Art Brut

Art Brut is an art movement of the 1940–1970 period. The gallery holds 135 works in this movement, including works by Paul Klee, Morton Livingston Schamberg and Dagobert Peche. Browse Art Brut paintings, portraits, pictures and artworks from the world's public-domain museum collections.

Art Brut—French for "raw art"—was named in 1945 by the French painter Jean Dubuffet to describe work made entirely outside official culture by people with no academic training: psychiatric patients, reclusive self-taught makers, spiritualist mediums, and other figures untouched by the conventions of the fine-art world. Dubuffet, repelled by what he called the "asphyxiating culture" of the Parisian avant-garde, travelled through Switzerland in 1945 with the writer Jean Paulhan and the architect Le Corbusier, visiting psychiatric hospitals and conducting interviews with doctors and curators. He prized this art as the purest, least mediated form of human invention—creation springing from inner necessity rather than from the marketplace or the museum.

Visually, Art Brut resists a single style, but recurring traits bind it: dense, horror-vacui surfaces that leave no empty space; private symbolic systems and invented scripts; flattened, frontal figures; and obsessive repetition of pattern, often in cheap or improvised materials. The work is typically unsigned by any school and indifferent to perspective, anatomy, or finish—qualities Dubuffet saw not as deficiencies but as liberations.

The canon centres on a handful of extraordinary figures. The Swiss psychiatric patient Adolf Wölfli (1864–1930) produced a vast illustrated mythology of his own life, complete with musical notation and text; Aloïse Corbaz (1886–1964), also institutionalised in Switzerland, painted operatic lovers in saturated wax crayon. The French medium Augustin Lesage and the British spiritualist Madge Gill made their work under claimed supernatural dictation, while the American recluse Henry Darger left thousands of pages of watercolour epics discovered only after his death.

Dubuffet formalised the field by founding the Compagnie de l'Art Brut in 1948—with André Breton, Jean Paulhan, Michel Tapié and others—to collect and study such works. His holdings ultimately became the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne, opened in 1976 and today numbering some 70,000 works. The English critic Roger Cardinal coined "Outsider Art" as a translation in 1972, broadening the term's reach. Art Brut's influence runs deep through postwar painting: its anti-academic rawness fed directly into Dubuffet's own practice and, by the 1980s, into the graffiti-inflected Neo-Expressionism of Jean-Michel Basquiat, who absorbed Dubuffet's techniques after seeing his work in New York.