Art Brut

Undoubtedly the most vocal advocate of this ideal of an art impervious to cultural contamination was Jean Dubuffet, a struggling painter in postwar Paris who, having steeped himself in Prinzhorn’s writings and the avant-garde’s fascination with primitivism, traveled throughout Switzerland in 1945 to witness firsthand the unusual art work being collected within the country’s progressive psychiatric hospitals. What was revealed to Dubuffet during these initial visits was to become a lifelong project to which the artist dedicated a great deal of his time, energy and financial resources. Immediately taken in by the startling originality and emotional profundity of these patient collections, Dubuffet embarked at once on a mission of aggressive acquisition, exhibiting select works to a largely indifferent public in the basement of a Parisian art gallery.

Despite the cool reception of his newfound charge, Dubuffet (bearing Klee’s torch) remained adamant that this art, sprung from the depths of the psyche, possessed the ability to revitalize a pictorial tradition increasingly stifled by modernism’s cerebral preoccupations. Uniting this loosely associated body of work under the banner of ‘art brut’— roughly translated as raw art— Dubuffet set about establishing three stringent characteristics essential to inclusion into the genre. First and foremost, Dubuffet insisted, those that create art brut must be somehow distanced from society, typically as a result of mental or social constraints. Secondly, the work of an art brut artist “is conceived and produced outside the field of fine arts,” meaning the usual “network of schools, galleries [and] museums,” and is created “without regard for any recipient” beyond the immediate and private use of its creator (Thevoz 1995:11). Lastly, “the subjects, techniques and systems of configuration” employed in a work of art brut should “stem from personal invention” rather than any prescribed artistic convention (Thevoz 1995:12).

Endorsed by the Compagnie de l’Art Brut, an organization founded in 1948 by Dubuffet and several leading figures from Dada and Surrealist circles, the above criteria were strictly enforced in the continued assemblage of the collection, resulting in occasional breaches of tact and ethical practice. While most acquisitions were the result of donations, the Compagnie did not hesitate to purchase works from doctors and psychiatrists, occasionally without the consent or knowledge of the artist (Peiry 2001:147).

Eventually, irreconcilable philosophical differences among the founding members forced the Compaigne to disband in 1951. Taking the opportunity to focus on his own painting, Dubuffet shipped the collection to the United States where it was housed for the next deacde in the Long Island estate of Alfonso Ossorio. In the fall of the same year Dubuffet delivered a lecture at the Arts Club of Chicago entitled Anticultural Positions, in which he expanded upon his theories of contemporary culture, lamenting its ongoing “drift from daily life” and absence of “real and living roots” (Dubuffet 1988:92). The antidote, according to Dubuffet, was to be found in an art “which would be a very direct and very sincere expression of our real life and our real moods,” in essence an art premised on the tenets of art brut (Dubuffet 1988:93). In this assertion Dubuffet inadvertently articulates a problematic contradiction that has become part and parcel of the art brut project: whereas Dubuffet was eager to share his exciting discoveries with the world in the hopes of inspiring a vast rethinking of the functions of art, the ideals of art brut, by their very nature cannot withstand the inevitable cultural contamination inherent in mainstream assimilation.

Torn between the desire to unleash art brut on the stale climate of academic art and the overwhelming need to protect it from corruption, Dubuffet reformed the Compagnie de l’Art Brut in 1962 in Paris, allowing the collection to be exhibited in New York that same year and again in 1967 within Paris’ Musée des Arts Décoratifs. Finally, as a kind of farewell to the limelight, a comprehensive catalog of the collection was published in 1971, listing some four thousand works by 133 artists. The following year Dubuffet was able to strike an awkward but tolerable compromise by dissolving the Compagnie for the last time and donating the collection to the municipality of Lausanne, Switzerland, where it was permanently installed in the Château de Beaulieu. Presently the collection remains open to the public, but in keeping with Dubuffet’s wishes works are no longer loaned to outside institutions and access for the purpose of research is strictly limited.

Although the great bulk of the collection remains encapsulated within the historical context of Dubuffet’s cultural politics, an ancillary collection was established in 1982 for the purpose of exhibiting work straddling the line between art brut and more culturally informed production. Known as ‘Neuve Invention,’ the addition of this recent collection allowed Dubuffet and his organization to engage in the active and ongoing reconsideration of the very notion of art brut, a bold move for a man driven by the tenacity of his ideals. By acknowledging the potential fallibility of what Michel Thévoz, the former director of the Collection refers to as “the polar concepts of art brut and cultural art,” the Neuve Invention strives for the suggestion of “guidelines rather than watertight categories” in the determination of how far removed an artist or artwork must stand in relation to the mainstream in order to be considered brut (Rhodes 2000:14). With the emphasis remaining on work posing a significant challenge to governing cultural values and assumptions, the Neuve Invention guarantees a fluidity of ideas essential to maintaining the Collection de l’Art Brut as a viable alternative to mainstream tastes and trends.

Posted by admin on April 6th, 2007 | Filed in outsider art | Comment now »

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