The Shadow of the Avant-garde : Rousseau and the Forgotten Masters

About the book

Difficult to categorize and branded as "naive"-art history had and still has a hard time with works by the great autodidacts: artists such as Henri Rousseau, Andre Bauchant, Morris Hirshfield, Bill Traylor, Alfred Wallis, or Seraphine Louis are far too often isolated in the light of an exotic primitivism, so to speak. Instead, the publication and the exhibition at the Museum Folkwang, since its founding the first museum worldwide devoted to modern art, surround their energy-laden works with key works from the modern era. It is not by chance that many of the autodidacts fascinated the established artists of today with their paintings and sculptures, and often sponsored them. From this perspective, even contemporaries such as Miroslav Tichy make a contribution to the development of art and are no longer merely its antagonists.

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The constellations of works at the Museum Folkwang by self-taught artists were, almost without exception, impressive... The spotlight that was shone on the less familiar self-taught masters illuminated the crepuscular gloom in which they have long languished, and that in itself makes the exhibition memorable.--Lynne Cooke "Artforum "

Maria Anna Potocka Biography

Maria Anna Potocka (b. 1950) has been the Director of the MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow since 2010. She is the founder of four art galleries, the creator of an international art collection (1973-2010, donated to MOCAK) and the curator of numerous exhibitions. She has authored many books and theoretical texts and is a member of the IKG, AICA, ICOM and SPP. ... Read full biography