Inspiration Made Concrete in ‘Self-Taught Genius’ Exhibition

"Encyclopedic Palace,” created by Marino Auriti, a mechanic who dreamed it would be built in Washington as a museum of human discovery and invention. CreditHiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Is there such a thing as artistic genius? In high-culture circles, it used to be taken for granted that there was, and there was a well-established canon of great artworks to prove it, from Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa” to Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings. Then, at the end of the 1960s, scholars like Linda Nochlin, author of “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” began to wonder why the canon consisted almost exclusively of works by male Caucasians. Is genius something that only white men are capable of? After that, belief in genius pretty much disappeared from serious art-historical discourse, except when it was disparaged as a patriarchal myth.

So it’s refreshing to consider an exhibition designed to rehabilitate the term and to do so along inspirationally democratic lines. “Self-Taught Genius: Treasures from the American Folk Art Museum” is not only an enthralling display of about 100 works from the museum’s permanent collection; it’s also an intellectually provocative effort to rethink the nature of artistic creativity.

Ammi Phillips’s “Girl in Red Dress With Cat and Dog.”CreditHiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Organized by Stacy C. Hollander, the museum’s director of exhibitions, and Valérie Rousseau, curator, art of the self-taught and art brut (outsider art), the show includes a wide variety of artists and objects. There are paintings and drawings, quilts, ceramics, handmade books, pieces of elaborately decorated furniture, duck decoys and weather vanes dating from the mid-18th century to the early 21st.

There’s so much diversity, you might wonder how such a disparate collection of objects could serve as the basis of a coherent, overarching thesis. What theory could apply both to a gorgeous, mostly white, intricately stitched quilt made by female slaves on a Southern plantation in the 1850s and a nine-foot wide watercolor picturing dozens of naked little girls with penises in a fantastic landscape created by the reclusive Henry Darger in Chicago in the mid-20th century? What connection can you draw between Ammi Phillips’s portrait “Girl in Red Dress With Cat and Dog” (1830-35) — one of the most beautiful paintings made by any American artist ever — and Judith Scott’s late-20th-century mummylike sculpture made by wrapping yards of colored yarn around an invisible armature?

Some pieces display extraordinary technical refinement. An imaginary cathedral drawn by Achilles G. Rizzoli called “Mother Symbolically Represented/The Kathedral” (1936) is an amazingly complex and finely detailed exercise in architectural draftsmanship, whatever its eccentric psychological motivations might have been. On the other hand, Bill Traylor’s drawing, circa 1941, of rudimentary human figures, a giant bird and two cats arrayed in gymnastic choreography on and around a fountainlike construction, delivers infectious formal rhythms without fussy refinement. It’s like the difference between Bach and the blues....Continue Reading

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