Celebrating the publication of Raw Vision’s one-hundredth issue, with a gallery of some legendary artists’ creations
    

Founded in 1989, Raw Vision quickly became the world’s leading publication reporting on the latest discoveries and news, helping to guide critical discussion, in the related fields of art brut, outsider art and self-taught art.

Now, in commemoration of this, the publication’s one-hundredth issue, the magazine looks back in order to look ahead: the following descriptions and analyses of emblematic works by five definitive, canonical art brut artists – Adolf Wölfli, Henry Darger, Aloïse Corbaz, Johann Hauser and Martín Ramírez – have been written by well-known specialists whose research has contributed significantly to our understanding of these art-makers’ creative visions and accomplishments. These short texts offer newcomers to this kind of art a hint of its richness and diversity, even as they remind experienced collectors and informed aficionados about the remarkable qualities that make it so intriguing – and unique.

MARTÍN RAMÍREZ: Untitled (Tunnel with Cars and Buses),
1954, crayon and graphite on pieced-together paper, 52 x 23.1 in. / 132.1 x 60.6 cm, private collection, © Estate of Martín Ramírez

Born in Mexico in 1895, Martín Ramírez created all of his artworks while confined to two psychiatric institutions in California, from 1935 through 1963, the year of his death. Since his work was first exhibited in 1952, Ramírez has won admiration for having constructed a singular visual language that perfectly integrates the figurative and the abstract…

ALOÏSE CORBAZ: Untitled,
between 1941 and 1945, coloured pencil on wrapping paper, 23.43 x 16.73 in. / 59.5 x 42.5 cm, Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne; photo by Morgane Détraz, Atelier de numérisation, Ville de Lausanne

Thanks to Dr Jacqueline Porret-Forel, a Swiss general practitioner who was very close to Aloïse Corbaz (1886–1964) and passionate about her art, Jean Dubuffet discovered the work of this art brut creator, who was born in Lausanne, Switzerland. Shortly thereafter, in 1947, Porret-Forel went to Paris to show Dubuffet some of the drawings that had been made by this patient who had been sent to Cery, a psychiatric hospital in Canton Vaud affiliated with the University of Lausanne. In 1920, Corbaz was transferred to the Rosière asylum in Gimel, east of Lausanne, where she remained until the end of her life…

HENRY DARGER: Are unsuccessivly attacked by glandelinians and narrowly escape capture,
circa 1930–40, collage, graphite, carbon, watercolour and pencil on paper, 19 x 24 in. / 48.26 x 60.96 cm, collection of Robert A. Roth

The reclusive Chicago artist and author, Henry Darger (1892–1973), spent most of his childhood in orphanages and evidently was profoundly and permanently affected by this traumatic institutional upbringing. The posthumous discovery of this devoutly Roman Catholic hospital janitor’s visionary work led him to become to be renowned as one of America’s greatest masters in the field of so-called self-taught art. He is best known for the epic panoramas he created after 1940 using carbon-traced images, watercolour and collage; in fact, many were painted on the reverse sides of reconfigured smaller works he had executed a decade earlier…

JOHANN HAUSER: Blonde Woman,
1986, 28.7 x 40.1 in. / 73 x 102 cm, pencil and coloured pencil, private collection, Vienna

A man drew a rectangle that turned out a little too crooked. Or was it just more creative than imitating what had been placed in front of him? The career of Johann Hauser (1926–1996), who is now recognised as one of the most definitive art brut artists of all time, began that simply…

ADOLF WÖLFLI: London = Süd,
from Von der Wiege bis zum Graab (From the Cradle to the Grave), vol. 4, pp. 405–06, 1911, pencil and coloured pencil on newsprint,
39.17 x 56.18 in. / 99.5 x 142.7 cm, Adolf Wölfli Foundation, Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland

Although the word “genius” is sometimes casually tossed around in the arts, when applied to the multifaceted, highly original artistic accomplishments of the art brut creator Adolf Wölfli (1864–1930), it is a description that irrefutably fits. Wölfli grew up in the countryside around Bern, Switzerland’s German-speaking capital. As a young, orphaned farm boy, he was bounced around in the service of uncaring families. In 1895, he was diagnosed as schizophrenic and sent to the Waldau psychiatric institution near Bern, where he spent the rest of his life…