It was with sadness that the University learned of the passing of Professor Roger Cardinal, who was appointed to a lectureship in French at Kent in 1968. He was later promoted to Professor of Art History in 1987.
Professor Martin Hammer, of the University’s School of Arts, writes: “Roger has the rare distinction of having invented a term, Outsider Art, the title of a 1972 book, that has become part of the landscape. It was his variant on Dubuffet’s Art Brut, or images produced by the untrained and those we might now call neurodiverse. He also produced books on Surrealism, German Romanticism, Expressionism, Paul Nash, Kurt Schwitters, and particular aspects of Outsider Art, plus numerous essays and reviews. Over several decades he was one of Kent’s genuine stars. I got to know him a little, in retirement, but defer to Ben Thomas’ warm recollections of what he was like to work with.”
Dr Ben Thomas writes: “Roger was a direct link with the Surrealists, and had at times an air of the Shaman about him. He was an energising presence in the department. There are few people of whom you can say that they are genuinely interdisciplinary – Roger was one. He came to History of Art from French, but he could have gone pretty much anywhere in the Humanities (he used to speak Swiss German with Agnes in the SCR). He had an ability to distill the essence of complex issues to an elegant phrase. His sentences were like rounded pebbles washed smooth by the waves of his intelligence. This resulted in short books, light on footnotes and other academic impediments, which could be read again and again for their insights. My father – a musician – had read his short book on Expressionism and was genuinely excited to hear I was going to be Roger Cardinal’s colleague. This was by far the best book written on the topic. When I asked Roger about it, it turned out he had written it in a fortnight for something to do.
His book on Surrealism is similar: a prose poem truer to the spirit of the movement that any number of more conventional academic texts. Of course, he is probably best known for popularising the idea of ‘outsider art’ in the UK, and for this he is admired by artists I have met – Humphrey Ocean mentioned him to me as an associate of Monica Kinley. He was also a great collector – as well as writing on collecting – and typically he collected everyday ephemera such as beer mats. The slide library was full of trays of slides of graffiti commissioned for his teaching on everyday images. He could be endearingly eccentric: board meetings would be interrupted by him excitedly dashing to the window to spot a woodpecker or some other rare bird, or you might find him looking at you intently and quizzically only to find he had not been listening to your ideas for curriculum development but sketching your portrait. Curiously enough I opposed some of Roger’s ideas for modules on broad topics like ‘painting’ or ‘sculpture’ – but have ended up delivering them in the form of ‘sculpture’ and ‘drawing’. So he was quite possibly prophetic, or at least ahead of the curve…”