Review: ‘Self-Taught Genius’ at Amon Carter Museum is about the art

The work of geniuses is on exhibit at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. Not artists, geniuses. It seems the art establishment is rather touchy about who can lay claim to the term “artist,” although it is quite loose with the term “genius.”

In “Self-Taught Genius: Treasures From the American Folk Art Museum,” more than 100 objects made by woodworkers, quiltmakers, painters and sculptors from the early 18th century to the present are on display. They were made by people not formally trained in art practices, but the creators were quite skilled or at least profoundly inspired.

Sadly, many of the objects go without attribution.

This reticence to call the makers “artists” is a myopia of the keepers of the art canon, usually historians and academics, followed by museums and galleries.

The artists have no say in the matter.

“These people have been marginalized for so long, they’ve been outside the art history canon,” says Carter curator Shirley Reece-Hughes. “That involves a lack of formal training, lack of a gallery network or a museum network.

“It’s only the High Museum in Atlanta that integrates self-taught artists within the broader art history.”

To keep these artists in an art ghetto, there are the disparaging descriptors — “folk,” “self-taught” or “outsider” — affixed to them and their output, rendering them second-class artmakers, or in the case here, not artists but geniuses.

The artist-not-an-artist delineation is a seriously debated issue. In a catalog essay that accompanies the exhibit, Stacy C. Hollander, deputy director for curatorial affairs at the American Folk Art Museum, writes, “At the turn of the 20th century, the field of American folk art was being formed by artists, critics, curators, dealers and collectors who championed the artworks as exemplars of a forthright honesty of purpose and execution that was absent from mainstream art and that seemed to encode the very DNA of American experience.”

So this art is all that — honest, forthright, bearer of the very DNA of American experience — but it is not created by artists. She goes on for 10 additional pages explaining why, with flimsy and prejudicial arguments that are rage-inducing.

The Carter has done a masterful job of installing this huge selection of disparate items; the only sour note is the tomato-red color of the walls in the first several galleries. The color is extremely discordant with the items that are bright red, as part of their red, white and blue Americana palette. It also overwhelms the pieces that are ivoried with age.

Many of the geniuses are unknown; some are, and many of them have interesting stories.

Marino Auriti, an auto mechanic, built a model (1:200 scale) of a museum that would hold all of humankind’s knowledge “from the wheel to the satellite,” he said. His Encyclopedic Palace/Palazzo would have been 2,322 feet tall, almost as tall as the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, had it been built.

The model that he constructed in the 1950s of wood, plastic, glass, hair combs and model kits was taken to the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013 to be the art fair’s centerpiece. Had he been a classically trained artist, the strictures of what is acceptable art would have halted those visions in their most embryonic tracts.

There are two other towers in the exhibition; large phallic things seemed to inspire these geniuses. One by an unknown artist, Empire State Building, c.1931, is made of tiny interlocking pieces of cherry wood, like an early form of Legos. The other, by Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, The Gold Tower, c.1970, is made of gold-painted chicken and turkey bones; it looks like a poorly wrought camp project.

While many of the artists’ names are lost to time, there were some who didn’t want to be known. Henry Darger, for instance, never wanted the public to see his art. He was a hospital custodian who lived in a one-room apartment in Chicago and toiled for decades on his private projects.

Only after his death in 1973 did his neighbors find his fantasy manuscripts, with drawings and watercolor illustrations for The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, that depict Bobbsey Twin-like children that romp across idyllic gardens or are hideously tortured. Darger cast himself as the savior in their stories.

One of the 9-foot-long scrolls that he painted on both sides is at the Carter. It all looks quite innocent, but closer inspection reveals it is anything but — serpents twist around darling children who display the sexual characteristics of both males and females while sprouting horns and tails.

Darger has become an inspiration to artists of graphic novels and comic books and numerous musicians. He and his work have been the subject of a documentary film, In the Realms of the Unreal. His headstone is inscribed “Artist” and “Protector of Children.”

The early American portraiture, of which there is an abundance in this exhibit, is interesting as the sitters are surrounded by subtle and not-so-subtle status symbols.

Mary Valentine Bucher is depicted with her book; her husband, the subject of Dr. Christian Bucher, is surrounded by his bottles of medicinals as he works a mortar and pestle. Their paintings are by Jacob Maentel, circa 1825-30.

The painting that shows all the holdings of the titular subject of Theodor Frick, Porkpacker, Richmond, Va. (1878), by Carl W. Hambuch, includes every household member, the houses, the barns, the carriages, the stock, the fields and the outbuildings, as well as rows and rows of clean white laundry flapping on the clothesline.

None of these portraits though is as dear as Girl in a Red Dress With Cat and Dog (1830-1835), by Ammi Phillips. Phillips, possibly self-taught, possibly apprenticed, became a professional painter who advertised a money-back guarantee if his sitters were not pleased with his work.

The best of the Folk Art Museum’s collection are the oddities, such as the beautifully carved phrenology head by Asa Ames. Phrenology was the belief that 27 areas of the brain related to certain aspects of behavior and that by feeling the lumps and bumps of the cranium a phrenologist could read a person’s character. Ames carved the head, in 1850, shortly before he died of tuberculosis.

Quilts are the storytellers from the women of genius. The Bird of Paradise Quilt, stitched between 1858 and 1863, was made by a bride whose intended died during the Civil War. She is depicted at the top of the quilt; in the square that would have been his is a spray of white flowers.

The pattern pieces for the quilt, made from newspapers of the time, were given to the museum along with the quilt top. The groom is one of the paper-doll cutouts among the animals and flowers. This work by an unknown quilter is quite poignant.

The Diamond in the Square Quilt, made in the early 1900s in Lancaster County, Pa., by an Amish woman, is magnificently ornate, contrary to their style of dress. The magenta, red and blue colors are bold, but the stitching is even more exuberant. Here was her outlet for making something quite useful but highly decorative as well.

The woodworkers carved animals and objects of a utilitarian purpose with a high degree of ornamentation — cabinets, chairs, boxes and bowls.

Much of the exhibit is to that end — utilitarian. And when it isn’t utilitarian, the art is spurred by a drive to create — and isn’t that where all art originates?

Let’s just call it art by artists and forget the derogatory subsets or the overinflated synonyms.

This story was originally published October 15, 2015 at 3:18 PM with the headline "Review: ‘Self-Taught Genius’ at Amon Carter Museum is about the art."