What is Art Brut?

French artist Jean Dubuffet invented the term "Art Brut" in the 1840s. The importance of raw art, the term suggests art performed by untrained artists working completely outside the conventions of traditional art and society. Dubuffet, strongly influenced by books that describe in detail the art produced by patients in mad asylum, began to collect art works by institutionalized mental patients, prisoners and others whose art has been disconnected from the restriction of society. Dubuffet believed that there was a pure form of art in this raw art that stems directly from the depths of the artistic psyche. At the end of the 1940s, he worked with other artists to create compilation of examples that would become a "collection of de l'art brut", now located in Lausanne, Switzerland. Rubber drawings of counterfeit money created on toilet paper and used artist to try to pay his psychiatrist to raise probes on symbolism and irony. This example Art Brut characterIts individual nature and increases the personal necessity for creating these works. The concepts of marketability and adoption in the art world, everyday concerns of mainstream artists, simply do not exist for the artists of Brut.

Although not exactly equivalent to artistic brut, the term "Outsider Art" is widely used in the English -speaking world to designate similar art. While Dubuffet focused mainly on the gathering of mad art and the work of prisoners, Outsider Art has a wider focus. In the strictest terms Brut artists lived on the very edges of society and had no interaction with academic institutions or galleries. On the other hand, outsider artists may not have technical training in art, but often live in society. Jakers of raw art, outsider artists are powered by internal visions and their own sense for creativity, rather than conventions on academic or professional art.

Dubuffet believed that all new forms of art were eventually assimilated into mainstream art. This transformation causes art to lose its power of original creativity. Some in the art world see that it occurs with outsider art. Rather than to be exclusively an area of ​​visionaries or artists working completely outside the traditional ideals of art, this term is now used to introduce parts of any untrained or unconventional artist. Many people believe that the growing recognition and acceptance of the art of Brut and Outsider Art has transformed it from raw art into popular art.