Art Brut

A Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Art

Art Brut (French: ‘Raw Art'). Term coined by Jean Dubuffet for the art produced by people outside the established art world—people such as solitaries, the maladjusted, patients in psychiatric hospitals, prisoners, and fringe-dwellers of all kinds. In English the term ‘Outsider art’ (the title of a book by Roger Cardinal, 1972) is generally used to cover this type of work. Dubuffet claimed that such art—‘springing from pure invention and in no way based, as cultural art constantly is, on chameleon- or parrot-like processes'—is evidence of a power of originality that all people possess but which in most has been stifled by educational training and social constraints. He may have become interested in the subject as early as 1923, but he did not begin collecting Art Brut until 1945, following a visit to Switzerland, where there were already collections of works by the mentally ill in psychiatric hospitals. Thereafter he devoted a good deal of his energies to promoting Art Brut, through writing, lecturing, and organizing exhibitions. From 1948 to 1951 he ran an association called the Compagnie de l'Art Brut, the aims of which he specified as ‘To seek out the artistic productions of humble people that have a special quality of personal creation, spontaneity, and liberty with regard to convention and received ideas; to draw the public's attention towards this sort of work, to create a taste for it and encourage it to flourish'. The best-known of the exhibitions he organized was probably ‘L'Art Brut Préféré aux Arts Culturels’ at the Galerie René Drouin, Paris, in 1949; it featured more than 200 works by 63 artists.

In 1972 Dubuffet presented his own collection (by then numbering more than 5,000 items) to the city of Lausanne, where it was opened to the public at the Château de Beaulieu in 1976. Among the artists represented were the French painter, draughtsman, sculptor, and writer Gaston Chaissac (1904–64), who used rough and ready materials and was influenced by child art, Madge Gill (see AUTOMATISM), the Swiss draughtsman and painter Louis Soutter (1871–1942), who after contracting typhoid was plagued by years of ill health and eccentric behaviour, Scottie Wilson, and the Swiss draughtsman, collage maker, writer, and musician Adolf Wölfli (1864–1930), who was institutional ized in 1895 after committing a series of sex offences. Nearly half the collection was produced by patients in psychiatric hospitals, usually schizophrenics, but Dubuffet repudiated the concept of psychiatric art, claiming that ‘there is no art of the insane any more than there is an art of the dyspeptics or an art of people with knee complaints'. He also distinguished Art Brut from naive art on the more dubious ground that naive painters remain within the cultural mainstream, hoping for public recognition, whereas Art Brut artists create their works for their own use as a kind of private theatre.

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© A Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Art 1999, originally published by Oxford University Press 1999.

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