The art of outsiders and avant -garde. Suvorova A.V.

“For a whole day, I imagined that I would go crazy, and I was even pleased with this thought, because then I would have everything I wanted,” exclaims the inspired Oscar Schrommer, one of the professors of the legendary Bauhaus, after Visiting a collection of art of psychiatric patients in Heidelberg. In the avant -garde era, marginality, outstanding, madness, strangeness, alogism become new “objects of desire”. The crisis of the canon of classical aesthetics led to the fact that the new trends in art began to include in their methanarrative the previously not noticeable creativity of outsiders. Why did the works of mentally ill, social marginals and visionaries have turned into significant artistic phenomena? How did the texts and works of the vanguard expanded the understanding of the boundaries of art? The art critic Anna Suvorova in her book explores the stages of this process.

At first, the expressionists used outsider motifs and images, then the appeal of surrealists to the alogism and ideas of “madness” led to the abandonment of the stigmatization of mental illness, and then, finally, Institutional practices, from AR Bryta and the activities of Jean Dubuff to exhibitions of the 2010s, finally legitimized “strange art”.

Anna Suvorova - art historian and culturologist, doctor of art history, associate professor of the Russian State Pedagogical University named after A. I. Herzen and National Research University "Higher School of Economics".