Why Do Art-World Insiders Love Outsider Art? See What Maurizio Cattelan, KAWS, and Cindy Sherman Collect in a Show at the Outsider Art Fair

“The idea of the show came about from coming to the fair for 20
years and running into artists like Chris Martin and Kiki Smith,
and more recently KAWS and Maurizio Cattelan,” Laster told Artnet
News at the fair’s VIP day. Those artists were there, he heard time
after time, to buy art.

“I think they are collecting it because they like the fact that
these are works made without the market in mind,” Laster said.
“Artists need to be reminded of that when they get success!”

Installation view of “Relishing the Raw:
Contemporary Artists Collecting Outsider Art,” curated by Paul
Laster at the Outsider Art Fair. Photo courtesy of the Outsider Art
Fair.

When Laster decided to put together the booth, he began reaching
out to some of the artists who he knew had Outsider art
collections, like Julian Schnabel, who once enlisted a
five-year-old Vahakn Arslanian to help smash dishes for his
well-known series of plate paintings. (Vahakn, who was born deaf,
went on to become a self-taught artist.) Soon, Laster was getting
tips—he should check with Cindy Sherman, and didn’t Laurie Simmons
have some Eugene Von Bruenchenhein work?

The booth soon morphed into a salon-style hang, its walls packed
with works by the likes of Lee Godie, Janet Sobel, and Purvis
Young.

Sometimes there are clear visual connections between the artist
who made the work and the artist who bought it. Laster pointed to a
Mose Tolliver portrait on loan from Polly Apfelbaum. “I think it
looks like Polly’s work, and it was gifted to Polly by her mother,
who may have thought that as well,” said Laster. (And with the
figure’s black pageboy bob, it also looks a bit like Apfelbaum
herself.)

Work by Mose Tolliver from the
collection of Polly Apfelbaum. Photo courtesy of the Outsider Art
Fair.

Many of the works were discovered by happenstance, like the work
Donald Traver owns by Prince Robert de Rohan
Courtenay, a sort of 20th-century illuminated manuscript featuring
a poetic ode to the postage stamp. “When I acquired a collection of nearly 30 of his works
through a probate auction held by the state of New York in 1989–90,
there was no internet, thus I knew nothing about the artist,”
Traver says in the press release for the show. 

Work by Prince Robert de Rohan Courtenay
from the collection of Donald Traver. Photo courtesy of the
Outsider Art Fair.

Later, Traver found a text that
Diane Arbus had written about De Rohan Courtenay when she
photographed him in 1958. “The rightful Hereditary claimant to the
throne of the Byzantine Eastern Roman Empire—styling himself His
Imperial Majesty, the Magnificent Emperor of the Byzantines and of
the faithful Romans, Semper Augustus—was born in Oklahoma in 1886,
having lost his Empire, along with a treasure valued at $90
million, when the Turks overran it in the year 1453,” Arbus wrote
in Harper’s Bazaar.  

Nicole Eisenman, on the other hand, always knew exactly who
Esther Hammerman was: a self-taught artist whose work is part
of the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in
Washington, DC—and is also Eisenman’s great-grandmother.

Vera Girivi, Untitled (2019)
from the collection of Jeannette Montgomery Barron. Photo courtesy
of the Outsider Art Fair.

“You can see the inspiration that Nicole could draw from it!”
Laster said of the Hammerman work on view.

A second work on loan by Schnabel is by Wayne Magrin, who
Schnabel discovered a few years ago at the home of a friend in
Palm Beach, Australia. He fell in love with one of Magrin’s
nautical paintings and asked where he could meet him. Schabel was
told “’Up the block, [Magrin] has a bacon and eggs breakfast spot
on the beach,’” recalled Schnabel in 2018, when he helped curate
Magrin’s first US solo show, at Ibid Gallery in Los Angeles. “Wayne
was painting in a small widow’s walk on the top of his house.”

Wayne Magrin, Patsy II (2003)
from the collection of Julian Schnabel. Photo courtesy of the
Outsider Art Fair.

But not all chance encounters happen in the real world anymore.
The booth also includes a painting by Vera Girivi, borrowed from
Jeannette Montgomery Barron. She and her husband, art dealer James
Barron, found the Italian artist on Instagram—a reminder that
social media offers a new platform for artists, self-taught and
otherwise, the world over.

Wisely, Laster has shared some of these stories with fairgoers,
mounting the Arbus excerpt and other statements from the
artist-collectors on the booth walls. “I love the fact that these
works have stories,” he said. Oftentimes, the stories of
self-taught artists, learning what fuels their desire to create, is
a large part of Outsider art’s appeal. In “Relishing the Raw,”
works’ connection to well-known contemporary artists serves to add
an extra layer of interest.

Read more https://news.artnet.com/market/relishing-the-raw-outsider-art-fair-1755462