JOHN ZEAMAN

Outsiders

Adolf Wolfli

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What accounts for the surge in popularity of “outsider art?” One answer is that contemporary art has starved people of sincere human expression. So, they turn to the work of religious visionaries, eccentrics, and psychotics, who—uncorrupted by art theory and fashion —create purely out of inner conviction.

“Bangali Firework” (1926) by Adolf Wolfli

In embracing this work, however, the audience is faced with a new problem: dealing with whatever it is that made this artist an outsider in the first place. In some cases, the causes are only isolation or naïveté. But what if the artist is psychotic? What if it’s someone far outside the mainstream of ordinary human feeling and perception?

In his 1898 essay “What Is Art,” Leo Tolstoy said a genuine work of art should communicate an emotion and make a person feel “so united to the artist that he feels as if the work were his own and not just someone else’s.” Art’s chief appeal, he believed, was “freeing our personality from its separation and isolation” and “uniting it with others,” both the artist and the other people who respond to it.

The art of Adolf Wolfli, on view at the American Folk Art Museum, puts these ideas to the test. Wolfli was born in 1864 and grew up in Bern, Switzerland. His father abandoned the family when Wolfli was 5, and his mother died three years later. Wolfli grew up as a hireling, with no permanent home. He excelled in school, but as an adult continued working as a farmhand and handyman. Between 1890 and 1895 he made several attempts to molest young girls. He served a prison term, and was ultimately sent to the Waldau Mental Asylum in Bern. There, he was diagnosed as schizophrenic and remained institutionalized for 35 years until his death in 1930.

Adolf Wolfli

Violent and agitated at first, he found his salvation in drawing. In 1902, one of his medical caretakers observed that Wolfli “had drawn very industriously for the entire summer.” The same report summed up his artistic efforts as “very stupid stuff, a chaotic jumble of notes, words, figures [to which he gives] fantastic names.” In 1907, a psychiatrist at Waldau, Dr. Walter Morgenthaler, took a different view. Psychiatry at the time was interested in art as a key – like dreams – to the human psyche. But Morgenthaler found aesthetic merit in Wolfli’s work as well, and in 1921 wrote a pioneering monograph on his life and work.

Morganthaler put Wolfli’s work in two groups: single-sheet drawings that he called “bread art,” because Wolfli traded them for things he wanted, such as art materials and tobacco. The rest belonged to a vast narrative cycle that combined prose, poetry, musical compositions, and illustrations. These were bound in 45 tabloid-size books and 16 smaller school notebooks that together contain an incredible 25,000 densely filled pages. They begin with an imaginary autobiography, “From the Cradle to the Grave.” In the next phase he expanded his life story into the realm of myth, with the “Geographic and Algebraic Books,” a narrative of fantastic travels and adventures throughout the universe. He then remakes the universe in his own image, calling it the “St. Adolf-Giant-Creation” – the title of the current exhibit.

The chief feature of Wolfli’s work is the incredibly dense patterning. Every drawing is packed border to border with detail, every area is subdivided again and again. Psychiatrists describe this as a horror vacui – the compulsion to fill in every square inch of an artistic surface. A number of pieces, for example, look like mandalas, which Swiss psychiatrist and theorist Carl Jung – who owned several Wolfli works – felt could be therapeutic for people in chaotic mental states. But, whatever drove him to obsessively make patterns, Wolfli became a master at it.

Wolfli’s drawings – in both plain and colored pencils – are at once very, very strange, yet oddly familiar. They remind you of the ornate borders and elaborately decorated letters of medieval illuminated manuscripts. Sometimes you see Oriental rugs, tarot cards, tapestries, Persian miniatures, a child’s board game, a primitive map, diagrams from biology, and paper money. Some are mostly abstract, and look like a swirling paisley, or a mysterious engineering diagram. Various motifs show up repeatedly, such as teardrop or capsule forms, and ribbon-like bands that unfurl across the surface, themselves filled with circular or oblong beads, musical notes, writing, or faces. Many of these seem animated – the blips and beads seem to move in their channels like the lights on a Broadway theater marquee, or a Times Square sign.

Many have symbols and things in them: townscapes and castles, boats and trains, birds and trees, as well as angels, smokestacks, fences, and bells. In almost all of them you will find a little moonish face looking out. Some are in circular frames, like the portraits on paper money. They have moustaches, elephant ears, horns, a black mask, and most frequently, a cross coming out of the top of the head, like an antenna. They are cartoonish faces, and there’s something a little creepy about them, the lack of expression, their enigmatic presence.

After his death, Wolfli’s work came to the attention of Jean Dubuffet, founder of art brut, a style that embraced the art of children, the naïve, and the mentally ill. Dubuffet called him “The Great Wolfli.” Another fan was Andre Breton, leader of the surrealists, who were particularly interested in psychotic states,- who valued the unconscious mind and anyone – such as the mentally ill – thought to have greater access to it.

Drawing becomes less important in Wolfli’s late works. In so-called “number pictures,” he calculates his fictitious wealth up to the year 2000. Subsequent series includes “Books With Songs and Dances” (1917-22), and “Funeral March,” in which music is the primary means of expression. When images are called for he begins to use magazine illustrations.

In his writings and lists of “inventions,” you are made more aware of the gulf between sense and nonsense, between the coherent and incoherent mind than in the drawings, which depend less on logic and rationality.

Not that there aren’t frustrations here, as well. As different as the drawings are, they are also relentlessly alike. They are systems or visions for which we have no key, for which there likely is no key. For all their complexity, energy, and apparent richness, they are locked doors. Like schizophrenic speech, they flee from sense into the safety of incoherence.

But we are nevertheless richer for having seen them. Which brings us back to Tolstoy’s definition. We don’t really receive a particular feeling from Wolfli; few people will recognize their own thoughts, here, or feel united with the artist. But we gain a window into another kind of consciousness – a mind pumped full of pressure, intense and disjointed. We step into a long dream, take joyless flights of fancy, and know the irresistable compulsions of the psychotic.

The American Folk Art Museum

2003

 

Ralph Fasanella

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How to account for Ralph Fasanella? A labor organizer and social activist, he showed no signs of artistic talent or even interest through early adulthood. Then, in the summer of 1944, he went on vacation in New Hampshire with a group of friends, one of whom was an artist. Fasanella saw her sketching and tried it himself. He drew a rowboat, a pair of shoes, and the inside and outside of one of the cabins. The results were surprisingly good.

An explosion of drawings followed.

“Family Supper” by Ralph Fasanella.

“When I became an artist, all of a sudden every fiber within me was alive,” he recalled years later. “My body was constantly excited, intoxicated with wonderful feelings of joy. Ideas came out. I couldn’t sleep.”

Fasanella, 31 years old, never looked back. Soon he was using oil paints and pouring all his life experiences into panoramic canvases: the New York City neighborhoods he loved, subway cars, machine shops, baseball stadiums, parades, and labor strikes.

He got attention here and there from shows at union halls and small galleries, but real recognition didn’t come until 1972, when New York magazine ran a cover story with a photo of a smiling Fasanella surrounded by his canvases. “This man pumps gas in the Bronx for a living,” the headline read. “He may also be the best primitive painter since Grandma Moses.”

Nothing was the same after that: a coffee-table book, an uptown exhibit, a PBS profile, and enough sales to get him and his family out of the Bronx and into a house in Westchester.

Now, the whole span of Fasanella’s career, from those early drawings done in 1944 right through to the last paintings before his death in 1997—a career spanning 52 years—can be seen in a major retrospective, “Ralph Fasanella’s America,” at the New-York Historical Society.

The comparison with Grandma Moses was both apt and not so. The two late-blooming artists (Grandma Moses was an even later bloomer, not starting until her 70s) share a similar flat, patterned style and a fondness for the big picture, a way of looking down on the world from a godlike perspective, with multitudes of human figures reduced to tiny scale. Fasanella evoked the complexities of urban life in the 1930s, just as Grandma Moses evoked the pastoral joys of her New England girlhood. But Fasanella differed from Moses in having a social program.

An ardent reformer, who, in Heminwayesque fashion, had gone to Spain to fight fascism in the Thirties, Fasanella continued to promote his utopian vision through his paintings. His first major canvas, “May Day,” portrays one of the huge labor parades that were once held in Manhattan’s Union Square. We see the parade marching through the downtown streets, the blocks packed with spectators. The painting lacks sophistication: The people are simple doll-like figures, the linear perspective shifts from one building to the next, and there is a complete absence of aerial perspective (the fading of things in the distance). But, despite the primitivism, this is far from childish. Fasanella organizes and unifies the sprawling composition by consolidating small elements into larger, boldly defined shapes. And, it doesn’t detract from his accomplishment to point out that this painting resembles a giant board game, with the ribbon of an elevated highway snaking around the perimeter of the scene and parks, gardens, and tenements as stops along the way.

Pictures of Fasanella at work show him using small brushes. If he painted a stadium full of people, there is no shorthand, no impressionistic treatment to suggest a large crowd. He paints every figure in the grandstands, each head dotted with a crop of hair, each torso with two arms and two parallel legs. Paintings made up of so many little pieces of color might fall apart in a cloud of confetti, but, once again, he pulls it all together, either by making a big abstract shape – a baseball stadium turns into a giant pinwheel – or by giving each painting a particular cast, as in “Grove Street Interior,” in which color is skewed toward the greenish side of the spectrum.

Fasnella’s paintings have a way of going on and on: another block, another tenement, another park with children playing. This is never more true than in “New York City,” a 110-inch-wide triptych that is one of Fasanella’s masterpieces.

In the foreground is a neighborhood scene that represents a condensed stretch of upper Broadway, Fasanella’s stomping grounds. The center of the painting is dominated by the 59th Street Bridge. Its sweeping curves carry the eye out to Queens and suburban Long Island beyond. The painting also manages to gather together the elements of the New York skyline – the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Brooklyn Bridge.

His overtly political paintings can become too symbol-laden and diagrammatic. His paintings about the executions of the Rosenbergs, the Kennedy assassination, and the social upheaval of the Sixties seem not so much pictures as propagandistic lessons, blueprints to change the world. More successful is the series on the 1912 “Bread and Roses” strike in Lawrence, Mass., in which he adopted a rigorous realism. He studied and absorbed every detail of the industrial environment, learning what machines did and how they worked before attempting to paint them. In some, he used cutaway views to peek into entire floors from the outside. In others, he uses colors expressionistically: A red-brick mill set against a fiery red sky, its chimney blasting out gas and sparks, evokes a labor situation that has reached the boiling point.

The Lawrence paintings were the crowning achievement of Fasanella’s career. By the 1980s, his intensity had begun to wane. The same sentiments are there, as in the rendering of the New York Daily News strike, but the energy needed to orchestrate big, detailed compositions is not. He could still be charming, as in his fey rendering of Times Square— a New Yorker cover for the Broadway Jubilee issue in May of 1993—but charm is not the quality we associate with Fasanella.

Fasanella’s art has been described as the visual equivalent of street talk – direct, opinionated, improvisational, and passionate. But without the social convictions, his art would have had no purpose. His paintings championed working class culture, and the dignity of labor. He always remained a Thirties leftist, tough and big-hearted, continuing to insist that America live up to its ideals as a humane, democratic society.

 

New-York Historical Society

2002

 

 

Folk Art Museum

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“American Anthem” is the second show at the new American Folk Art Museum. If the first was overshadowed by the opening of the new building itself, then the second should be the one where the building —which was showered with accolades, including some from me—would get down to the more self-effacing job of displaying the art.

But when I went to look at the art, it didn’t feel that way. The building kept intruding and distracting me.

There are some serious architectural problems here that were overlooked, I think, in the post-Sept. 11 outpouring of goodwill that attended the museum’s opening. The $22 million building—the first permanent home for the once nomadic museum—became a symbol of faith and optimism about the city’s future.

The facade of the American Folk Art Museum.

And it was hard not to be dazzled by the architectural pizazz of Tod Williams and Billy Tsien, New York architects who were doing their first big New York project. Their key decision was to carve a five-story atrium in the center of a very narrow building and to use various slots, peepholes, and stairways to add to the sense of airy connection between the floors. They succeeded all too well, with the result that the areas for displaying art are often too narrow and feel more like landings than galleries.

Fortunately, folk art is resilient – or it wouldn’t have made it this far. The experience is like visiting dear old friends who have chosen to live in an overdesigned house that seems at odds with their personalities. “American Anthem” draws on the museum’s great permanent collection and reshuffles the deck a bit, repositioning the pieces in new arrangements based on social or aesthetic currents. You’ll see whirligigs and weathervanes, stenciled bellows and painted duck decoys, Frakturs, dolls, and a carousel horse. There’s every kind of quilt, from crazy quilts and album quilts to a flag quilt, string quilt, bars quilt, and a tree of life quilt. There are paintings infused with religious fervor, paintings infused with socialist fervor, and paintings infused with every other possible fervor including bizarre and claustrophobic works by outsider artists such as the reclusive Henry Darger and the institutionalized Martin Ramirez.

“Flag Gate” from 1876

The show kicks off with the iconic “Flag Gate,” from 1876, the centennial year of America’s independence. A functioning gate, it has carved, wavy wooden stripes that look like they’re rippling in the breeze.

Don’t miss “Noah’s Ark,” a piece that doesn’t really fit here, in that it was made neither in America, nor by an American, but by an anonymous prisoner of war in England (it is meant to juxtapose with the liberty-inspired works). Carved mostly from animal bones recycled from prison kitchens, it looks to have been done during a long internment, judging by the meticulous detail and the elaborate architectural construction, including movable parts that showed the animals boarding the ship.

Not all folk art was intended as art. Reflecting a mid-19th century atmosphere of reform and social theories – that sometimes shaded over into pseudoscience — is the “Phrenological Head,” which uses a colored, map-like diagram on a mannequin to reflect the 37 purported “faculties” responsible for human behavior.

Stories are often told of folk artists laboring in their spare time at ambitious projects that take years to complete. So it is with a secretary cabinet made between 1862 and 1869 by a railroad woodworker named Frederick Stedman Hazen. The elegant piece is far from folkish. It uses 21,378 pieces of inlaid wood, including some with famous associations, such as those from the steeple of Independence Hall, Mount Vernon, the ships Endeavor and Constitution, and some associated with Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. Hazen, who gained fame during his lifetime for the project, mounted and labeled a sample of each piece of wood he used, noting its location on the secretary.

The show has an interesting group of late-blooming naïve painters, such as Victor Joseph Gatto, a boxer, laborer, and convicted robber, who took up painting after seeing the prices at a Greenwich Village sidewalk show. Vowing he could do better, Gatto became successful with works such as the Henri Rousseau-inspired jungle scene shown here, painted in 1942.

Morris Hirshfield didn’t begin painting until he was in his 60s. The former garment industry entrepreneur is best known for his animal paintings, such as “Mother Cat With Kittens,” with his characteristic Egyptian-style flatness and the domestic cats endowed with furry manes like male lions.

Morris Hirshfield’s “Mother Cat With Kittens.”

Outsider artists, whose visionary approach to art sets them apart from the naïve artists, include the Southern Baptist lay preacher Howard Finster, who died this year at age 87. In 1976, he had a vision that told him to create sacred art. His paintings are didactic and diagramatic, mixing images of the modern and the biblical, such as an airplane with clinging angels.

Here, then, is the full richness of the American folk tradition. The art is terrific, the installation is well done, but … that building. Wouldn’t something a bit more plain and folksy have been better, instead of these 50-foot vertiginous drops, the redundant stairways, the offbeat blends of sandblasted concrete, metals, green fiberglass, and precious woods? But, high-profile buildings are what museum boards want nowadays. And in a way, the building makes a statement about the changing face of folk-art collecting. The art may have humble origins, but it is no longer displayed in humble spaces.

 

The American Folk Art Museum, NYC

2002

Art Brut

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More than 50 years after Jean Dubuffet coined the provocative term “art brut” – literally “raw art” – the audience for it couldn’t be less shocked. Back in the 1930s, when the French painter began touting the work of graffiti scrawlers, psychics, and the institutionalized insane, it must have seemed, to the average person, like one more outrage of modern art, another assault on the traditional ideals of beauty and harmony.

Dubuffet not only admired the art of the untutored and unbalanced, he tried to paint that way himself, with brutally distorted, primitivistic stick figures incised in coarse grounds of paint, sand, dirt, and glue.

Now, “outsider art,” as it is called today, has become so popular that it’s in danger of losing its outsider status. There’s a museum devoted to it in Baltimore, and names like Adolf Wolfli and Henry Darger are now known well beyond once-small circles of specialist scholars and collectors. This weekend marks the ninth annual Outsider Art Fair downtown in Manhattan, while uptown, the Museum of American Folk Art kicks off an exhibit of art brut.

A painting by outsider artist Aloise Corbaz.

On view are about 100 works from the collection of the Paris-based foundation ABCD (Art Brut Connaissance & Diffusion), which is dedicated to promoting awareness of art brut, of which Dubuffet identified four strains: by asylum inmates, spiritual mediums, the isolated, and the self-taught. (Technically speaking, “outsider art” is a broader term than art brut, covering not only art by naive or disturbed artists, but that by trained artists who work in idiosyncratic styles – like Dubuffet.)

The exhibit is divided up along Dubuffet’s breakdown, with the biggest number of works coming from the ranks of the insane. To Dubuffet, art was art, regardless of who created it, and he resisted any attempts by critics or historians to marginalize art brut. But, to avoid the stigma of mental illness, he played down that aspect, and instead attributed the artists’ originality to their cultural innocence.

It was this search for art completely uncontaminated by culture that led Dubuffet into Europe’s asylums and psychiatric clinics. Among the artists whose work he collected were Wolfli and Aloise Corbaz.

Wolfli (1864-1930), a Swiss laborer and alleged child molester, spent the last 35 years of his life in a Bern clinic. In 1921, his psychiatrist, Dr. Walter Morganthaler, brought the world’s attention to his work with a paper titled “A Mental Patient as Artist.” Wolfli, obsessively prolific like many such artists, created a 25,000-page opus, combining musical compositions, poetry, and 3,000 illustrations.

“Christoph Columbus” is typical of his early work, a symmetrical composition – a mandala of sorts – with a stylized face in the center and mythical animals along the border. The work has a natural affinity with the totemic art of the Kwakiutl Indians of America’s Pacific Northwest – art that Wolfli almost certainly never saw.

Bold and sometimes compulsive patterning is a hallmark of art brut, and Wolfli’s art became progressively more so as he got older. Greeting visitors at the entrance to the galleries is his giant pencil drawing, put together from four sheets of paper and measuring about 6 feet across. Its dense, diagrammatic image is part map, part cityscape, part architectural drawing. Musical notation, script, abstract designs, and small decorative heads inhabit the meandering tracks and channels of this elaborate design. Streets and buildings pop up in one section, while another large form looks like some kind of vessel, a cutaway view of a submarine.

What stands out is the certainty and steadiness of the artist’s hand. Wolfli doesn’t hesitate, or rework. It’s hard to tell if this is because he has a complete conception of what he wants before he puts it down, or because he simply follows his instincts wherever they lead him, from one edge of the paper to the other.

Corbaz (1886-1964) was also Swiss, and had been a governess in the court of Kaiser Willhelm II of Germany before World War I. She began producing artwork shortly after being institutionalized in 1918, and by 1936, the doctors of La Rosiere asylum were collecting her drawings and paintings. If Wolfli’s work has a primitivistic flavor, Corbaz’s remind us of Matisse or the German expressionists. She created a perfumed and colorful world populated by kings, queens, dukes, and duchesses in a setting of courtly opulence – all of it dedicated to expressing her unrequited love for the kaiser.

Spiritualism was very big in the first half of the 20th century, and it apparently spawned enough examples of trance-induced “automatic writing” to warrant its own category. These mediums took no credit for their works, but claimed to be “channeling” creative forces. Madge Gill (1882-1961) had a spirit guide named Myrninnerest, who compelled her to begin drawing at the age of 37. Her pen-and-ink drawings feature the repetition of a woman’s face enmeshed in interlocking geometric patterns formed by one continuous, flowing line.

Those Dubuffet called “isolates,” or solitaries, produced their art in secret. Darger (1892-1973) is the best known American in this category. He was raised in a Catholic home for boys, and was institutionalized as a young man for behavior problems. He then settled into a routine as a janitor at a Catholic hospital. In his spare time, he worked on a massive illustrated saga called “The Story of the Vivian Girls in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnean War Storm, Caused by the Child-Slave Rebellion.”

The creepy illustrations are a psychiatrist’s field day, with gruesome battles between the evil Glandelians, who look like Nazis, and the little Vivian girls in their bows and frilly frocks, who look like figures copied from a child’s coloring book. The child-slaves have female features and penises. Although Darger’s work fascinates many, and is widely exhibited, his work is among the least interesting artistically. The figures really do look traced, and repeated in a rubber-stamp way, creating horizontal multifigured compositions that look like wallpaper – except for the grisly hangings and strangulations.

These are sick images. Darger’s appeal seems based less on the art than on the romantic myth of the isolated outsider artist who is only discovered after his death. It was Darger’s landlord who found his life’s work, which included the 12-volume, 15,000-page epic of the Vivian girls.

Dubuffet’s last category – self-taught artists – doesn’t quite fit the “raw art” category. The work of these more or less ordinary folk – clerks, housewives, shopkeepers – lacks the edge of the true outsider. The mysterious, almost elegant designs of Scottie Wilson, a Scottish-born Canadian who “doodled” in the back room of his secondhand shop for 37 years, are odd, yes, but fundamentally rational.

Which brings us back to Dubuffet’s insistence that it is naivete and indifference to artistic traditions that is art brut’s most salient feature. Such a description might fit a rural folk artist like Grandma Moses, but it ignores the irrational nature of art brut. The art of these schizophrenics, psychotics, spiritualists, and recluses isn’t one of childlike innocence, but one of strangeness, obsession, claustrophobia, and bizarre preoccupations.

And, this is precisely why we are drawn to it – because we are curious about this dark side of human nature, and because these people are unquestionably the real thing. For them, art wasn’t some pose or game. They didn’t have to strive or struggle to suggest a surreal world. They lived in a surreal world, and their art gives us a peek into it, and a taste of what it might be like to be them.

Museum of American Folk Art

2001

 

 

 

 

Dreams of Utopia

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What do a psychedelic album cover, the robot from Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,” the Declaration of Independence, Renaissance architecture, and the Garden of Eden have in common?

All are, in one way or another, expressions of the utopian impulse, according to a wide-ranging exhibit at the New York Public Library, “Utopia: The Search for an Ideal Society in the Western World.” It brings together hundreds of books, posters, pamphlets, prints, photographs, film clips, letters, bits of music, medieval manuscripts, Soviet propaganda, anti-war buttons, and other historical materials in what is one of the largest exhibits the library has ever presented.

Organized in cooperation with the Bibliotheque nationale de France and filling galleries on two floors of the Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street building, this is an exhibit that casts its net wide and strives to bring as much visual life as possible to what is, in effect, a purely philosophical or literary concept.

The Garden of Eden, as rendered here by Lucas Cranach the Elder, was a utopian template.

Judging by the number of spin-off events – lectures, film series, Web sites, performances, and courses at colleges and museums all over the city – our time seems ripe for a utopian revival, although, according to this show, all times are. Utopian thought, we learn, is a deep undercurrent that has run through every century. In fact, by the time you leave this exhibit, you may find yourself believing that utopian drives – not love, sex, or money – is what has made the world go ’round.

The exhibit looks not just at those consciously designed blueprints for better societies such as Plato’s “Republic” or Sir Thomas More’s “Utopia,” but at age-old myths or beliefs in worldly – or otherworldly – paradises. These include the Garden of Eden, the Golden Age of the Greeks, New Jerusalem, El Dorado, and Atlantis.

It also chronicles those actual experiments in utopian living, most of which were carried out in North America in the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Oneida in New York and New Harmony in Indiana. The exhibit’s final section looks at how utopian ideas have also transformed mainstream societies – and often the course of history. The most dramatic examples are the French and American revolutions and the spread of communism in the 20th century.

Utopia has meant different things to different people. The Shakers tried to create a society without sex, even for procreation (religious conversion was supposed to provide a steady flow of new members), while the Oneida community practiced “complex marriage” in which husbands and wives were shared. Ancient Sparta was considered utopian by some, despite its reliance on slavery, because individuals subordinated their needs to that of the city-state, while even the Nazis had their own perverse utopian goals in their ideas of improving humanity through eugenics, creating, by their logic, a master race.

Utopianism, we learn, also has its ironic and satiric side. The word itself, coined by More as the name for his fictitious island, is a pun meaning both “good place” and “no place.” Satires on utopias are almost as old as the serious tracts, and Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” is probably the best known.

More, who wrote his book in response to social ills and inequalities in Renaissance England, was the first to describe a place that was, in theory, achievable by ordinary humans. In his pre-Marx, communist society, everyone’s house was identical, and money was unnecessary because everyone drew freely from communal warehouses to which all contributed.

The discovery of the New World provided a blank slate for Europeans to project their utopian fantasies. Colorful prints show the indigenous populations as, alternately, noble savages or vicious cannibals. In their ideas for perfect communities on this new soil, many of the Renaissance utopians turned to classical ideas of proportion and urban planning, although the rigid controls that utopias are sometimes known for comes across in strict grid plans, such as that for Savannah, Ga.

After More, the fictitious travelogue became the favored literary genre for utopian fantasies. These included Francis Bacon’s “New Atlantis,” where humanity’s problems are solved by science and invention, and such romantic novels about Shangri-Las as Samuel Butler’s “Erewhon” and Edward Bellamy’s “Looking Backward.” With the advent of science fiction, utopias began cropping up on other planets.

Utopia’s evil twin is dystopia, the result of some slip between conception and execution, a situation best illustrated – unfortunately for us – by 20th century examples. Titled “Dreams and Nightmares,” this section has at its entrance a replica of the robot from “Metropolis,” the early silent movie about technology run amok. A copy of Karel Capek’s 1923 play in which he coined the word robot, from the Czech word robota, reminds visitors that its root meaning is drudgery.

Utopian literature goes distinctly dystopian with George Orwell’s fantasy of a totalitarian state, “1984”; Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”; and Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451.”

Soviet propaganda posters from the early years after the revolution show heroic men and women wielding scythes and raising sheaves of wheat over their heads, while nearby are bleak photographs from the Stalinist gulags of the 1930s.

The exhibit pulls together a colorful array of utopian threads from the counterculture flowerings of mid-20th century America: communes, Haight-Ashbury hippies, Woodstock, civil rights, feminism, and gay rights.

These broader cultural manifestations of utopian idealism provide some of the most diverting images in the show, although they fall outside a strict definition of utopia.

Easily overlooked are the less free-associational displays, such as that on contemporary “intentional communities” in America. Too little is said about these serious experiments with actual utopian living. Some have been going on for quite a while, such as the Virginia community founded in 1967 on the principles put forth in B.F. Skinner’s “Walden II.” One wonders, do the children there wear lollipops around their necks to develop frustration tolerance, as the behavioral psychologist described in his utopian fiction? Or, did that prove too dystopian? Alas, there is only one photo of a few buildings, and not a person in sight.

Nor is enough said about the Israeli kibbutzim, probably the century’s most important experiment in utopian communal living, which are said to have lost much of their early idealism.

It’s said that the standard of living in the world has never been higher. The most affluent billion people live in galloping pursuit of a happiness never dreamed of by Thomas Jefferson and other idealists. Yet, technology, consumerism, and ecological problems have given rise to fantasies more along the lines of “Brave New World” than Shangri-La. But, as this exhibit makes clear, utopias and dystopias are different sides of the same coin, less real blueprints than reflections of the hopes and fears of the real world we live in.

New York Public Library

2000

Millennial Dreams

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For most people, millennial fever passed with New Year’s Eve. But others are still possessed by it. They wait, not for the calendar millennium, but a miraculous one – the thousand-year period, prophesied in the Bible, in which evil will be banished from the Earth and Christ will reign.

The prophesy, if that’s what it is, is found in the Book of Revelation at the end of the New Testament. Fundamentalist Christians, who take the Bible literally, have have been vigilant for centuries, watching for portents from above – comets, meteor showers, and the like. Once, even non-believers feared the end was at hand on the famous “Dark Day” of May 19, 1780, when the sun failed to appear across a swath of the Northeast, apparently the result of forest fires and a weather inversion.

This is the kind of background you need to bear in mind to fully appreciate “Millennial Dreams: Vision and Prophecy in American Folk Art.” Many of the self-taught artists and craftsman in it were fervent believers, their imaginations inflamed by Revelation’s apocalyptic prophesies, such as this one, projected on the floor at the exhibit’s entrance: “And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key to the bottomless pit and great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years…”

The 75 works in the show, some from as far back as the 1700s, range from images of trumpeting angels to multiheaded beasts, from city plans of the heavenly New Jerusalem to chronological charts of history’s progress in millennialist terms.

It would be wrong, however, to think that millennialism was the sole province of wild-eyed preachers or doomsday cults. A less apocalyptic school of thought held that Christ’s Second Coming would occur only after mankind had earned the passage into heaven by a thousand years of good behavior. This notion melded with America’s belief in itself as a new beginning for the world, and fueled the nation’s utopian and reformist spirit.

The show begins with Gabriel, the horn-blowing archangel who heralds the millennium’s arrival. Weather vanes in his shape, as flat as paper cutouts, were often perched atop church steeples in late 18th and early 19th century New England. These are curious, almost comical figures – some male, some female, some cherubim – as ungainly as storks, with curved beaky noses, and long legs trailing behind.

Some of the artists here were rural preachers, such as the Oklahoman, William A. Blayney, who made elaborate charts to illustrate the millennialist idea that history is the unfolding of a divine plan. If you saw a proselytizer holding up this placard, you’d probably run away. But in the safety of the museum, it’s fun to look at. It’s as dense with information as one of those laminated study sheets, with text, and headings, and arrows, and lots of little cartoonish panels illustrating prophecies about angel armies, dragons, and blackened-out suns. Blayney was as proud of his creation as he was blind to aesthetics, as can be seen from the crude scrawl across the painting’s surface: “All Rights Reserved.”

Visionary folk artists are a colorful breed and this group is especially so. There’s Chester Cornett of Dwarf County, Ky., a chair maker who dreamed that eastern Kentucky was going to be engulfed by a great flood and built a 20-foot ark to save himself and his family. There’s Harriet Powers, a former slave, whose Biblical quilt shows people cringing and gesticulating during hailstorms, meteor showers, and other unusual occurrences believed to be portents of the millennium. She used a shorthand, symbolic style, not unlike that of graffiti artist Keith Haring, in which falling stars look like country fair ribbons, and the frightened people look like Gumby.

Washington, D.C., janitor James Hampton spent 14 years secretly constructing “The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly” out of discarded furniture and used light bulbs that he lovingly wrapped in gold and aluminum foil. The weirdly exotic piece, now an icon of religious folk art, looks part Flash Gordon, part Angkor Wat. Up close, you can see that, yes, it’s just plain old aluminum foil, the same stuff you played with as a child, which is part of its charm. You find yourself remembering how easily shaped it was, but how, once crinkled, it could never be made smooth and shiny again, no matter how much you flattened it.

At the center of the show is a version of Edward Hicks’ “The Peaceable Kingdom,” one of about 60 such images he made. Hicks was one of those itinerant 19th century limners – a painter of signs and decorative patterns. His vision was post-apocalyptic, a heaven on Earth, in which lions and lambs literally lie down together. This painting and its variants are icons of American art, a seemingly strong and original statement. So, it’s ironic to learn that Hicks borrowed his imagery from two paintings, Benjamin West’s “William Penn’s Treaty with the Indians” and Richard Westall’s “The Peaceable Kingdom of the Branch.” Folk artists are forever surprising and confounding us.

The Museum of American Folk Art

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