Art & Exhibitions
Jarvis Cocker and The Museum of Everything Will Celebrate Untrained Artists at Frieze Masters
Just don't don't call them "outsider" artists.
Eileen Kinsella
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British art curator James Brett, who founded the non-profit The Museum of Everything seven years ago, is a busy man.
Less than two weeks after launching a gallery show “Jarvis Cocker’s Journeys Into The Outside” at his new and first-ever permanent gallery space (The Gallery of Everything)—an exhibition that has the added cachet of being organized by his close friend and Pulp frontman—Brett will next celebrate untrained (don’t call them “outsider”) artists at the the upcoming Frieze Masters (October 5–9), in Norman Rosenthal’s “Collections” section.
“Le Foyer de L’Art Brut: Jean Dubuffet, Michel Tapié & Co, Galerie René Drouin” will revisit a ground-breaking 1947 show at an experimental Parisian salon organized by Dubuffet and his dealer René Drouin along with art critic Tapié. As Brett recounts, Dubuffet found Art Brut in hospitals, villages, and on the street, and the untrained artists who created these works would fascinate him for the rest of his life. Dubuffet sought out “the authentic, the spontaneous, and the anti-cultural,” says Brett.
And it was certainly an aesthetic that “insiders” clearly appreciated, even at the time. Visitors to the 1947 exhibition included luminaries such as Joan Miró, Hans Hartung, André Lhote, Isamu Noguchi, Jean Cocteau, Tristan Tzara, Henri Michaux, Victor Brauner, Andre Malraux, Jean Fautrier, and André Breton.
The Museum of Everything bills itself as “the world’s first and only wandering institution for the untrained, unintentional, undiscovered and unclassifiable artists of modern times.” As Brett told artnet News in a phone interview about the simultaneous gallery and Frieze ventures “what unifies all of this stuff is this alternative history of art and different ways of seeing the process of making material culture.”
The Frieze Masters presentation will explore the nine-month sojourn that took place in the basement of the Galerie René Drouin. Some of the artists featured then and now, are Gaston Chaissac, Aloïse Corbaz, Fleury-Joseph Crépin, Miguel Hernandez, Juva, Pascal Désir Maisonneuve, and Swiss artist Adolf Wölfli. The presentation will also include period publications and guest books from Galerie René Drouin at the time.
Meanwhile, The Gallery of Everything’s new—if diminutive—space in Marylebone is an unusual one. “When a small barber shop round the corner from my office opened up—after my barber passed away—I thought, well it’s the same colors as the museum [red and white]. I promise you, it really is as silly as that,” Brett told artnet News.
Meanwhile, “Jarvis Cocker’s Journeys Into The Outside” opened September 25 and runs through November 20. Cocker travels to far-flung locales in order to interview artists and craftsmen, usually amid their astonishing creations. The exhibition also features original photographs of the environments and their makers.
Artists include the Indian landscape architect Nek Chand Saini, French multi-disciplinary recluse Chomo, graphic artist St EOM, self-ordained minister and house painter WC Rice, German carpenter Karl Friedrich Junker and preacher Howard Finster whose artwork was made famous on album covers by REM and the Talking Heads.
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