He named this type of art Art Brut which literally translates as "raw art". He defined Art Brut as "the works executed by people untouched by artistic culture, works in which imitation - contrary to what occurs among intellectuals - has little or no part, so that their makers derive everything subjects, choice of materials used, means of transportation, rhythms, ways of patterning, etc.
Here we find art at its crudest; we see it being wholly reinvented at every stage of the operation by its maker's knack of invention and not, as always in cultural art, from his power of aping others or changing like a chameleon. The organization was intended to serve as a center point for further research and curatorial activities. In , just before the Compagnie's dissolution due in part to a disagreement wherein Dubuffet accused Breton of attempting to co-opt Art Brut into the "huge cultural machine" of Surrealism , painter Alfonso Ossorio offered to house the collection in his home in East Hampton, near New York.
While visiting the United States, Dubuffet delivered a lecture at the Art Institute of Chicago, titled "Anti-cultural Positions," in which he accused Western culture of suppressing true creativity.
In the Compagnie de l'Art Brut was reformed, with over members dedicating themselves to the discovery and collection of works of Art Brut. In , Dubuffet began publishing the first eight editions of Art Brut booklets, which continue to be produced today. Dubuffet found Art Brut to be an important inspiration for his own art, as he believed it to be a more pure, sincere, and authentic expression of emotion, immune to the assimilating influences of mainstream culture.
There are a variety of factors that contributed to the interest in Art Brut in the first half of the twentieth century. Many mainstream artists were attracted to Art Brut in what they saw as the "Primitive" art of faraway cultures. This may have come about because of growing dissatisfaction with the mainstream art world, and more broadly speaking with a distrust of mainstream society in the period surrounding the two World Wars.
Artists in the Western world at this time witnessed the utter devastation and upheaval that had resulted from widespread ideologies centered upon technological, industrial, and rational routes of "progress". People living during this period also saw the tragic and inhumane implementation of social philosophies, including Eugenics, which claimed to improve quality of life for the general public by eliminating undesirable traits such as mental illness, disability, and criminal tendencies.
The multiple atrocities carried out for the duration of World Waw II caused many people, especially artists, to become skeptical and wary of grand theories and ideologies, both beyond and within the art world itself. Many artists hoped that a celebration of the irrational and a turning for help to individuals on the margins of society could offer new sources of inspiration regarding different ways of understanding, relating to, and representing other people and the world around us.
In this way, celebrating Outsider Art was an alternative way for artists to "fight" against political injustice. As artist and author David Maclagan asserts, "Art Brut can be seen as the continuation and intensification of a widespread and typical feature of Modernism: the quest for new and original forms of creativity in areas considered immune from conventional culture. At the same time, many within the art world continued to operate with the romantic notion of the "mad genius".
Commonly referred to as the "genius-insanity" theory, the idea that as German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer expressed "genius is nearer to madness than the average intelligence" can be traced back to Aristotle. The idea began to pervade common thought during the Renaissance , peaked during the Romantic period, and, MacGregor wrote in , "has not yet been laid to rest".
The result of this preoccupation with the insane genius during the Romantic period led artists to turn their attention toward madhouses, making frequent visits and recording their observations of insane artists at work, in order to answer the question "could the madman give birth to art?
This is perhaps a misguided line of enquiry, because it is so often wrongs committed by society that ultimately cause mental illness. The rise in interest in Art Brut, particularly of the "mentally imbalanced", was aided by simultaneous developments in the field of psychiatry, and later the realms of Art Therapy. Medical professionals who worked with mentally ill and cognitively disabled patients such as Dr.
Walter Morgenthaler and Dr. Hans Prinzhorn began to turn to patients' artworks as potential clues that could grant them insight into the nature of their ailments and disturbances, or, at the very least, into ways in which these afflictions could be differentiated and categorized. This led many doctors to begin collecting and analyzing patient artwork rather than merely discarding it, and many of these artistic samples eventually found their way into the public sphere and the hands of mainstream artists who hoped to find inspiration from these works.
As art historian John MacGregor writes, "The role of the physician as interpreter of this new type of image was very influential, determining to some extent the way in which it was received at first by the lay public. Nevertheless, as was the case with Primitive Art , the creative artist saw these images in his own unique way. The term Outsider Art was coined in by Roger Cardinal professor emeritus of literary and visual studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury , who sought an appropriate English equivalent for the French term Art Brut.
Just as Dubuffet described Art Brut, Cardinal described Outsider Art as creative works produced by self-taught artists that is, artists with no formal arts training , that do not follow traditional or academic artistic conventions and that convey "a strong sense of individuality". Both Dubuffet and Cardinal have specified that while Outsider Art and Art Brut tend to be associated with artists who are mentally ill such as schizophrenics , it also includes art "by individuals who are quite capable of handling their social lives but who recoil, consciously or unconsciously, from the notion of art being necessarily a publicly defined activity with communally recognized standards," including children, and social recluses.
According to Cardinal, Outsider Art's "ambit of use rests on the notion that art making is a widespread human activity reaching far beyond the world of public galleries, teaching institutions and culturally marked art production.
Art Brut is not a movement with which artists self-identify, but rather a label assigned, often posthumously, by historians, critics, and collectors to self-taught creators with little or no contact with the mainstream art world and its institutions. MacGregor explains, "It is a totally heterogeneous collection of images and artists, with no underlying unity or common purpose. These terms often overlap, and are at times incorrectly used synonymously. To say that the art is disparate and not unifiable is correct, although Outsider Artists do share a tendency to certain themes and motifs.
For example, there is an interest in portraits, fish, birds, repetition, binding, linking, and entirely filling a given space. However, there are other Outsider Artists, like Stephen Wiltshire, Gregory Blackstock, and James Castle, whose images offer extremely realistic reproductions of existing things or places.
What sets these latter artists apart is that they do not follow any pre-existing artistic style or movement, such as Cubism or Expressionism although coincidentally, similarities sometimes exist.
They also, despite making more "realistic" pictures on first glance, like the more classic outsiders Wolfli do fill designated space, and do attempt to create order by using art. John Wells — Scottie Wilson — Alfred Wallis — On display at Tate Modern part of In the Studio. Jean Dubuffet Large Black Landscape Although Jean Dubuffet coined Art Brut to encompass all works free of cultural norms and traditions, he was mainly interested in a subcategory of Art Brut — art made by the patients in mental hospitals.
In , art critic Roger Cardinal introduced the Outsider Art as an English equivalent of Art Brut and his expression is applied more broadly to include self-taught artists who are working outside of the art institutions. In his effort to dignify art created by mentally ill, Dubuffet wrote a manifesto in , promoting the artistic style free from the intellectual heritage, established values and high culture.
This focus on the marginal and subversive can be seen in the wider context of the twentieth-century avant-garde movements from Dadaism to Cubism and Surrealism, to name a few.
Childlike imagery, explorations of unorthodox materials, raw expressions, they all converged in his own production. When it comes to Art Brut and its representatives critics tend to use the term authors rather than artists. This is mostly due to the fact that many of those individuals whose works can be subsided under this label do not consider themselves artists. They take nothing from the art traditions and do not contribute to the culture in any way.
Many names that are now considered representative for the movement do not come from the artistic background. He has developed his skills and talent on his own and in over thirty years produced a massive oeuvre that included complex, meticulously executed visual works and fictional writings. These are only some names among many others who became famous after studies of Art Brut and Outsider Art began.
Jean Dubuffet used to describe Art Brut as art that was not based on established traditions or techniques. Art that did not follow styles or trends, and it was not made primarily to be sold for monetary gain and maybe not even made as "art.
0コメント