EXHIBITIONS AND DISPLAYS

THE MUSEUM THAT FORGOT ITSELF

RAFAEL IXTAPA

October 3, 2025

In a neglected museum in southern Europe, the paintings of Louis Vivin and Vincent Haddelsey appear less as outsiders than as prophets of another modernity, reminding us that art’s truest revelations often linger at the margins, loved but unclaimed.

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It was in a mid-size town in the south of Europe, a place full of silent beauty that people often dismiss, where shutters closed before evening and facades carried the faded pinks of a century of sun. The streets were narrow, lined with bakeries that sold bread still dusted in flour, the air heavy with figs drying in their own sweetness. At the edge of town, on a rise, stood a house that had once belonged to a perfumer of some renown, a man who distilled citrus, roses, and lavender into essences that evaporated into the air long after he had left. The walls still carried a faint odor, as though the bottles had leaked into the plaster, leaving the rooms permanently scented with absence.

The building had been turned into a museum, though one might hesitate to call it that. No guard, no ticket booth, only a brass plate at the entrance, its letters rubbed nearly illegible. To step inside was to trespass politely. The rooms were dim, the carpets frayed, the windows clouded. Paintings leaned against walls; others hung crooked, frames mismatched, corners splintered. One felt less like a visitor than an intruder in a mansion abandoned during a family dispute.

The collection was without logic, heterogeneous, broken. Portraits of anonymous citizens, devotional panels painted by hands too unsure to finish halos, landscapes where skies sagged into crude streaks of blue. I do not like the word “outsider,” but for lack of a better one, it could be used here. The work was naive, amateur, occasionally miraculous. And yet, walking through the rooms, I felt the charge of discovery, the jolt one gets only in places un-curated, where the work is not mediated by a wall label telling you how to feel. Here was art freed from commentary, left to speak or fail on its own.

Some of it failed. But failure can be its own revelation. And amid the failure, there were sudden apparitions of brilliance, like lightning across a dull horizon. That was when I saw them: Louis Vivin and Vincent Haddelsey. Their names looked misplaced on the wall, like signatures on documents filed in the wrong archive. And yet they held the room.

Louis Vivin, La chasse aux sangliers, 1925. Oil on canvas, 50 x 65 cm

Louis Vivin (1861–1936) was born in Paris, the son of a poor family. He worked for decades as a postal employee, earning a modest living, painting only in his spare hours. It was not until his retirement around 1922 that he began to paint with true seriousness. His subjects were Parisian streets, squares, churches, cafés, monuments—not the orchestrated views of the boulevards, but the ordinary places of the city as remembered by someone who had walked them countless times. His style was deliberately flattened, perspective tilted or discarded, buildings stacked against one another like blocks, figures schematic.

Vivin’s Paris is not Haussmann’s, nor the avant-garde’s fractured city. It is a city of memory, reconstructed by an amateur who refused illusion. The colors are quiet—ochers, browns, grays, touched with muted blues or greens. Critics have often placed him in the lineage of Henri Rousseau (1844–1910), Séraphine of Senlis (1864–1942), Camille Bombois (1883–1970), and André Bauchant (1873–1958): the peintres naïfs, celebrated in the interwar years by Wilhelm Uhde in the 1928 exhibition Les Peintres du Cœur Sacré. Yet Vivin’s work is not dreamlike, like Rousseau’s jungles, nor visionary, like Séraphine’s florals. It is sober, even melancholic. His flattened Paris resembles a ledger of recollections, as if the postal clerk he once was still counted the buildings like so many letters, arranged in careful stacks.

Louis Vivin, Sacré-Coeur, 1930. Oil on canvas, 46 x 55 cm

The US art historian Robert Rosenblum would have recognized this. In Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition (1975), he traced a parallel lineage of modern art rooted not in Parisian avant-gardes but in the twilight atmospheres of northern Europe—melancholic, inward, resistant to spectacle. Vivin belongs there. His Paris is not the radiant City of Light but a city of dusk, of recollection, of muted conviction. The kind of conviction that lingers, even when no one is left to witness it.

Louis Vivin, La conciergerie ou Le Palais de Justice, 1935. Oil on canvas, 72 x 91 cm

Next to him hung Vincent Haddelsey (1934–2010), born in Grimsby, England. Self-taught, cosmopolitan, eccentric, Haddelsey painted horses. Always horses: foxhunts, parades, cavalry regiments, Mongolian herds. He traveled compulsively—Mexico, India, Chile, Mongolia—to find them. His style was flat, decorative, almost heraldic. He had no interest in modernist experiment, yet this refusal gave his work an unintentional modernity. Like Vivin, he painted not to intervene in art history, but to record what he loved.

Vincent Haddelsey, The Long-Jumps, 1985. Lithograph, 55 x 44 cm

British painting has always had a place for such figures. Alfred Wallis (1855–1942), the Cornish fisherman who painted ships on scraps of wood; L. S. Lowry (1887–1976), the clerk who painted factory towns in stick figures. Haddelsey belongs to this genealogy—provincial, eccentric, yet irreducibly personal. His horses are not anatomical studies but archetypes. Each horse is an emblem, a bearer of ritual, an index of tradition.

Alfred Wallis, Headland with Two Three-Masters, 1934-38. Oil on card 22 x 30 cm

Placed together, Vivin and Haddelsey created a dialogue across geography and time. Vivin’s Parisian streets, Haddelsey’s English horses: both outside the mainstream, both strangely resonant. Both, too, reveal how categories like “outsider art” conceal as much as they reveal.

Vincent Haddelsey, Winter Walk, 1974. Lithograph, 38 x 53 cm

The term “outsider” assumes an inside. It assumes there is a central canon, a world of insiders from which these figures are excluded. But what if the reverse is true? What if it is Picasso and Matisse, Bacon and Freud, who are the insiders, trapped by expectation, and Vivin and Haddelsey who are free? Free to follow memory, free to paint love, free to remain indifferent to the canon. “Outsider” is a word the center uses to protect itself.

Rosenblum was sensitive to this. In his essay “The Naïve and the Sentimental” (1982), he wrote about the way figures like Rousseau and US folk painters destabilized the boundaries of art history. He saw continuity where others saw exclusion. In that sense, Vivin and Haddelsey belong not outside, but alongside. They are tributaries to the river of modernism, not its detritus.

The museum itself seemed to agree. Or rather, it did not disagree. No labels, no commentary, no hierarchy. Just paintings hung wherever a nail could be found. This is what made discovery possible. The Louvre will always overwhelm. The Prado will always impress. But discovery—real discovery—requires imperfection. It requires the possibility of stumbling upon a Vivin in an improvised display in a house no longer lived in.

Laurence Stephen Lowry, A Northern Race Meeting, 1956. Oil on canvas, 76.2 x 102 cm

I lingered. The air was thick, smelling faintly of perfume and damp. The perfumer who once lived here must have understood ephemerality. Perfume is an art of outsiders, too. It cannot be framed, cannot be collected, cannot be preserved. It evaporates. It exists only in the act of inhaling. It lingers only in memory. So does art, finally. The permanence of oil paint is an illusion; it too cracks, flakes, disappears. What survives is the memory of having seen it, unexpectedly, in silence—conviction persisting even in the absence of an audience.

I thought of Séraphine, painting flowers with pigments she mixed herself, oils and blood and candle wax, in Senlis, never recognized until Uhde discovered her. I thought of Alfred Wallis painting ships after his wife’s death, the boats flat and black, the sea a gray field. I thought of Joseph Crépin (1875–1948), the plumber from Arras who heard angels instructing him to paint symmetrical visions. All of them outsiders, but also prophets of another modernity.

Séraphine Louis, Marguerites, 1931. Ripolin on canvas, 81 x 65 cm

What binds them is not style but conviction. Conviction that art must be made, regardless of recognition. Conviction that images matter even if no one sees them. Conviction that beauty exists outside the market, outside the canon, outside the city.

I walked down into the town. The streets were nearly empty. The cafés were closing. The sea was somewhere near, invisible but scented in the air. The place was real and unreal, at once itself and elsewhere. What mattered was not the town, nor the building, nor even the collection. What mattered was the encounter. To find Vivin and Haddelsey here was to be reminded that art history is porous, that the margins are as essential as the center, that discovery still happens.

Fleury Joseph Crépin, Temple numéro 30, 1939. Oil on Canvas. 76.5 x 61.5 cm

The perfumer had long vanished, but his house still exhaled. I carried Vivin and Haddelsey with me, not as entries in an encyclopedia, but as companions. They walked beside me as I left the museum, as the shutters closed, as the night thickened. They are not outsiders. They are simply there, waiting for someone to see them. Conviction lingers in silence, long after the audience has gone.

Rafael Ixtapa (b. 1949 in Valdivia, Chile) briefly studied naval engineering in Concepción before abandoning both the sea and mathematics for poetry, then again for art history, which he never formally completed. His essays appear sporadically, usually in places no one remembers him submitting them to. Once described (incorrectly, he insists) as a South American Robert Walser, he prefers to think of himself as a failed archivist who keeps misplacing the archive.

Cover image: A place where collections crumble into discovery