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- Industrial-Strength Art
The photographers who found beauty in the factory.
Christopher Benfey
posted June 4, 2008 - Drawn-Out Process
Philip Guston's brave evolution from Abstract Expressionist to comics-inspired draftsman.
Mia Fineman
posted May 14, 2008 - Spain's Greatest Living Painter
The haunting Realism of Antonio López García.
Christopher Benfey
posted April 30, 2008 - The New Emperor of No-Brow
Is Takashi Murakami Japan's Andy Warhol—or its Walt Disney?
Mia Fineman
posted April 16, 2008 - Lucian Freud, Unbuttoned
Freud's grandson tells all.
Christopher Benfey
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art: The big picture.
Obsessive DrawingWhy do outsider artists make art?
By Francine ProsePosted Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2005, at 6:24 AM ET

The work in Obsessive Drawing, now open at the American Folk Art Museum in New York, could hardly be purer or more authentic. Seeing it is an exhilarating reminder of everything you ever thought (and learned better than to ask) about the relationship between art and madness and about the overwhelming compulsion to make art. It is independent of any ambition to be recognized (and compensated appropriately) as a professional artist. It is difficult to look at these works without sensing how much their creators were driven by necessity, or, as curator Brooke Davis Anderson comments, by the need "to help them cope with regret, fear, loss, or illness."
Click here to read a slide-show essay about obsessive drawing.
Francine Prose is the author, most recently, of A Changed Man.
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