Art of Outsiders and Avant-garde

“For a whole day, I imagined that I was crazy, and I was even pleased with this thought, because then I would have everything that I wanted,” exclaims the inspired Oscar Schlommer, one of the professors of the legendary Bauhaus, after visiting the collection of art Psychiatric patients in Heidelberg. In the avant -garde era, marginality, outstanding, madness, strangeness, alogism become new "objects of desire". The crisis of the canon of classical aesthetics led to the fact that the new trends in art began to include in their methanarrative the previously not noticeable creativity of outsiders. Why did the works of mentally ill, social marginals and visionaries have turned into significant artistic phenomena? How did the texts and works of the vanguard expanded the understanding of the boundaries of art? The art critic Anna Suvorova in her book explores the stages of this process. At first, expressionists used outsider motifs and images, then the appeals of surrealists to the allogism and ideas of "madness" led to the abandonment of the stigmatization of mental illness, and then, finally, institutional practices, Ar-Brutus and the activities of Jean Dubuff to exhibitions of the 2010s, Finally legitimized "strange art". Anna Suvorova is an art historian and a culturologist, doctor of art history, associate professor of the Russian State Pedagogical University named after A. I. Herzen and National Research University "Higher School of Economics"