Going mad for their art?

The Art From Within: Art Brut in Austria and Hungary exhibition at the Hungarian National Gallery deals with the art created by those who venture beyond the line of acceptability and outside the realms of professional art, and who ultimately ended up in psychiatric care.The raw honesty and bizarre ingeniosness of these anonymous creators, labelled as “mad,” and living at the periphery of society, often served as inspiration to great avant-garde artists such as Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, and André Breton who studied the art collection of the Heidelberg clinic (parts of which are shown here), which was comprised of the result of art-therapy sessions. As shown in the current exhibition, patients interpreted the world around them in compelling images of dancing women, monsterous humans, repetitive figures, animals and unrecognizable creatures set against futuristic backgrounds.

Three collections

The display at the National Gallery is organized around three collections: the Austrian material, made of 100 artworks carefully studied and collected from various psychiatric institutions there by the art writer Angelica Baumer; 50 drawings from the Budapest Museum of Psychiatry; and a series of drawings produced by  the Hungarian Aristocrat count Ernő Teleki between 1953 and 1970, when he was deported to the Macin forced labour camp on the Danube-Black Sea Canal –- the “cemetery of the Romanian bourgeoisie,” as it was called at the time.
Teleki’s works and writings were donated by his family and now belong to the National Gallery.
The major part of the Hungarian collection belonged to the National Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology, which closed down in 2007. The ownership of this latter collection is yet to be decided.

Art From Within: Art Brut in Austria and Hungary

Until Nov 9
Hungarian National Gallery
Buda, District I
Buda Palace
Szent György tér 2