Believing He Was Jesus Christ, This Remarkable Brazilian Outsider Artist Recreated The Universe In An Insane Asylum

Arthur Bispo do Rosario seldom slept. All day long he worked to replicate every object in the universe, fabricated out of commonplace materials such as cardboard and thread. And at night, when he shut his eyes, he was visited by angels who told him what he must make next.

Bispo do Rosario was no ordinary man. Although the Americas Society classifies him as an artist – exhibiting the objects he made in a vibrant new exhibition – Bispo was certain from an early age that he was Jesus Christ. On Christmas Eve of 1938, he presented himself at a Benedictine monastery in Rio di Janeiro, explaining that he had come to judge the living and the dead.

Instead he was arrested, and judged clinically insane. Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and lacking financial resources, Bispo was incarcerated in mental institutions for the remaining fifty years of his life.

He treated these institutions as makeshift workshops, relentlessly pursuing the mission confided in him by angels. He embroidered old bedsheets with thread salvaged from the uniforms of former inmates, embellishing the stained fabric with all he knew about human anatomy and the contours of every ship he’d seen as a signalman in the Brazilian Navy. Other objects were fabricated in the round by wrapping thread around scavenged metal or wood: a bow and arrow, a paint roller, a shoehorn, a cattle brand. All were readily identifiable, if not by the shape then by the neatly embroidered label.

Most spectacular of all was the mantle he made for himself, which he intended to wear at the Annunciation. The heavy garment was embellished with his embroidery of everything from a grand piano to a ping-pong table, as well as an entire alphabet of Navy signal flags.

Bispo wore this garment late in life when journalists came around, taking an interest in his work (which filled eleven cells of the solitary confinement section of the asylum where he was held). None of the reporters were there to announce the Second Coming. Instead their articles proclaimed his artistic genius – the preternatural giftedness of a madman – establishing the pattern for a posthumous reputation most recently affirmed at the Americas Society.

The artistry of Bispo’s work is beyond dispute. The Americas Society exhibition would be equally at home in the Metropolitan Museum of Art or MoMA. And there are myriad ways in which to situate his work in cultural terms, whether by calling it outsider art or by comparing it to Arte Povera.

But is it really important whether Bispo’s work is comparable in quality to Bill Traylor’s or Alighiero Boetti’s? Is there value in interpreting his objects art-historically, recapitulating the self-congratulatory postmodern parlor game of scolding the parochialism of previous generations? Or is the impulse to domesticate Bispo’s work demeaning? Is it yet another form of confinement?

Whatever the monks and the medical establishment might have thought of Bispo, and whatever curators and critics might think today, he was extraordinarily clear about his vocation. And whether or not he was the Messiah, his vocation was important.

As Bispo explained to a social worker in a 1988 interview, he sought to “represent the existence of Earth”. The mission he believed the angels assigned him was to create a simulacrum of the cosmos that he could put in order as preparation for the Last Judgement.

The elements of this encyclopedic simulacrum were called up from memory, found in his surroundings, and conjured in his extraordinary imagination. They were organized in the space he was able to command, the unoccupied cells that made his confinement all the more solitary and his solitary vocation all the more profound. Singlehandedly and singlemindedly, Bispo was doing the work of making sense of human existence so that the human condition could be assessed as a whole.

Bispo do Rosario did not need to be Jesus Christ – let alone an artist – to deliver this judgement on the living and the dead. His good work is here for all of us to see and to reckon with. A bow and arrow, a paint roller, a shoehorn, a cattle brand: What do we make of them, and what do we make next?