December 4, 2015



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Published by The Bee Publishing Company, Newtown, Connecticut

INDEXES ON
PAGES 36 & 37

AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM

Le Diable (The Devil) by Pascal-Dsir Maisonneuve (18631934), Bordeaux, France, circa

19271928. Shells; 91/8 by 85/8 by 7 inches.
Arnaud Conne photo
Untitled sculpture by Auguste Forestier (1887
1958), Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole Psychiatric
Hospital, France, circa 19351951. Carved and
painted wood with fabric, leather, zipper, buttons, medallions, aluminum foil and nails; 20
by 73/8 by 105/8 inches. Claude Bornand photo

Plchinle gnsthrs vitrs-he [sic] (Punchinello gangsters vitrs-he) by Gaston Duf (Gaston
Dufour) (19201966), Saint-Andr-lez-Lille Psychiatric Hospital, France, 1949. Colored pencil on
drawing paper; 27 by 197/8 inches.
Arnaud Conne photo

Art Brut in America

The Incursion Of Jean Dubuffet

By James D. Balestrieri

NEW YORK CITY Before you read this, look

at the images that accompany this essay. Consider them individually, then compare them. Are
you curious, enthralled, appalled, dismissive? Do
you want to know more? Do you recoil? Do you
say to yourself or out loud to the person beside
you, I could do that. Jean Dubuffet (19011985)
collected these works and thousands more under
the banner of a term he coined: Art Brut brut
meaning crude, unformed, raw. The French painter, sculptor and printmaker would grant not only
the validity but the necessity of all your visceral reactions. But, to your I could do that, he
might reply, True. Why dont you?
It is easier to dene Art Brut by what it is not
than by what it is. Art Brut is not a movement,
like Impressionism. It is not a school, like the
Hudson River School. It does not name a group
of artists, like the Taos Founders or the Ten. It
is, in a way, Outsider art, but it is not folk art,
with its handmade, handed-down traditions of naivet and craft. Art Brut shares something with
asylum art, yet it is not concerned with nding
clues to pathologies in the productions of the institutionalized. Childrens art begins as Art Brut,
but as soon as children want their art to imitate
the world of their parents, Art Brut questions the
purity of the impulse.
Despite all that it is not, the exhibition Art Brut
in America: The Incursion of Jean Dubuffet, at
the American Folk Art Museum through January
10, is fascinating, not in the facile way that we
throw that word around, but in the way that the
sun, scintillating on the water, or a re, licking Untitled by Gaston Chaissac (19101964), Vende,
and crackling in the darkness, fascinates us into France, circa 1948. Ink on paper, 87/8 by 6 inches.
a kind of waking trance. If it sometimes takes an
Amlie Blanc photo

effort to confront these works, it takes even more to

tear yourself away from them.
Art Brut is found art, art that arises directly from
the impulse to make art, art that does not know it
is art: doodles and scrawls, the productions of obsessions and distractions. It is art before artfulness, art
that would surprise the artist if the artist knew it
was art. It is a beautiful cat the color of cappuccino foam padding out of a shock of ruddy weeds and
lemony brush beside the train tracks at the moment
as I write this when the train stops to let another train pass. Art Brut is accidental art, a car crash
between the psyche and the image. (The images of
the cat and the car crash should give you the avor
of Dubuffets own, extensive writings on art and his
insistence on setting down the lightning immediacy
of rst reactions.)
In 1945, just as the horrors of World War II were
both winding down and coming to light, Jean Dubuffet began amassing an assemblage of works that
would become the foundation for the Collection de
lArt Brut, based in Lausanne, Switzerland. From
late 1951 until 1962, the collection was displayed at
the Creeks, the East Hampton, N.Y., home of wealthy
artist Alfonso Ossorio, and was available for private
showings for artists like Jackson Pollock, Henri Matisse, Mark Rothko and scores of others. Some were
enthralled by what they saw; many seemed indifferent. Few, in hindsight, were entirely unaffected, for,
while Dubuffet found Art Brut at the edges of education, culture and sanity, he also insisted that this
same impulse slept in the breast of every one of us,
that it was a common birthright, even if it came forth
uncommonly and expressed itself idiosyncratically,
under unusual conditions.
( continued on page 14C )

14C Antiques and The Arts Weekly December 4, 2015

Untitled by Jean Mar (Jean Marchand) (circa 18281911), Bel-Air Clinic, Chne-Bourg,
Switzerland, circa 1905. Newsprint, blue paper, plant fiber and white and black string;
35/8 by 2 inches.
Caroline Smyrliadis photo

Untitled by Heinrich Anton Mller (1869

1930), Mnsingen Psychiatric Hospital, Bern,
Switzerland, circa 19271929. Colored pencil
on drawing paper; 225/8 by 16 inches.
Claude Bornand photo

Composition symbolique, amour pour lhumanit (Symbolic composition, love for humanity) by Augustin Lesage (18761954), Pasde-Calais, France, 1932. Oil on canvas; 38 by
27 inches.
Claude Bornand photo

Art Brut in America

The Incursion Of Jean Dubuffet

( continued from page 1C )

Perhaps the best denition of Art

Brut in English is the translation of
Dubuffets own words by his friend Ossorio for a 1949 exhibition of the works
in New York: We mean by that term
works done by people uncontaminated by artistic culture, works in which
the sense of mimicry, contrary to what
happens among intellectuals, plays
little or no part, with the result that
their makers draw all (subjects, choice
of materials used, means of transposition, manner of writing, etc) from their
own being and not from hangovers of
classical or fashionable art. We witness
here the artistic process in all its purity, raw, reinvented on all its levels
by the maker, starting solely from his
own impulses. Many of the objects
shown are the work of inmates of psychiatric hospitals. We see no reason for
making of these works, as is so often
done, a special department. All contacts that we have had (and they are
many) with our more or less conned
comrades, have convinced us that the
mechanisms of artistic creation are exactly the same in their hands as they
are among people reputedly normal.
Jean Dubuffet was himself uncommon. The son of a prosperous French
wine merchant could this be the
origin of the word brut, as in Champagne brut? he was a Modernist who
despised Modernism. Nevertheless,
Dubuffet is a seminal gure in postWorld War II art. He sought and employed new and nontraditional materials restlessly, daring almost willing
his art to destroy itself. He scratched
portraits into paint mixed with dirt
and sand, faces innocent in execution
and frank in expression, rising above
ugliness to become, in their own way,
beautiful. He covered supports in crinkled gold and silver foil in an attempt
to convey the energy of the births of
stars and universes.
But he is perhaps best known for his
large-scale paintings and sculptures of
abstract outlined forms in reds, blues
and whites. These pieces hit the eye
like interlocked layers of diacritical
and punctuation marks of some unknown language or, perhaps, like a

Baptme de Pie XII / Un Baiser laviateur Le Pape Pie XII monnayeur et son Sphinx sur le sige (Baptism of Pius XII / A kiss to the aviator
Pope Pius XII counterfeiter and his Sphinx on the seat) by Alose
Corbaz (18861964), De La Rosire Psychiatric Hospital, Gimel, Switzerland, circa 1955. Colored pencil on a sheet of paper folded in the middle,
double-sided; 59 by 393/8 inches.
Olivier Laffely photo

childs bucket of toys wooden letters, toy

soldiers and animals, toy cars and trucks
strewn on the oor in a jumbled heap.
Look again at the works illustrated here.
Augustin Lesages 1932 Composition symbolique, amour pour lhumanit (Symbolic
composition, love for humanity) is a mandala
to some lost faith of Byzantium, while Adolf
Wolis 1921 untitled (Saint Adolph bitten
in the leg by the snake) is sheet music for
a melody heard in a dream, something you
hear while the avant-garde composer John
Cage sits at the piano and plays nothing for
four minutes and 33 seconds (which he did in
1952), Robert Gies Distribution defuves
avec machine centrale et tableau mtrique
(Distribution of emanations with central machine and metric table), executed (there is an
interesting word for how this piece came into
being) circa 1916, is reminiscent of the sci-
drawings some of my grade-school classmates
dreamt up during dreary lmstrips about soil.
Are the gures connected by the energy of life
or in the simultaneous shock of electric death,
or in their sudden awareness of that death?
We all share a touch of pareidolia, seeing
wolves and ships and faces in clouds, but Pascal-Dsir Maisonneuves shell art Le Diable
(The Devil) transforms objects we generally
see as beautiful into a visage that taunts us
with its wild, spiraling eyes.
Francis Palanque scrawled on crushed eggshells. Jeanne Tripier out-Rorschached Rorschach in sugar and ink. Jean Marchand and
Juliette Bataille worked in bits of string and
yarn they found. Art Brut is a primer for contemporary practice.
It is hard these days to imagine any corner of
human experience that might be somehow untainted, unmediated by culture. Philosophers
of French Structuralism and Post-Structuralism Barthes and Derrida, for example
might have argued that Dubuffets quest was
nothing more than an exercise in futility. But,
like all Holy Grails, the journey may well be
more important than the object of the quest.
Perhaps no single Art Brut work shows the
artistic impulse in full, made visible, yet the
shadow of the impulse shimmers in each of
them in ways that sent, and continue to send,
shock waves.
If we collect art in order to partake, in some
way, of some narrow slice of the impulse that
gives rise to the work in the rst place, the
desire to see that impulse made manifest
speaks to a need to connect on an even deeper
level. Something in us wants access to a pre-

December 4, 2015 Antiques and The Arts Weekly 15C

Untitled by Guillaume Pujolle (18931971), Toulouse Psychiatric Hospital, France, 1938. Watercolor, ink and colored pencil on paper; 113/8 by
87/8 inches.
Amlie Blanc photo

Untitled by Francis Palanque (Francis

Palanc) (19282015), Vence, France, 1953. Finely ground eggshells on canvas; 31 by 23
inches.
Henri Germond photo

Untitled (Saint Adolph bitten in the leg by

the snake) by Adolf Wolfli (18641930), the
Waldau Clinic, Bern, Switzerland, 1921. Colored pencil and pencil on paper; 26 by 201/8
inches.
Marie Humair photo

AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM

Distribution deffluves avec machine centrale et tableau mtrique (Distribution of

emanations with central machine and metric table) by Robert Gie (1869?), Rosegg
Psychiatric Clinic, Switzerland, circa 1916. Pencil and India ink on tracing paper;
19 by 263/8 inches.
Arnaud Conne photo

cognitive plane, wants to borrow from William

Blake to experience innocence. In books, plays
and lms from Candide to Huck Finn, from Forrest Gump to Nell, we create characters through
whose eyes we try to see the world as if for the rst
time. In music think Philip Glass, hip-hop and
our keen interest in traditional music from around
the world we discard tonality and return to the
rhythms of our bodies and the earth. In the visual arts Richard Serras bioform art, Ugo Rondinones giant cyclopean gures, Maya Lins site-specic works at Storm King ephemeral art, art
that is meant to decay, to rust, to vanish, is a thing,
a movement.
Yet to assert that Art Brut, or any of the works I
have just mentioned, seeks meaning in the savage,
the primitive, the aberrant, is to contradict what
Dubuffet was all about. Dubuffet, as the catalog
describes it, famously shared a meal with the art
critic Clement Greenberg, and the argument between them surely about Art Bruts rawness
versus Greenbergs endeavor to present Modern
art as an outgrowth of a carefully considered aesthetic, unless it was about the peas led to the
two men dining at separate tables.
No, the art and artists Dubuffet discovered and
championed are more akin to the sensitive souls in
H.P. Lovecrafts weird ctions (The Call of Cthulhu
springs immediately to mind) who channel visions
of a primordial past that are also prescient harbingers of an unimaginable future. For a time, these
characters paint and sculpt incredible, impossible,

Dcor de nuit (Night setting) by Juliette Elisa Bataille

(1896?), Ville-Evrard Psychiatric Hospital, Neuilly-surMarne, France, 1948. Wool and cotton embroidery on cardboard; 8 by 71/8 inches.
Ulrich Choffat photo

grotesque works, automatically. Then something transpires; the impulse recedes. They snap out of their
personae, sometimes cease making art altogether. But
their works remain as a testament and puzzle. Further, and this is the point, the art does not really stop.
It just stops being made where we can see it.
Art Brut does not express otherness or indulge in
nostalgia for a lost Eden. What it offers is a glimpse
into an archetypal impulse buried deep within, inside
all of us, one we carry everywhere, at all times, an impulse hard to recognize, still harder to tap, impossible
to maintain, an impulse that is nevertheless essential
to our sense of ourselves as a species. On some conscious, or unconscious, level, we are all always making
art.
See Art Brut in America: The Incursion of Jean
Dubuffet at the American Folk Art Museum. Look at
your doodles. Look.
Jim Balestrieri is the director of J.N. Bartfield Galleries
in New York City. A playwright and author, he frequently
writes about the arts.
Petit dossier no. 10 (Little folder no. 10) by
Jeanne Tripier (18691944), Maison Blanche
Psychiatric Hospital, Neuilly-sur-Marne, France
(circa 19351939). Ink, varnish, and sugar on paper; page size between 85/8 by 6 inches and 135/8
by 85/8 inches. Jean-Marie Almonte and Michael Legentil photo
All works illustrated are from the Collection de
lArt Brut, Lausanne, Switzerland.