The building is simple. There are no world-famous names featured here. Yet the Art Brut Museum or Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland leaves you with a deep sense of respect for the artists and admiration for the man who created this unique institution.
This museum houses art by tormented but talented persons: prisoners, patients of psychiatric hospitals, rebels, nonconformists, loners and misfits. These are people who as individuals and creators live and work on the fringes of society. As artists they function with total disregard for public approbation or social opinion; some who are mentally challenged may not even understand it. To me, this is a great museum because the works represent the triumph of the human spirit over afflictions of mind and body.
The museum is the brainchild of Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet (1901-1985), a French painter and sculptor. He was known as the founder of the Art Brut movement and as a man who challenged status quo with regard to art. Dubuffet is recognised for his humanistic approach to art. He is sometimes described as a curator who embraced ‘low art’. Dubuffet questioned established notions of art and approaches to creation. The Art Brut Museum, which we visited in its 40th anniversary year, is testimony of his philosophy.
To build his collection, Dubuffet travelled to hospitals, examined asylum art collections and later visited prisons, besides acquiring works from loners and nonconformists. He refused to label these works as art of the insane, or art by criminals. Instead, he saw it and defined it as art produced by persons either unfamiliar with artistic circles, or tending to avoid them. Dubuffet recognised a different mode of creation when he said: “The authors draw everything (subjects, choice of materials employed, means of transposition, rhythms, ways of writing, etc.) from their own depths and not from clichés of classical art or art that is fashionable.” In their work, he said one sees “an artistic operation that is completely pure, raw, reinvented in all its phases by its author, based solely on his own impulses.”
In 1971, Dubuffet donated his collection to Lausanne city: at the time, it comprised 5,000 works by 133 creators. The Collection de l’Art Brut was thrown open to the public on February 26, 1976. Today, it has nearly 70,000 works by 1,000 authors in its holdings. About 700 are on permanent display. Many temporary exhibitions have also been held here.
Spread over four floors, the works are neatly arranged, each with labels and descriptive notes in English and French. We saw paintings, line drawings, sculptures, dresses, painted sheets of metal and rolled-up fabric on display. The artists, who include men and women, belonged to diverse social, economic and educational backgrounds. Some had been in prison for years, while a few, like artist Heer, were mentally challenged. Judith Scott and Pascal Tassini had Down’s Syndrome. Another artist and loner was so severely short-sighted that he worked with his nose to the paper. There were others who had had troubled lives, suffered mental disturbances or were scarred by personal tragedies and spent years in psychiatric hospitals. Like Aloise, who worked secretly for years, using graphite and ink, besides juice from petals, crushed leaves and toothpaste. The support material came from wrapping paper sewn with thread, or alternatively, the backs of calendars, envelopes and bits of cardboard. There was Benjamin Arneval known for minutely detailed drawings; Paul End who worked with lead pencil and coloured pencil on wrapping paper; and Madge Gill who would draw and embroider, and obsessively use Indian ink and calico or cardboard.
Another artist, Auguste Forestier, sculpted butcher’s bones which he procured from his institution’s kitchen. He also made wooden figures of humans and animals decorated with sundry scraps sourced from rubbish. Among other artists were loners who had cut themselves off from society, and others generally described as nonconformists who lived by their own rules. Some artists were quoted as saying their inspiration had come through a dream, or a vision while in the waking state, while a few spoke of the guidance or prompting of a spirit or angel.
There was our own Nek Chand too, the only Indian artist we saw. The creator of Chandigarh’s Rock Garden was a great visionary who made this wonderland out of waste materials. I wondered at his inclusion, until I came across this line in a handout: “Unscathed by the influence of traditional art, they tend to avail themselves of novel means and materials, and to come up with highly unusual styles of figuration.”
Indeed that is what Nek Chand is celebrated for — a novel concept, and for thinking out-of-the-box using uncoventional materials. His was such a radical idea that he initially worked in total secrecy. The museum pays him a special tribute — two life-size figures by him stand at the entrance. I have visited and written about Nek Chand’s Chandigarh garden. But now, seeing him included in a museum, often described as Alternative Art or Outside Art, I saw him in a new light.
Dubuffet and his museum could serve as an inspiration and as an example worth emulating to those who have the resources to create such institutions. For the rest of us, laypersons, it is a call to recognise and respect art irrespective of who and where it was created.
Aruna Chandaraju is an independent journalist, photographer and translator.
