Michael the Cartographer, Untitled. Courtesy Whitechapel

Caroline Lewis ventures beyond the establishment to encounter the inner worlds of outsider art - together with some of the famous art it has inspired.

At the Whitechapel Gallery, London, until June 25 2006 is a fascinating world of hallucinogenic and surreal works by artists from outside the mainstream – Outsider Artists.

Beautiful, naïve and wildly colourful drawings and paintings by psychiatric patients, mediums, criminals, eccentrics and self-taught creative minds from around the world are hung alongside the likes of Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Joan Miró amongst other well-known ‘insiders’ who have taken inspiration from their less celebrated counterparts.

The exhibition, Inner Worlds Outside, highlights the shared traits between their work, but more than anything brings the incredible imaginations of the artists with no formal training under the spotlight. The sheer number of works on show (well worth the entrance fee) indicates how much art there is to be appreciated beyond the establishment.

Henry Darger, After McWhurter Run Glandelinians attack and blow up train carrying children to refuge. Courtesy Whitechapel

One of the stars of the show, and of Outsider Art in general, is American Henry Darger (1892-1973). Four episodes from his epic Story of the Vivian Girls are encountered at the entrance to the gallery.

His landscape watercolours depict the trials and tribulations of a group of little doll-like girls, sometimes clothed in pretty dresses, sometimes naked and exhibiting androgynous characteristics, as they fight the Glandelinians – a raggle-taggle army of soldier men and scouts who blight the girls’ utopian world of lush green hills and oversized flowers.

Discharged from the army for physical and psychological reasons, Darger worked on his oeuvre reclusively, earning a living as a caretaker in Chicago. Only after his death was a 15,000-page story manuscript discovered along with thousands of watercolours and drawings of the Vivian Girls.

French miner Augustin Lesage (1876-1954) was also prolific, painting hundreds of works charged with religious symbolism after voices began to order him to do so at the age of 35. Large canvases such as No. 166 show an incredible attention to detail, with thousands of tiny brush strokes reminding one of Aboriginal art or Islamic patterns.

Adolf Wolfli, General View of the Island of Neveranger, 1911. Courtesy Whitechapel

Watercolours with collage elements by Texan Charles Dellschau (born in Prussia, 1830) share a certain style with Lesage. Dellschau was fascinated by flight, and spent his spare time dreaming up magical flying machines which he illustrated and decorated heavily with geometric patterns and newspaper cuttings about pioneering flights.

Anna Zemankova (1908-1986) concentrates on botanical motifs, embellished with embroidery and cutting-out. The Czech housewife had been keen on art as a child, but was dissuaded from following it as a career by her father. In middle age, she took up her hobby again, working in the small hours so as not to disturb her daily routine of looking after the household.

She seemed to work in a trance, listening to music, which has led to speculation that she was either being guided by spirits or experiencing synaesthesia. Whatever the case, her organic, crayoned images of strange plants and anatomies in gentle colours and shading are oddly beautiful.

Henri Rousseau (Le Douanier), Le Petit Chevalier Don Juan, before 1880. Courtesy Whitechapel

Another eye-catching work is Nuée Suspendee (Hanging Cloud) by Marie-Rose Lortet (b.1945), which throws a dappled shadow high on the inner gallery wall. The web-like, double layered sculpture looks like it may be made by a mainstream artist, but then the materials list – rhubarb threads and petrified potato seeds – sets it apart.

Close-by is a section devoted to the Allure of Language, featuring some surreal takes on the alphabet. Star Wars and science fiction spring to mind looking at (insider) Jack Smith’s large-scale work ‘Written Activity’. Colourful rune-shapes neatly fill the frame, spelling out what revelations we can only guess.

Alongside Smith’s work are smaller pieces with strange handwriting and scribbles. One is by mescaline experimenter and author Henry Michaux, who used art to escape the ‘conventions of language’. Indeed, there isn’t much grammar about his criss-crossing, illegible, continuous handwriting in several colours – but it’s a mere doodle next to many of the other things around.

Madge Gill, Untitled, 1939. Courtesy Whitechapel

Upstairs, Madge Gill reaps a whole ante-room for her drawings, with their repetitive patterns of cross-hatching, checkerboard and female faces. She insisted that she was led by a spirit called Myrninerest and often signed her works with that name.

She was certainly dedicated – a work on calico about 10 metres long stretches the full length of the room, every square inch ornamented in red, green, blue and black ink. The face that appears at random intervals on it and her other works seems to be the same one throughout, neither smiling nor frowning. Is she Myrninerest, or a self-portrait?

There are some worrying faces in the adjoining gallery – a portrait of Hitler with a red slash for a mouth and a model of a head with deeply wrinkled brown skin and a pig snout that is more ET than human. Neat crayoned arcs make up ‘A Mask’ by famous dancer Nijinsky. The troubled schizophrenic ballet dancer said the faces in his art were of soldiers.

Sava Sekulic, Napoleon and his Daughters, 1974. Courtesy Whitechapel

Another military name sneaks into the next room, entitled The Erotic Body. Napoleon and his Daughters by Sava Sekulic (1902-1989) is quite intriguing, depicting a face with hair mutated into female bodies arranged around it in rays.

Croatian Sekulic’s style is both surreal and naïve. There’s a nice little oil by another naïve artist in the final part of the exhibition, Fantastic Dreams and Haunting Tales. Henry Rousseau’s Le Petit Chevalier Don Juan stands in a plush room in 17th century finery, replete with bright white stockinged legs.

On the nightmare side is a large illustration by William Kurelek, where a body hides in a sheet from strange creepy-crawlies, half-human beasts and Escher-style combinations of limbs.

Inner Worlds Outside is full of the weird and wonderful, outrageous imaginings and sweet, naïve artworks. It’s a brilliant chance to experience a huge collection of some of the 20th century’s greatest artists, who would never have expected their work to be on show in a major gallery when they picked up their brush.