[August Walla: Adam and Fue in Paradise STEIN.)…]

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August Walla: Adam and Fue in Paradise STEIN.)

teo Ernie Stubbins reviews the exhibition "Outsiders' on show at the Hayward Gallery, South Bank, London. example, was a coal miner until one day while working at the coal face he heard a voice telling him to become an artist. His paintings were so rigourously abstract and formalised as to defy all interpretation.

In other cases we can begin to glimpse the social and economic basis for the disturbance of the artist's life.

Stolen

Heinrich Anton Muller for example was a small farmer who invented a machine for pruning grapevines. His idea was stolen and exploited and his reaction to this blow led him eventually to a psychiatric hospital.

There he went through a phase of producing complicated but useless machines before turning to the remarkable sequence of drawings and paintings by which he is represented in the exhibition.

Some of the work can be interpreted as no more than the • display of psychopathological symptoms.

Fantasies

This would be true of the sado-masochistic fantasies of Joseph Sell, or the remarkable pseudo-anatomical drawings by an anonymous Hungarian artist.

Others, such as August Neter, set out to record their hallucinations in a systematic way for their own benefit or for others.

•For several of the artists it is clear that the purpose of the work is the creation of an environment more to their liking than the one in which they live.

Sometimes this is a strictly internal fantasy NOW 20p p&r 50p plu WSL, 31 world, such as that created herself as the centre of a wonderful world of love and colour.

13 volumes Another remarkable example of this kind is the recently discovered Henry Darger, a hospital cleaner who spent all his spare time creating a massive illustrated epic 'Realms of the Unreal' about a revolution of children against adults. By the time of his death he had completed 13 enormous volumes of this work.

Rarer are the cases where proletarian artists set out to create a physical world which corresponds to their internal requirements.

Deservedly famous among these are the postman Cheval who spent 33 years building an ideal palace' in his garden near Lyon, and Simon Rodia, a telephone repairman who INSIDE: Mi • The significa OUT! Trot: kyisn Still availa ble, T 20p p&p. (No.

Dartmouth Park indel's dance with Stalinism ace of the Transitional The U.S. SWP 40 years on.

I Today No. rotskyism Ti Hill, London EULE. sece HELESUL built the great metal towers in Los Angeles.

It would be possible to write volumes on the individuals whose works are shown here.

For me the most lasting memory of the whole exhibition was a series of tableaux by Francis Marshall showing stages in the life of a woman Mauriette.

Bucket All the figures are assembled from discarded materials, life in school and family life, of adolescence and religion among the French poor. The final scene is, significantly, not the death of Mauriette but 'Mauriette has found a job' We see Mauriette as a cleaner, on her hands and knees with her head slumped into her bucket.

THEI ETICAJOUf AL OF T WOR AS SOC LEAC , No 4 Jariud 4. Price plus ›day No price . Availa ble rom NW5 14 IR.

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