Art Brut

In 1945 the painter Jean Dubuffet coined the term art brut — raw art. He meant the work of people who never attended art school, who knew nothing of the market or of criticism, and who made things purely because they had to. In Dubuffet's view, official culture was a machine that trained imitation and rewarded whoever kept up with fashion. He objected to it head-on. In 1971 he donated his collection of roughly 5,000 works to the city of Lausanne. When it opened to the public in 1976, he insisted to the end that it be called a Collection, never a museum. The stories of the people gathered here are quiet, and every one of them is strong. Adolf Wölfli began drawing in a psychiatric hospital in 1904 and left behind 25,000 pages. Henry Darger spent his life as a janitor in a Chicago hospital; his 15,000-page story and more than 350 paintings were only found in 1972, when his room was cleared out after he was moved into a care facility. Hilma af Klint, the cave paintings at Altamira — they all take the same shape: finished in complete obscurity, reaching anyone only much later. Making something and having it found, I think, are two different things.