Bispo do Rosario, Madness, and Outsider Art

Bispo do Rosario, Annunciation Garment

Arthur Bispo do Rosario (1909-1989) is the paradigmatic "outsider artist." Now regularly hailed as an artistic genius – e.g., "this exhibition provides immersion in Bispo’s greatness" – he spent most of his adult life in a mental hospital with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia.

Bispo do Rosario was born to a poor family in Brazil's northeast. He worked as a handyman, then joined the navy and learned to box. He eventually left the navy, but online sources don't agree on exactly when or why; the NY Times says he was discharged for insubordination. 

His ordinary Afro-Brazilian low-life was interrupted by a vision he experienced on December 22, 1938. In the vision God told him that he was Jesus Christ, that he would judge the living and the dead, and that his mission on earth was to recreate, or perhaps record, the entire world. The jacket above documents the vision.

Bispo do Rosario wandered around for a while trying to explain to people about his mission. He visited the monks of Mosteiro de São Bento and told them he was Jesus Christ. They promptly reported him to the police, and he was picked up and sent to a mental institution. After a brief stay at one hospital he was sent to the new centerpiece of Brazil's mental health system, the Colônia Juliano Moreira in Rio de Janeiro. 

Most sources say he spent the rest of his life there, much of it by his own choice in solitary confinement. A New York Times review of a new exhibit of his work has this: "In 1954 he escaped and remained free until 1963, getting by on odd jobs while also making his artwork," but I can't find any confirmation of that. In the hospital he used whatever materials he could get his hands on – yellowed bedsheets, discarded uniforms, trash – to pursue his mission of physically recreating everything in the world.

This need to recreate is what gives his work its bizarre encyclopedic quality; this old bedsheet records the all the names Bispo do Rosario knew of that began with A. He stitched the names onto the sheet using thread he had unravelled from uniforms.

After his death in 1989 a nurse who had befriended him shared some of his works with Brazilian artists and critics, who were impressed. From there his reputation as an artist steadily grew. His status as a Brazilian master was solidified in 1995 when the government chose him as one of two Brazilian artists to feature at the Venice Biennale.

A NY Times review of a 2015 exhibition has this description of his work:

His works most evoke Duchamp when he finds ways of organizing and presenting discarded material and objects, from carton, wood, tin and metal, to plastic toys, kitchenware, clothes and shoes. He had anaffection for building little carts on wheels: in multiple forms, sometimes on three levels, they carry square stones, plastic cars and small ships.

By the end of his life he had made more than 800 objects.

The modern interest in art by mental patients goes back to the Surrealists, who thought that what they called "l'art des fous" might provide an open window to the subconscious. In sane people, they thought – following Freud, of course – access to the subconscious was blocked by various defense mechanisms. They struggled to overcome those defenses, but suspected that they remained too inhibited to plumb the true depths of the psyche. Perhaps crazy people could. The Surrealists also asserted quite vehemently that what mental patients produced was indeed art. Art might be a profession connected to salons and museums and so on, but at its root it sprang from the human need for self-expression. The exhibits they organized in the 1950s often paired works by mental patients with others by established artists.

But is that true? Pondering the work of Bispo do Rosario, I have my doubts. Obviously we are all human, and we all create and arrange. Babies barely able to control their hands will sometimes arrange objects in a way that pleases them. But then most of us speak, and that doesn't make us poets or novelists. What else is required to make someone an artist? If the only criterion is that other people like the work and see something in it, then Bispo do Rosario was an artist. But if art requires some particular kind of intention, some desire to engage with viewers or readers as an artist, then he was not. He had no interest in engaging anyone; he only sought to fulfill the mission God had given him.

Ultimately I think the fascination with outsider art derives from the difficulty of these questions. We can't really define art, can't really say what it means to be an artist, and can't explain why we like or value art. We also know that many artists are crazy and many others worry that they might be, raising the question of how creativity and mental illness intersect. A character like Bispo do Rosario intrigues us because his life and work slap us in the face with these and other questions.

Bispo do Rosario's art also points toward one of the abiding human needs: to impose order on chaos. He was driven to catalog everything he knew; to stitch onto a bedsheet all the names he knew that began with A; to depict the ambassadors of all the nations he could name, riding in impressive cars. The severity of his illness drove the intensity of his response. 

Hallway to the cells where Bispo do Rosario lived, photograph by Rafael Adorjan.

All of us feel this need for order; all of us have demons we need to control; all of us hope that the ways we battle them will lead to something — to meaning, to beauty, to joy, to survival. In the meaning, the beauty, and the joy of Bispo do Rosario's surviving remnants we see hope for ourselves.