art brut in america: the incursion of jean dubuffet at the american folk art museum

Daily Serving
January 7, 2016

Art Brut in America: The Incursion of Jean Dubuffet, currently on view at the American Folk Art Museum in New York, focuses on two events seminal to the introduction of art brut to an American audience. The first was a 1951 speech given by the French artist Jean Dubuffet to the Arts Club of Chicago entitled “Anticultural Positions.” Displayed in full at the museum, the speech is a kind of manifesto for the creative field Dubuffet had been constructing since 1945, arguing the superior authenticity and raw creativity of works made by children, psychiatric patients, so-called primitive artists, and other anonymous individuals who were “uncontaminated by artistic culture.” The second event was the loan of some 1,200 art brut works from Dubuffet’s collection to his friend Alfonso Ossorio in 1952, who displayed them in his East Hampton mansion, The Creeks, for the next decade. Ossorio was a wealthy artist and collector in his own right, and The Creeks was a New York art-world hotspot in the 1950s and ’60s, frequented by influential figures such as Clement Greenberg, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Marcel Duchamp, Barnett Newman, Harold Rosenberg, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko, to name just a few. In addition to the nearly 200 works of art, most of which were part of the original loan, Dubuffet’s letters to Ossorio and photographs of the art brut works hung in Ossorio’s home are also on view in the exhibition.

The importance of this documentation is hard to overestimate. In addition to providing insight into Dubuffet’s early process and philosophy in formulating art brut as a new aesthetic paradigm, it also chronicles the moment when the seeds for what would later become outsider art were first planted in the United States. Many of the artists included in Art Brut in America, like Aloise Corbaz, Augustin Lesage, and Adolf Wolfli, are now well known to American audiences through the robust and active network of outsider-art galleries, fairs, and publications. Through revisiting and partially re-creating art brut’s American debut, the exhibition also inevitably tells outsider art’s genesis story. While it is undeniable that the outsider-art genre was built from art brut’s blueprints, and inherited the slippery criteria for inclusion and false dichotomies that plagued its predecessor, it is crucial to remember the differences between the two fields, in particular the historical context that informed Dubuffet’s motives for collecting in the first place.

Dubuffet, whose work is most closely tied to the tachisme and art informel movements, was highly involved in the European avant-garde art world and an active contributor to conversations about the role and importance of art after the horrors of World War II. He was influenced by Hans Prinzhorn’s 1922 book, The Artistry of the Mentally Ill, and Walter Morgenthaler’s 1921 book, A Psychiatric Patient as Artist, which described the artwork of Morgenthaler’s patient, Adolf Wolfli. By the time Dubuffet proposed the transfer of the art brut works to Ossorio in 1952, he had been collecting across Western Europe for about six years, primarily from psychiatric institutions whose doctors donated works in the hopes they would be preserved. Set against the very recent trauma of the Nazi party’s persecution of the mentally disabled—referred to as the murder of the “unfit”—it is not surprising that Dubuffet approached his collecting with great urgency and that many medical professionals were eager to cooperate with his efforts. [1] He exhaustively documented the details about every new acquisition, recording his direct observations of the creators, interactions with their doctors, and descriptions of the institutions. While his self-interests were certainly tied to art brut gaining prestige and cultural value—not to mention that he heavily borrowed many formal and stylistic elements for his own art practice—Dubuffet is responsible for the preservation of this work as well as the only records of many of these individuals’ lives. His project, in the aftermath of unprecedented atrocity, is a deeply redemptive one.

Grounded within this historical frame, the exhibition’s extensive use of biographical information doesn’t feel out of place. The names of the asylums where the artists were institutionalized are included on the majority of the exhibition’s object labels. Small booklets with the artists’ biographies are available in every gallery. When such strategies appear in the contemporary outsider-art marketplace, however, they risk being reductive and exploitive. The present landscape of attitudes concerning mental-health issues in the United States is considerably different from the one Dubuffet was responding to in postwar Europe, thankfully so. Mental illness is no longer unequivocally determinative of cultural marginalization. Positing that it promises the kind of artistic purity and uncontaminated creativity that Dubuffet proclaimed distinguished art brut from the established, academic, mainstream art world just continues a romantic mythology.

The 200 works in the show range wildly in medium and complexity, and there is no formal thread that definitively or comfortably ties them together. One of the undeniable appeals of the show, however, is imagining the reception of these boldly unselfconscious works by the New York art-world elites who were deep in the trenches of Abstract Expressionism.

Art Brut in America provides a focused spotlight in which to examine a pivotal moment in art brut’s history and a germinative moment for outsider art’s reception and formation in the United States. The exhibition confirms the breadth and importance of Dubuffet’s efforts while acknowledging that he was constantly reevaluating and revising the field’s definition from its beginning.

Art Brut in America: The Incursion of Jean Dubuffet is on view at the American Folk Art Museum through January 10, 2015.

[1] http://www.ushmm.org/information/exhibitions/online-features/special-focus/nazi-persecution-of-the-disabled