Overview

Throughout history there have been artists who created without the benefit of formal training. However, for many centuries, the dominance of the European art academies obscured the work of these self-taught artists, who were judged to be inept and inferior. Only at the dawn of the 20th century, when artists began to rebel against the academies, did self-taught art suddenly receive serious attention from the mainstream art-world. Artists like Picasso and Kandinsky felt that trained artists were inevitably corrupted by their schooling, and that self-taught artists were purer and potentially greater. In the wake of this support from important modern artists, collectors, dealers and scholars developed a sustained interest in self-taught art.

The Galerie St. Etienne specializes in a range of American and European self-taught artists active from the 19th century through the present.