What Is Outsider Art?

What does "outsider art" mean?

Outsider art is art made by people with little or no contact with the official art world. Its makers are usually self-taught, and they often work alone, for themselves, with no thought of an audience or of selling their work. Many never called themselves artists at all.

The label describes the maker's position rather than a style. An outsider artist might draw on scraps of paper in a hospital ward, build a palace from stones collected on a postal round, or fill a rented room with a fantasy novel of thousands of pages. What links them is distance from art schools, galleries, critics and the art market.

Where does the term come from?

The idea began in France. In 1945 the painter Jean Dubuffet coined the term art brut, literally "raw" or "rough" art, for work he believed was untouched by artistic culture. He collected drawings and objects by psychiatric patients, spiritualist mediums, prisoners, recluses and eccentrics, and argued that they were more inventive than anything in the official art world. You can read his story in our guide to Jean Dubuffet and art brut.

The English term followed in 1972. The British art historian Roger Cardinal wrote the first book in English about art brut, and his publishers wanted an English title. The compromise was Outsider Art. Cardinal never much liked the phrase, but it stuck. Our guide to Roger Cardinal and the 1979 Outsiders exhibition tells that story.

Who are outsider artists?

Outsider artists come from every background, but a few groups appear again and again in the history of the field:

• People in psychiatric hospitals. The earliest collections came from asylums in Switzerland and Germany. Adolf Wölfli drew, wrote and composed music on about 25,000 pages at the Waldau clinic near Bern. See art from the asylum.
• Spiritualist mediums. Madge Gill of East London believed a spirit guide called Myrninerest directed her hand. See mediumistic art.
• Solitary makers. Henry Darger, a hospital cleaner in Chicago, secretly wrote and illustrated an epic of more than 15,000 pages.
• People who started late in life. Bill Traylor, born into slavery in Alabama, began drawing at about 85.
• Builders of environments. The French postman Ferdinand Cheval spent 33 years building his Palais Idéal. See visionary environments.
• Artists with learning disabilities. Judith Scott, who had Down syndrome and was deaf, made powerful fibre sculptures at a studio in California. See supported studios.

What does outsider art look like?

There is no outsider style, but some features turn up often enough to be worth knowing:

• Obsessive detail and repetition, with every inch of the surface filled.
• Personal systems: invented alphabets, maps, cosmologies, calendars or religions.
• Unusual materials, such as wrapping paper, cardboard, envelopes, thread, cement or broken crockery, often because nothing else was available.
• Words and images together, with writing worked into the picture.
• Large bodies of work made over decades, sometimes thousands of pieces.

None of these is required, and plenty of trained artists share them. That is one reason the label is argued over.

How is outsider art different from folk art or naïve art?

Folk art usually follows the shared traditions of a community, such as quilts, carved signs or decorated narrowboats. Naïve art is made by untrained painters who imitate the conventions of fine art and often hope to join it. Outsider art, in its strict sense, stands apart from both tradition and the art world. Our guide to art brut, outsider, folk and naïve art compares the terms side by side.

Why is the term controversial?

Critics argue that "outsider" defines people by what they are not, and that it can turn illness, poverty or disability into a selling point. Others point out that many so-called outsiders were deeply connected to their communities. In 2018 the National Gallery of Art in Washington used "outliers" instead, and many museums and writers now prefer "self-taught art". We explain the arguments in "outsider", "self-taught" or "outlier"?

Where can you see outsider art?

The Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne, founded on Dubuffet's own collection, is the world's first museum devoted to the field. In the UK, the largest public collection is the Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection at the Whitworth in Manchester. Our guides to where to see outsider art in the UK and outsider art museums in Europe and the US cover the rest.

Where to go next

Meet the outsider artists, read the key facts, or follow the story through the timeline.