Beyond the fringe

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Surrealism is in the air, what with the Hayward and Max Ernst shows (reviewed in these pages last week), and it’s been lurking around in a different guise since April in an enthralling show at the Whitechapel which focuses on Outsider Art. Outsider Art, or Art Brut as Dubuffet originally termed it, is art made by ‘people free of artistic culture’; in other words, not artists, though the categories are increasingly blurred. It’s often the product of the mentally disturbed, of those beyond the fringes of society, who make drawings or paintings, sculpture or embroidery, which deal directly with their obsessions. They may not intend to make art, but their work is collected and often displayed as art.

Inner Worlds Outside at the Whitechapel (until 25 June) mixes up these Outsiders with real artists (such as Klee, Kandinsky and Guston) to produce an extremely effective range of imagery, rich enough to keep the imagination fuelled for a month. When I visited, it was proving popular with the public, and particularly the young. Are we in for a new wave of surrealism? The British have always done it well, with the proto-surrealist work of Blake and Lewis Carroll predating Breton’s formulations, to name but two. Is there more to come?

My own initiation into the mysteries and rituals of surrealism took place 20 years ago when I was called in to assist the artist Eileen Agar (1899– 1991) with the writing of her memoirs. With typical modesty, she wanted to write a tribute to her late husband, the Hungarian man-of-letters Joseph Bard, but all her advisers were suggesting that she should concentrate on telling the story of her own colourful life. It was my job to prompt her recollections of her early years as an artist, her recognition (somewhat to her surprise) as a surrealist by Roland Penrose and Herbert Read, and her subsequent involvement with the surrealist movement.