Art Singulier

also: Art hors-les-normes · Art en marge

movement 1970s-present France

Art singulier is the French current named in the 1970s for self-taught and marginal creators who stand outside academic art yet cannot be fully captured by Dubuffet's protected category of art brut. The architect Alain Bourbonnais began collecting such artists in 1971, opened the Atelier Jacob in Paris in 1972, and coined first 'hors-les-normes' and then 'singulier'. The idea reached a wide public through the 1978 exhibition Les Singuliers de l'Art at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, organized with the critic Michel Ragon and Michel Thévoz; Bourbonnais's collection later settled at La Fabuloserie. Its tutelary figures include the painter Gaston Chaissac, the collagist Yolande Fièvre, and the visionary builder Robert Tatin.

The Tribuna of the Uffizi (Zoffany)
The Tribuna of the Uffizi (Zoffany)Public domain (credit: Johann Zoffany) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Self-taught practice that deliberately or incidentally sidesteps academic training
  • Spontaneous, direct handling of material, favored over intellectualized form
  • Personal mythologies and idiosyncratic systems of figure and symbol
  • Mixed and recycled materials: collage, assemblage, painted panels, built environments
  • A border-crossing range that absorbs cubist, surrealist, and popular influences

Key figures

  • Gaston Chaissac (1910-1964) — Painter of lucid, rustic-abstract figures; the movement's tutelary spirit
  • Robert Tatin (1902-1983) — Sculptor-architect who built a total visionary environment
  • Yolande Fièvre (1907-1982) — Collage-assemblage artist among the movement's founding figures

Sources

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