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albert
louden 1943
It isn't
easy, being an outsider. Once elected, there are appearances to be
kept up: the solitary lifestyle, the nutty habits, the freedom from
artistic
influences. Above all, indifference to earning money. Scrounging for
canvas
and paint, going without luxuries such as food and socks, are all
part of
the life of austerity that one's public demands. In the end, the outsider's
surest way of proving his integrity is to be dead.
Albert
Louden, Britain's best known living outsider, has had enough of the
outsider lifestyle. When I met him he committed the ultimate indiscretion.
He described himself as an artist. Thin, balding, and suffering from
ligaments
torn by weight lifting, he is at 54 as prolific as ever. However one
chooses
to classify the swelling, swirling figure and landscape paintings
stacked
throughout his home- dare one call it his studio?- they mark him as
one of
the century's most original and powerful image-makers.
Louden's
acclaim and subsequent rejection as an outsider in Britain, France
and America has become a cause celebre of contemporary art. His crime
is that he broke the outsider's vow of poverty- by selling his paintings
to
commercial galleries. Such is the outsider's Catch 22. Some of the
very
dealers who bought and sold his work now regard him as the ousted
outsider.
Untouchable. He might as well be mainstream.
A
self-taught painter and van driver by trade, Louden lives on his own
in a
tiny two-storey Victorian terraced house in Leyton, a once-prosperous
area of East London. So far so good. He pads barefoot from room to
room,
riffling through the stacks of paintings, whose sheer number, overflowing
into
garden sheds, hints at obsessiveness. outsider bonus point. Instead
of
painting on an easel he lays the canvas flat on the floor and goes
at it with
oil sticks. Star for eccentric conduct. And, these days, he is for
ever on and
off state unemployment benefit.
So
what happened? Louden was discovered in 1981 by a former London gallery
owner, the late Victor Musgrave, a friend of Jean Dubuffet and co-organiser
of the ground-breaking1979 Outsiders exhibition at the Hayward Gallery,
London. At the time, Louden was unemployed and broke. He had seen
Musgrave's exhibition advertised in a back number of Art Monthly and
used
one of his last two remaining postage stamps to send him photographs
of
his figuratives in pastel.
In
retrospect, Musgrave's early letters to the artist, preserved by Louden
in
a folder, are ominous- at least for an emerging outsider. In January
1982,
he wrote: 'If you are content to leave it all to me, you know I will
move
heaven and earth to launch you in a very competitive art world'. The
following
year: 'Just hang on a little and don't worry. You know how many artists
I have discovered and made famous, from the day I met Bridget Riley
to now.
We will make up very soon for the brutal rejection you had from the
idiots
of Cork Street' (London's citadel of commercial contemporary art galleries).
The
breakthrough came in 1985- the year after Musgrave's death- with an
exhibition at the cutting-edge Serpentine Gallery in London. During
the peak
years 1990-91, Louden's work was shown in 13 commercial galleries,
in London,
New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Kyoto, Paris and Malmo, Sweden. Eleven
public galleries with an interest in outsider art in Britain, France,
Switzerland
and America bought or showed him. Camera crews descended on his home.
He found he could charge £750 for big canvases. He was a star.
Then
came the disagreement that affected his career as an outsider. Monika
Kinley, Musgrave's partner and inheritor of the Outsider Archive that
he
founded, decided to part company with him on the grounds that he was
going
commercial. Kinley is a powerful arbiter of outsiders' integrity and
in the
following year, 1992, Louden only managed to have one commercial show.
He says: 'The fact is, Monika's driving force was the setting up of
a museum,
whereas mine was making money. My showing at the Boundary Gallery
in
1990 was the last straw for her'. And with a twinkle in his eye: 'In
fact it was
the Outsider Archive committee that decided to ask for my 'Outsider
Badge' back. So I polished it up and gave it to them'.
[quelle:
internet]
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