Art Brut
also: Outsider art
Art brut - 'raw art' - is the name Jean Dubuffet gave in 1945 to work made outside official culture: by psychiatric patients, recluses, and self-taught visionaries with little or no contact with the art world. Dubuffet prized it precisely because it was untouched by artistic training and convention, and he assembled a famous collection of it, now housed in Lausanne. English speakers later widened the idea into 'outsider art'. The makers often work obsessively, filling thousands of pages or wrapping entire environments, driven by private mythologies rather than patrons or movements. Because the label was coined by an insider, its boundaries are still debated, but its greatest figures - Wölfli, Darger, Séraphine de Senlis - now rank among the most admired artists of the twentieth century.
Defining characteristics
- Visionary, private subject matter drawn from personal mythology or religious revelation
- Dense, obsessive patterning that fills every inch of the surface
- Untrained handling of perspective, anatomy, and color, applied with striking consistency
- Unusual materials and formats: bound books of thousands of pages, wrapped environments, works on scraps
- Long, solitary serial production, often made in secret
Key figures
- Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) — Coined the term in 1945 and formed the founding collection of art brut
- Adolf Wölfli (1864-1930) — Swiss psychiatric patient whose illustrated books of some 25,000 pages are foundational works
- Henry Darger (1892-1973) — Chicago recluse who wrote and illustrated a 15,000-page epic in secret
- Séraphine Louis (1864-1942) — Self-taught French painter of huge floral canvases inspired by stained glass
- Madge Gill (1882-1961) — British mediumistic artist who drew vast spirit-guided compositions
Example works
- In the Realms of the Unreal — Henry Darger (c. 1910s-1930s)
- Rock Garden of Chandigarh — Nek Chand (from 1957)
Sources
- Art Brut - Wikipedia encyclopedia