358
Extraordinario 5
Febrero 2026
Revista de Investigación y
Creación artística
Investigación
ISSN: 2659-7721
Outsider art is the art created by people who have never studied art, were not part of the
art world and were completely disconnected from its institutions. They usually lived on the
margins of society in areas of distress. People such as chronic prisoners, the mentally ill or those
who lived in other isolated realities. The surprising, rich, and dazzling treasures of creation that
they left behind, and which were usually discovered only after their death or in the twilight of
their lives, confront viewers, as well as the art world, with disturbing questions and a need for
self-clarification. Hanoch Levin writes about life 'from the side' in the play "The Rubber
Merchants": "Oh, if only it were possible to live life as if from a movie theater, to sit a little to
the side, to see life moving in front of you on a lit screen, all the storms, the loves, the disasters,
this whole story, everything running and passing you by without touching you, and you, for the
price of a few liras, sit in the dark on a chair, with a chocolate in your mouth, and watch. Just
watch." The outsider artists are those people for whom the lit life has passed by while they sit in
the dark. To the side. And completely alone.
The new exhibition "In Other Circles: Outsiders, Naives, Autodidacts" at the Haifa
Museum of Art is curated by Ruthie Director (from January 19, 2013 to July 20, 2013).
Director, the museum's chief curator, comes to this exhibition after a series of successful
exhibitions at the museum, and after creating an exceptionally high bar of expectations. The
comprehensive exhibition presents the best international artists in the field, including Adolf
Wölfli, Bill Traylor, Henry Darger, Eloise, Sam Doyle, William Hawkins, Minnie Evans, Carlo
Zinelli, Morton Bartlett. The works on loan, all from private and museum collections in the US
and Europe, are displayed in an extensive museum exhibition that spans all the museum's
spaces. An exhibition whose installation required particularly long preparation, meticulous
planning, and extensive resources. This is also the first opportunity to be exposed to this art in
Israel on such a scale and quality. Outsider art is an art field that has very little presence in the
Israeli art scene. When I asked, where did it come from? Ruthy Director says: "For years I have
been interested in Art Brut, or the English name coined for this art in 1972, Outsider Art. I have
visited the important Art Brut collections in Europe and exhibitions by outsider artists. I owe
my first acquaintance with the field to the late Meir Agassi, the art critic and artist, who in 1998
edited a "Studio" issue on the subject. We were friends, and during the two years (at least) that
he worked on editing the issue, he would tell me about his visits and encounters with the great
collections of Art Brut, and with the central figures of the field. This is how I became
acquainted with the wonderful creators who worked in secret, and I was captivated by the power
of their works. It is difficult to understand – and at the same time very easy to understand – how
such powerful works remained completely outside the standard body of art history. In the
exhibition in Haifa, I am presenting, among other things, works by David Strauss, which Meir
Agassi created for his fascinating virtual "Meir Agassi Museum." David Strauss was a real
person (unlike the two other artists that Meir created for his museum), a member of Kibbutz
Ramat HaKovesh, the kibbutz where Meir was born and raised. In retrospect, Meir understood
Strauss was an outsider artist. He was hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital in 1962 and lived
there until his death in 1984. "The success of outsider art, as art that grew without training,
without encouragement and without feedback, has an image, which somewhat undermines the
theories, of the dominance of art institutions in everything that happens in the art world. I asked
Ruthie if during the long period of researching the phenomenon she had to choose a side. The
