The Silent Weaver (14 page)

In 1974 McGrath established the Third Eye Centre in Glasgow's Sauchiehall Street. As its original name suggests, the Third Eye Centre was a place for psychedelic and other happenings; a ‘shrine to the avant-garde' exhibition and performance arena, it was typical of those which had flowered briefly during the 1960s in London, San Francisco, Birmingham, Amsterdam and New York. It came later to Glasgow, but it lasted longer. Prosaically retitled the Centre for Contemporary Arts, the Third Eye Centre outlived its founder and was still thriving in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

In 1977 McGrath travelled to continental Europe in search of inspiration and exhibits for the Third Eye Centre. In Switzerland he visited the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne and saw for the first time the extraordinary collection of raw, compulsive outsider art which had been assembled by Jean Dubuffet. Tom McGrath's mind, said a friend, was blown.

The Dubuffet collection in Lausanne represented a sea-change in twentieth-century concepts of art. Jean Dubuffet was a French bourgeois artistic rebel. He was born, the son of a wine merchant, in the Atlantic port of Le Havre in 1901. Like other French men and women of his generation, he would live to see two world wars fought on his country's soil. Dubuffet was too young to be enlisted in the first one and too old for the second. It was a recipe for disillusion, disobedience and mutiny.

While trench warfare consumed the east of his country from Dunkirk to Verdun, Jean Dubuffet did well at his Le Havre lycée. After the Armistice was signed in 1918 he travelled to the Académie Julian in Paris to study painting. The Académie Julian was a distinguished and relatively progressive school (unusually, it admitted women, who were doubly unusually permitted to paint and sketch nude models from life), but Dubuffet stuck it out for just six months. He wrote later that a conversation with a teacher had encapsulated his disaffection from establishment art.

The young Dubuffet suggested to his teacher that there must have been, throughout history, forms of art which had been alien to the dominant culture of their time, and which had consequently been neglected and lost. The teacher replied that this was unlikely, because the experts of the past could be trusted to separate the wheat from the chaff. If those hypothetical experts had judged an artwork to be unworthy of preservation, it probably had been unworthy of preservation.

Jean Dubuffet considered such reasoning to be simply stupid. ‘Experts' of any age, he thought, were not objective. They were the products of cultural conditioning. In his own time at least, their definitions were moulded by the Graeco-Roman representative tradition, which had become moribund and stifling. His own teacher ‘bowed before the prevailing wind emitted by the Establishment, and could consent to find objective beauty only in the place marked out by a superior order'. Dubuffet did not want to be like that, so he left the Académie Julian.

He slipped easily into Bohemian Paris, learning to play the accordion and bagpipes, befriending poets and painting in his own time, in his own way, at his own pace.

In 1925 Jean Dubuffet returned to Le Havre, married, had a daughter, and in 1930 the small young family went back to Paris and opened a franchise of his father's wine business in the capital city.

If the career of a vintner had satisfied Jean Dubuffet, nobody outside South Uist and Craig Dunain Hospital might ever have heard of Angus MacPhee. But at some point in his twenties or early thirties, Jean Dubuffet read a book called
Artistry of the Mentally Ill
by Hans Prinzhorn. It changed his and many other people's lives.

Hans Prinzhorn was not the first European psychiatrist to take a professional interest in the artwork of his patients. Prinzhorn himself inherited the collection of ‘psychotic art' amassed at the psychiatric hospital of the University of Heidelberg by Emil Kraepelin. The true original in the field was neither Prinzhorn nor Kraepelin, but was probably a Scot named Dr William A.F. Browne. William Browne was a friend of Charles Darwin and a physician superintendent of lunatic asylums in Montrose and Dumfries between 1834 and 1857, when he was appointed Commissioner for Lunacy in Scotland. Browne introduced such activities for patients as writing, art and drama. He experimented with early forms of occupational and art therapy, and made a collection of the artistic work of his inmates.

But neither William Browne nor Emil Kraepelin wrote the book. Hans Prinzhorn did.
Bildnerei der Geisteskranken
, or
Artistry of the Mentally Ill
was published in 1922. Prinzhorn presented and analysed the work of ten ‘schizophrenic masters' from his and Kraepelin's Heidelberg collection. One made obscene figures out of chewed bread until a physician persuaded him to turn to woodcarving, at which he proved
unusually adept. Another painted compulsively on his wall with the dyes and juices hand-squeezed from plants. Yet another made designs with animal fat on the wallpaper of his room. ‘He always allows himself to be driven by momentary impulses,' Hans Prinzhorn wrote of this man, ‘so that his pictures generally incorporate the unconscious components of pictorial creation in a rare state of purity . . . he composes completely passively, almost as a spectator . . .'

They all had artistic ability, but their subjects, style and motivations were very far from the Beaux-Arts ideal of the Académie Julian and other representatives of nineteenth-century European civilisation. That was enough to enchant Jean Dubuffet. He left his wife and his business and returned to art – but this time, ‘There is no art without intoxication. But I mean a mad intoxication! Let reason teeter! Delirium! The highest degree of delirium! Plunged in burning dementia! Art is the most enrapturing orgy within man's reach . . . Art must make you laugh a little and make you a little afraid. Anything as long as it doesn't bore.'

While Jean Dubuffet found a new wife and a new vocation in Paris and painted crazed portraits which ‘depersonalized most of his subjects, comically exaggerating proportions and idiosyncrasies', across the border in Nazi Germany the psychotic, outsider art collection made at Heidelberg by Kraepelin and Prinzhorn received what in retrospect would be seen as its greatest pre-war accolade.

Adolf Hitler's National Socialist Party, which took power in Germany in 1933, liked ‘traditional' art that exalted Aryan purity and militarism. They disliked almost everything else. Most of all, they disliked what had become known as ‘modern' art. They called modern art
entartete Kunst
, or degenerate
art. It was not only a categorisation; it was a sanction and a threat. German ‘modern' artists were, at best, forbidden to sell their work, to teach or even to paint. Some were sent to concentration camps.

In order to illustrate this appalling stuff, the Nazis mounted an exhibition – a counter-exhibition – of degenerate modern art. Five thousand works were seized from private collections and museums by a Third Reich Visual Arts Commission. The ‘Entartete Kunst' show opened in Munich in July 1937 and ran for four months, attracting huge crowds, before moving on to 11 other cities in Germany and Austria.

The exhibition contained work by Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, Paul Klee and Vincent Van Gogh.

It also included, behind the labels ‘Madness Becomes Method' and ‘Nature as Seen by Sick Minds', some of the art by schizophrenics which had been collected by Emil Kraepelin and Hans Prinzhorn at Heidelberg, and which had been introduced to the world by Prinzhorn 15 years earlier as
Artistry of the Mentally Ill
.

Jean Dubuffet and the rest of the European and American art world and intelligentsia then had several easy questions to answer. Whose madness was preferable, that of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse or that of Adolf Hitler and Josef Goebbels? Whose company would any serious artist sooner join? With what authority did the eminences of the Nazi Party disparage others as having ‘sick minds'? If the Third Reich proscribed somebody for being ‘mad', was it not likely that they were something else altogether, something valuable and praiseworthy, such as challenging, original and subversively creative?

After the defeat of the Third Reich, while Angus MacPhee
was silently settling into Craig Dunain Hospital, Jean Dubuffet travelled to Heidelberg to see what was left of Prinzhorn's collection. He then toured the asylums of Switzerland for three years, assembling his own collection of
l'art des fous
.

Back in Paris, Dubuffet showed his examples of the art of the insane to friends. Five of them were sufficiently enthused to join him in establishing the Compagnie de l'Art Brut – the Society of Rough, or Raw, Art – in 1948. The five were the surrealist writer and poet André Breton, the critic and publisher Jean Paulhan, the art collector and dealer Charles Ratton, the artist and collector H.P. Roche and the expressionist critic and curator Michel Tapié. With the exception of Ratton, whose reputation for dealing with the Nazis during the occupation haunted him for life, it was a company whose eminence grew as the twentieth century progressed.

Dubuffet was perfectly capable of explaining for himself why he thought that art should be discovered outside the academies, the galleries and the museums – as far outside them as possible – and why art produced by people in extraordinary states of mind was valuable. But in 1948, André Breton said it for him. Breton had joined the Compagnie de l'Art Brut, he wrote, because

I am not afraid to put forward the idea – paradoxical only at first sight – that the art of those who are nowadays classified as the mentally ill constitutes a reservoir of moral health.

Indeed it eludes all that tends to falsify its message and which is of the order of external influences, calculations, success or disappointment in the social sphere, etc. Here the mechanisms of artistic creation are freed of all impediment. By way of an overwhelming dialectical reaction, the fact of internment and the renunciation of profits as of all vanities,
despite the individual suffering these may entail, emerge here as guarantees of that total authenticity which is lacking in all other quarters and for which we thirst more and more each day.

Those French avant-garde intellectuals were not only arguing that a ‘sane' European society which had generated two world wars within 30 years was not to be taken at its own estimation. They were also saying that art created by mental patients, particularly schizophrenics interned in asylums or hospitals, was actually certain to be better than art created by graduates of institutions such as the Académie Julian. Schizophrenic art, psychotic art,
l'art des fous
, raw art, outsider art, or whatever it would be called, was not valuable because it was therapeutic for the patient. It was not interesting because it was a surprise to see it done at all, like Samuel Johnson's dog walking on its hind legs. It was not a freak show. It was the product of a pure human creative impulse, unpolluted by greed for money and recognition and uncompromised by cultural conditioning. It was nothing but art. Raw art.

Jean Dubuffet and his colleagues mounted the first large public exhibition of Art Brut in 1949 at the Galerie Drouin in Paris. Two hundred works by mental patients were shown. In the exhibition catalogue Dubuffet printed his short manifesto, ‘
L'art brut préféré aux arts culturels
', ‘Raw Art Preferred to the Cultural Arts'.

By this [Raw Art] we mean the works executed by people free from artistic culture, where, contrary to what happens among intellectuals, mimicry has little or no part, so that the creators take everything on its own merits and not according to the clichés of classical art or fashionable art.

We are witnessing an entirely pure and raw artistic operation, whose creative process is completely reinvented by the artist, using his or her own impulses. It is art which manifests itself. That is its only function. It is not the cultural art of the chameleon and the monkey.

As the London Institute of 'Pataphysics suggested in 2002, it is difficult not to see Jean Dubuffet's post-war career as the inspiration for the Anglo-Saxon philistine scorn of Tony Hancock's 1961 film
The Rebel
. In
The Rebel
Hancock plays a clerk who mistakes his own infantile artistic abilities for accomplished impressionism. His doodles of people and animals are caricatures of Dubuffet's own non-figurative work. The film disregards the fact that Dubuffet and his contemporaries did not create abstract art because they were unable to draw a photographic image of a cow. They could, but did not want to draw a standard cow. They moved into non-figurative work and impressionism precisely because they had explored classical representative art and found it wanting. They had to experience it before they rejected it.
The Rebel
is a sound indication that in 1961 the United Kingdom was rather less ready than France for a challenge to the representative Graeco-Roman tradition, particularly if the challenge was mounted by diagnosed schizophrenics.

Jean Dubuffet continued to collect and to treasure the art of schizophrenics, while attempting in his own work to discover a similar raw purity. He used a variety of different materials in his later ‘assemblages', or three-dimensional textural collages. Those materials included such ‘found objects' as leaves and grass. Dubuffet lived until 1985. It is possible but unlikely that he heard of the work of Angus MacPhee. It is equally unlikely that Angus MacPhee heard of him. But two sentences by one
fit the other like a meadow-grass glove. ‘Art does not lie in the beds that have been made for him,' wrote Jean Dubuffet in 1960. ‘He runs away as soon as you pronounce his name: he likes it incognito. His best moments are when he forgets his name.'

The Compagnie de l'Art Brut ran out of money in the early 1950s. Jean Dubuffet then resumed personal responsibility for the collection which he had started, and shipped it for safekeeping to the United States of America. It was housed for ten years at the Long Island home of Dubuffet's friend, the Filipino surrealist artist Alfonso Ossorio. In 1962 the collection returned to Paris, where a revitalised Compagnie de l'Art Brut had found a four-storey house on the Rue de Sevres suitable for exhibiting the artworks. Drawings, paintings, carvings and embroideries by mental patients were added, until it contained over a thousand items. In 1967 another major exhibition was presented, this time at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. Dubuffet published a further manifesto in the catalogue, inviting viewers to ‘Make way for barbarism . . . The aim of our enterprise is to seek out works that as far as possible escape cultural conditioning and proceed from truly original mental attitudes.'