The Shadow of the Avant-garde, Rousseau and Forgotten Masters / Museum Folkwang
Oct.2, 2015 – January 10, 2016
A shadow accompanies every 20th-century Avant-Garde Art Movement. Self-taught artists are what make up this shadow.*
They are painters, sculptors, and photographers with neither academic training nor access to both traditional and newly emerging channels of dissemination for their works. But their works match those by the best artists of the 20th century in artistry, aesthetic richness, immediacy, and intensity. These relative unknowns, in fact, often became an important source of inspiration for many of their famous counterparts, who gave them recognition and sometimes encouragement. The exhibition presents thirteen of these self-taught artists and a brief retrospective of their major works, which as a whole represent a kaleidoscope of widely different forms of artistic creativity.
