Art Brut Posters

What is Art Brut and how did it originate?

'Outsider art' was coined in 1972 by art critic Roger Cardinal as the English equivalent for 'art brut' (French for 'raw art' or 'rough art'), a label created in the 1940s by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture. Dubuffet focused particularly on art by those on the outside of the established art scene.

What visual characteristics define Art Brut style?

Outsider Artists almost always employ techniques of pattern, and obsessive repetitive design features. There is an attempt to create simple and satisfying order when they themselves are typically touched by an awareness of chaos. Many artists create fantastical images derived from their vivid imaginations including cities, people, animals, all often encased within geometrical shapes.

How does Art Brut differ from academic art?

For Dubuffet, art brut was the raw expression of a vision or emotions, untrammelled by convention, including graffiti, and the work of the mentally ill, prisoners, children, and primitive artists. It was not polished, fashionable, or commercial—it was instinctive, often obsessive, and deeply personal. Most outsider artists never studied in academies.

Who are notable Art Brut artists?

Celebrated outsider artists include Henry Darger (a Chicago janitor whose thousands of pages of illustrated manuscripts revealed fantastical worlds), Adolf Wölfli (a Swiss psychiatric patient who created intricate drawings and narratives blending music, myth, and memory), and Judith Scott (a fiber artist with Down syndrome who transformed yarn and found objects into powerful sculptural forms).

What makes Art Brut powerful in design?

Later works in this tradition, 'passionate and primitive, sometimes pathetic, sometimes obscene, incorporate forms derived from graffiti and psychotic art; painted in thick impasto or constructed in collage, these densely detailed and intensely expressive works convey a sense of teeming life and brutal force.'