Art News

Seeing Stars: Visionary Drawing from the collection on view at the Menil Collection

HOUSTON, TX.- Mining the Menil Collection’s archives of works on paper, Seeing Stars: Visionary Drawing from the Collection showcases rarely exhibited drawings by artists who largely had no contact with the mainstream art world. This “outsider art,” as the work came to be known, enchanted and inspired the Surrealists, who believed artists with no formal training,or those who drew in altered mental states, could more successfully access the subconscious, achieving greater clarity and authenticity of expression. The drawings highlighted in Seeing Stars (more than 50 in all) defy traditional and academic methods of representation and mark-making. Instead, experiments with chance, automatism and psychoanalysis – along with constructions of imaginary landscapes, creatures and machines – characterize the work. In 1949, Jean