What some disdainfully call “psychopathological art” is in fact nothing more than the materialization of those feelings and sensations that would be present in each of us, without cultural, social, or religious conditioning.
In a museum of art brut, there is a strange and disturbing familiarity with the exhibited works. These are works made without a shred of technical knowledge and often using only makeshift materials. The creators are mostly misfits, outcasts, and psychopaths, but there are also inmates, people who are generally asocial, vagabonds. All characters who share a “lucid madness,” an inner restlessness more evident or more cultivated than in others.
One must not confuse art brut with naive art. The latter is aimed at a market, has techniques and canons to follow, while art brut is an end in itself, a sort of personal diary, an absolutely private world. Therefore, the approach to the works must be humble and without critique.
The great creativity and vigorous imagination of these artists provoke a violent break with everyday reality and translate the “good” side of the word “madness” into practical terms. A term with a double meaning: constructive and creative or potentially dangerous for the community, not only physically but especially morally. According to Western culture, the only acceptable, justified madness is that which is found in the world of art. But this goes beyond madness. Art brut goes beyond any conventional path and is naturally welcomed eagerly by psychotherapists and psychiatrists, who see great research possibilities in it.
Art for business or art for art’s sake?
The creator of the Museum of Art Brut was the Frenchman Jean Dubuffet. One day he asked himself: what should I expect from art? Perhaps only aesthetic beauty? Or objects destined for decoration? But he soon became convinced that his would be “a much longer and more adventurous journey,” in search of a profound break with the norms that established artistic canons and bound to officially recognized procedures only. The fruits of that lifelong research were collected in a very special museum, the Collection of Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland.
The Art Brut museum is unique in its kind, gathering works by artists from all over the world, united by the “non-norms” typical of this art form. It was precisely in Switzerland that Dubuffet began, in 1945, the research and collection of “extra-cultural art productions.” Over the years, he managed to collect more than 1200 works created by artists of different nationalities, and in 1967 exhibited part of them in the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris. In 1976, the collection was transferred from France to Switzerland and the Collection of Art Brut in Lausanne was inaugurated.
Two representatives from the Belpaese
Among the works in the collection are the sculptures of Filippo Bentivegna, born in 1885 in Sciacca, Sicily. A very original character, a dowser, who emigrated to the United States for 20 years and loved wood, especially knotty wood from which he carved sculptures of ambiguous figures with unexpected metamorphoses. Then there are the works of Carlo, born in 1916, from S. Giovanni Lupatolo, a small town in the province of Verona. From 1957 Carlo devoted all his time to drawing. A solitary man with a dog companion, he was drafted and sent to the front, from which he returned shocked. Over time, he worsened, and because he was subject to visions and persecution mania, he was institutionalized in the psychiatric hospital of Verona.
Today Filippo and Carlo are respected and admired. In the Museum of Art Brut in Lausanne.
