The Self-Taught Outsider Artist

Several years ago, in Miami, I had lunch with a fellow artist and a local museum curator. The curator asked us to suggest exhibitions, perhaps something a little off the beaten path for the museum.“Claudio Bravo,” I said.In unison they turned to me and replied, “Ecch.”If it surprises you that Bravo’s work would elicit that reaction, you may be unfamiliar with the extent to which contemporary art tricycles assiduously around its cul-de-sac among the avenues of human culture. Bravo, who passed away recently at the age of 74, practiced a style of painting marked by astonishing realism.For the sake of polite lunchtime conversation I didn’t press the point, that the museum had, probably unknowingly, adopted a hard line against painting executed in a humanist, traditional mode, despite the fact that contemporary art often takes that very form. It is the unstated mission of many contemporary curatorial programs to assure that the work on display descends clearly from parentage in conceptual art and the art of Fluxus. The gatekeepers’ needs for philosophical and political justifications have grown so acute that I know of one painter, who in more sensible circumstances would be able to present her work as traditional landscapes, is instead trying to pass herself off as an environmental artist.So Bravo never had an exhibition at that particular museum, but he enjoyed a successful career, with representation at Marlborough Gallery and a 1994 retrospective at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago that drew over a quarter million visitors. The little training he had came from a teacher at the Jesuit school he attended as a youth in Valparaiso, but he went on to develop remarkable craft and a keen appreciation of American color-field painting, which his wrapped packages and curtains homage. He lived comfortably as an expatriate in his beloved Morocco, celebrated by admirers of realism, and painted as he saw fit to paint right up to the very end. Having witnessed the guttural extent of the opinion that certain ostensibly sophisticated art worlders hold about his work, his remaining true to himself appears as no small triumph.Franklin Einspruch is an artist and writer.

The Self-Taught Outsider Artist

The Self-Taught Outsider Artist

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