found employment in the hospital bakery of the Ritto Nakayoshi Sagyojo (institute for the mentally disabled, in the city of Kusatsu). In 2001, the professor directing the workshop where Sawada worked with clay, launched the construction of a small potter’s cabin: it was located a few kilometers from the institution and deep in the wilds.

Here Sawada creates his sculptures silently and with unflagging regularity. His works – demons, monsters, masks – are characterized by hundreds spikes of clay that give them an intricate and frightful beauty. He plants these one by one into the either round or cylindrical shapes constituting the central body of each piece. After shaping the bodies, he fires them in a large wood-fired kiln built of earth and ignited only twice a year. This gives them their brownish-red hue in lighter or darker shades, depending on the flames.

These monstrous and magical creatures seem to be the fruit of a personal mythology, maybe inspired by the old Japanese traditions of imaginary beasts, ghosts and spirits. We can find affinities with the masks of Nō Theatre,  manga characters, and African tribal arts.

Charles Dellschau

The Sketchbook of Charles Dellschau

Charles Dellschau was an American butcher who lived between 1830 and 1923. He was a part of the Sonora Aero Club, a group of men that met to discuss and design flying machines. According to his diaries one of the members of this seceret society had discovered the formula for an anti-gravity fuel he called “NB Gas.” The aim of the group was to design flying machines that would use this anti-gravity fuel.

Dellschau was a draftsman for the club, designing a variety of fantastic flying machines for the group. After his death, all of his art works were discarded, but used furniture dealer rescued the notebooks and drawings and took them to his warehouse, where they sat forgotten for several years under a pile of discarded carpet. A university student asked the furniture dealer if she could use some of Dellschau’s notebooks as part of a display on the history of flight.

The drawings were a hit, inspiring the imagination and creating a sense of wonder in onlookers. Years after his death, Dellschau’s art works received the recognition they so deserved. Now his antique illustrations are celebrated for their inventiveness, artistic appeal and for simply being marvellous.

Lyle Carbajal

Paintings by Lyle Carbajal

Lyle Carbajal is an American born artist working in a style possessed of a primitive energy, as well as sophistication of detail that is incredibly diverse and unique. His work, which he calls Urban+Primitive, has been shown internationally and has been associated with the following organizations: London’s Raw Vision Magazine, The British Consulate in Los Angeles, The Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) in Seattle and the Tennessee Public Television for the Arts.

While studying at the Art Institute of Seattle in the early 1990’s, and later on furthering his education in Nashville TN, he became interested in an array of related (and unrelated) subjects, which saw coursework in the fields of English, finance, law, negotiations as well as advertising and design. Shortly after receiving a degree in Nashville, he spent the following year volunteering full-time with a domestic Peace Corps program. While serving the southern United States he was exposed to as well as educated in southern regional culture, which would become the primer for much of his present work.

“Childhood memories and my Latin American background helped me search for a primitive expression of the world. Just like Debuffet, Twombly and Appel before me, my pursuit of “Brut” has lead me in both tangible and psychological directions, which I presume will continue indefinitely.” -Lyle Carbajal

Kelly Moore

Kelly Moore, “Dead Cowboy Retablo”

Kelly Moore is a self-taught artist who has no formal training or education in art. His original and expressionist work has been referred to as Outsider Art, Art Brut, Raw Art and Visionary Art. His intuitive style and technique reflects a raw, primitive quality that is frequently juxtaposed with a startling innocence. He is currently living and working in New Mexico.

Adolf Wolfli

Artwork by Adolf Wolfli

Adolph Wolfli was a Swiss artist who was one of the first artists to be associated with the Art Brut or outsider art label. He was arrested and in 1895 was admitted to the Waldau Clinic, a psychiatric hospital in Bern where he spent the rest of his adult life. He suffered from psychosis which led to intense hallucinations.

Wölfli produced a huge number of works during his life, often working with the barest of materials and trading smaller works with visitors to the clinic to obtain pencils, paper or other essentials. The images Wölfli produced were complex, intricate and intense. They worked to the very edges of the page with detailed borders. In a manifestation of Wölfli’s “horror vacul”, every empty space was filled with two small holes. Wölfli called the shapes around these holes his “birds.”

His images also incorporated an idiosyncratic musical notation. This notation seemed to start as a purely decorative affair but later developed into real composition which Wölfli would play on a paper trumpet.

Glenn Brady

Five Paintings by Glenn Brady

Born in 1966 in Brisbane, Australia, Glenn Brady grew up in a suburb of wooden houses,some on stilts to deal with the heat of the summer. By the age of sixteen, he had left both school and home. He started painting after a stay in a local phsychiatric hospital and has made painting his career. Brady has had thirteen solor shows in Brisbane and three solo shows in Melbourne. He won first prixe overall in the Gold Coast Show for his paintings at his first entry in a competition.

“I have never studied art and don’t really know much about it. .I just love to paint: and i paint what i see mainlym which to others mightn’t seem like much. But to me it’s all I’ve known……rows of houses and the very varied people who dwell in these suburbs, where each person’s home and life can be completely different to their neighbour who lives 15 feet away.”- Glenn Brady