fleeting

acronyms:

Art Brut (French: ‘Raw Art’). Term coined by Jean Dubuffet for the art produced by people outside the established art world—people such as solitaries, the maladjusted, patients in psychiatric hospitals, prisoners, and fringe-dwellers of all kinds. In English the term ‘Outsider art’ (the title of a book by Roger Cardinal, 1972) is generally used to cover this type of work. Dubuffet claimed that such art—‘springing from pure invention and in no way based, as cultural art constantly is, on chameleon- or parrot-like processes’—is evidence of a power of originality that all people possess but which in most has been stifled by educational training and social constraints. He may have become interested in the subject as early as 1923, but he did not begin collecting Art Brut until 1945, following a visit to Switzerland, where there were already collections of works by the mentally ill in psychiatric hospitals. Thereafter he devoted a good deal of his energies to promoting Art Brut, through writing, lecturing, and organizing exhibitions. From 1948 to 1951 he ran an association called the Compagnie de l’Art Brut, the aims of which he specified as ‘To seek out the artistic productions of humble people that have a special quality of personal creation, spontaneity, and liberty with regard to convention and received ideas; to draw the public’s attention towards this sort of work, to create a taste for it and encourage it to flourish’. The best-known of the exhibitions he organized was probably ‘L’Art Brut Préféré aux Arts Culturels’ at the Galerie René Drouin, Paris, in 1949; it featured more than 200 works by 63 artists.

© A Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Art 1999, originally published by Oxford University Press 1999.