PARIS-After traveling through Russia, setting up shop at Tate Modern in London and welcoming more than 350,000 visitors since its creation in 2009, the Museum of Everything is parked in Paris for the winter, at the end of a dark alleyway in St Germain des Prés in what used to be a catholic seminary.
The art has no price tags or gallery representation. Its creators might not even have known they were artists when the pieces were made. There are more than 500 outsider-art pieces here, all made by nontraditional, self-taught artists. Some were farmers, janitors or truck drivers. For most of them, art was their only medium of communication.
“A lot of these artists had mental conditions, schizophrenia, they can't read or talk, so they create their own language,†says James Brett, the museum's founder. Josef Karl Rädler, an Austrian ceramicist committed to a sanatorium in Vienna in the 1900s, painted his surroundings and neighboring patients into small gouache compositions that cover one of the walls of the museum. Like much of the art here, the work is meticulous, obsessive and powerful, a long way from the art stars at the fairs like FIAC, Frieze or Art Basel Miami Beach.
Five-meter-high figures painted on rice-paper rolls by Guo Fengyi, a Chinese factory worker turned artist, tower above you on one floor. Upstairs, through a labyrinth of small rooms with paintings from floor to ceiling, you find castlelike constructions made with typewriter parts by the French duo ACM that interact with Midwestern America religious banners from the 1960s.
Astonishingly, it all works. “We are more than just curators,†says Mr. Brett about his obsessive, personal relationship with all these artists. “It's like art from the caverns: No one knew it was art back then. All you needed was a person to discover it.â€
The Museum of Everything is at the Chalet Society, 14 Boulevard Ras pail, through February, Wednesday to Sunday, 11:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. To visit, register on the museum's Web site.
