Jean Dubuffet's Art Brut Movement

After two or three false starts, Jean Dubuffet became a prolific and monumental artist and writer who made a substantial and lasting contribution to world culture. And although he professed a profound disdain for culture and tradition, he cultivated and maintained relationships with leading French intellectuals, philosophers, artists and playwrights until his death in 1985. As important as Dubuffet's own work was, his collection of outsider art which he termed Art Brut is probably even more important in the influence it has had than his own work. Art Brut, which translates as raw art, was a collection of work by non-traditional, naive artists who were usually self-taught and made art which was not a response or reaction to historic art movements. The movement itself was directly inspired by the seminal work Artistry of the Mentally Ill by Dr. Hans Prinzhorn who was not alone in his interest in the art of the mentally ill most notably Dr. Walter Morgenthaler and his work A Psychiatric Patient as Artist also contributed to awareness of art being made in non-traditional settings. In general, the zeitgeist of the latter half of the 1800s and the early part of the 1900s was one of
These artist looking for art which was powerful, personal, and original, scourged asylums for undiscovered and untaught artists whose works satisfied the need for novelty. These artists believed in general that institutional art – art which emerged from culture – was devoid of oomph. Schizophrenics, obsessives, and deviants who lived in worlds with mythologies all their own, composed works which did not ignore or disregard design rules as normal artists do, they struck out in their own direction. The rules, these outsiders followed, were seemingly so original that they filled the works with visual heroin for keen eyes craving a