Dubuffet and Art Brut. Outsider Art

In this regard, since the interwar period, Dubuffet has been interested in drawings, paintings, sculptures and assemblages made by non-professional artists, honing his taste and knowledge of folk art, of children's drawing, in a vision that puts on the same level some things that would be incomparable from the start. He was fascinated by those creations that resulted less affected by the artistic culture of schools, academies, and the art market.

Since the fall of 1944, Dubuffet has been searching for any kind of document that could bear witness to what remains his strongest, most programmatic statement of his entire work, which in 1946 he condensed into one sentence: "Tout le monde est peintre", "Everyone is a painter". Dubuffet believed that 'True art is always where we least expect to find it'; he looked outside traditional and institutional circuits for the traces of a creation he defined with an oxymoron, interweaving two antithetical notions to the point of indistinguishability: Art Brut.
Then he tried to define it: "By this we mean a kind of art composed by works carried out by people with no artistic culture whatsoever, hence in which the mimicry, as opposed to that among intellectuals, has little or no role, so that their authors source everything (subjects, choice of materials used, means of transposition, rhythms, ways of writing, etc.) from their own background rather than from the clichés of classical art or art à la mode."

As a consequence, according to Dubuffet every common man is an artist in the making. Moreover he stated: "We are dealing with a pure, raw, artistic operation, reinvented in all its phases by its author, solely relying on his own impulses."
From this fundamental concept, the basis of Art Brut, one can therefore understand Dubuffet's embrace of and interest in all human and social sciences (such as anthropology, ethnography, study of folklore, and even psychiatry, psychology) that could help him pursue his investigations to better understand man and the invisible thread that connects each of us to the concept of 'pure', 'impulse', 'raw' art, as opposed to 'cultural' art.

Dubuffet thus mobilized a wide network of cooperation. He was constantly interfacing with ethnographers, psychiatrists, and other scholars of artistic otherness. In Switzerland, in the summer of 1945, Dubuffet met the director of the Ethnographic Museum in Geneva, Eugène Pittard, and the alienists Charles Ladame and Walter Morgenthaler. In Paris, his relations with Charles Ratton and Jean Paulhan made him welcome at the Musée de l'Homme. There Dubuffet talked with oceanist Patrick O'Reilly, attracting the sympathy of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Georges Henri Rivière of the Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions. He also spent time with Surrealists such as André Breton and Paul Eluard. Through his research and during his travels (from the Sahara to the Paris metro) and in his works, he reworked the notions of 'near' and 'far' into a new aesthetic-artistic perspective, thus refining his artistic conceptions, supported by his own work as an artist and by his collections.

Methodical and conscientious, Dubuffet puts together all this documentation, mainly photographic and bibliographic, which collected the findings of his research. The works in his library testify to his curiosity and his photo albums to the exercise of the gaze; his letters speak of a critical spirit. This constant work of research enabled him to clarify what he meant by "Art Brut" as well as it encouraged him to distance himself from the concept of "primitive art" or even the definition of "art of the insane".

Dubuffet's art is characterized by a counterpoint and a real culture of paradox; It never allows itself to be locked into proven formulas, it oscillates between outspoken materialism and high conceptuality, it makes heterogeneity and diversity a condition of its existence. So, for nearly four decades, one series followed another, combining, sometimes simultaneously, the praise of an archetypal human figure and the celebration of matter in its most elemental state, the apologia of the visible and the celebration of spirit, along with Art Brut as the horizon of true creation. It has been a surprising back-and-forth movement, where his explorations for Art Brut fueled his conception and his practice of art, just as his own creation fueled his explorations. So be careful! For Jean Dubuffet himself, his own work as an artist should not be confused with Art Brut!
The section devoted to Dubuffet in the MUDEC exhibition presents a broad overview of his work as an artist – 18 works including paintings, drawings and sculptures carried out between 1947 and 1982 and coming from prestigious collections such as the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, or even the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome (together with a body of documentary material) books, catalogues, letters, posters and pictures, providing the visitor with an idea of the heterogeneity of styles and of the extent of the work done, to introduce, discover and highlight some historical authors of Art Brut and their works he collected.

Second section. Art Brut.
Dubuffet's historical collection, donated in 1971 to the Collection de l'Art Brut, based in Lausanne, is the result of a research journey that began in Switzerland and France in 1945, then extended to other countries, resulting in a collection of works produced by self-taught outsider artists.
Personal history and relationship with society had profoundly influenced and characterized the artistic production of these self-taught authors, who created without concern for any public judgment. Needing neither recognition nor approval, Art Brut artists conceived universes, often enigmatic, intended for no one but themselves.
The definition of Art Brut relays then on both social and esthetics criteria. These authors offer an An 'unconventional approach of materials: they do not limit themselves to brushes and canvas. Their works are made by means of unusual tools and materials, that they can find around them: old cans, pieces of wood, rusty wires, poor paper, shells, etc...
The exhibition "Dubuffet and Art Brut. Outsider Art" provides the visitors with the intriguing prospect of immersing oneself in the world of each author.
The second section hosts the artworks of the most important and historical figures of Art Brut. Aloïse Corbaz, an in-patient in a psychiatric hospital, began drawing and writing secretly, using unusual materials such as flower petals and crushed leaves. Her work is a personal cosmogony, populated by princely figures and festive themes. Carlo Zinelli, which, his artistic voice painted his gouache, with stylized human figures and anatomical details, representing a journey inside his complex and fascinating mind. Adolf Wölfli: his work is colossal, with 25,000 pages of graphic pastel compositions, collages, literary creations and musical scores. Emile Ratier, a blind artist: his passion for wood pushes him to create animated mobile sculptures with cranks and sound mechanisms. Noises and squeaks guide his finishing, while the subjects of his works range from carts and rides to animals.

Third and fourth section: Beliefs and the Body
In these two sections, art brut artists from the five continents are presented, with works related to the themes of beliefs and body.
The theme of beliefs, understood in a much broader sense than just the religious dimension, here also involves personal beliefs, true individual mythologies.
Seeking explanations of the foundations of being, of life, of death as well as of their individual destiny, Art Brut authors did not find preconceived answers in the usual dogmas, or sometimes they reappropriate them by reinterpreting them. Giovanni Battista Podestà, deeply marked by the Catholic religion, is pervaded by a Manichean view of existence and feels a duty to denounce social corruption, while Madge Gill, as well as others, believes in lasting relationships with the dead and entrusts the responsibility of her artistic work to another entity, letting her hand be guided by what spirits dictate.
Among the many representations of the subject of the body, and the meanings these have for Art Brut authors, in this exhibition, the works by the Chinese artist Guo Fengyi illustrate the fluids running through it, while those by Giovanni Bosco eveal fragmented anatomies; the masculine and the feminine are combined in Giovanni Galli's drawings, while Sylvain Fusco evokes the body from the point of view of eroticism and carnal pleasure.
The many graphic and plastic works, as well as textile ones, selected for this exhibition were made by men and women from different parts of the world.
These works reveal the richness and great variety of the Lausanne museum's collections, as well as the aesthetic power of works conceived on the margins of the art world by self-taught creators who demonstrate imagination, ingenuity, talent, and self-acquired skills.
Once again, the Mudec Museum intends to give voice to all the different forms of culture and art in the world through this exhibition, and to shine an additional spotlight on the freedom of art and artistic expressions across the five continents.

On the occasion of this exhibition, 24 ORE Cultura has published the catalog "Dubuffet and Art Brut. Outsider Art". This volume is available inside the exhibition bookshop, in bookstores and online.