What some disdainfully call “psychopathological art” is in fact nothing other 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 unsettling familiarity with the exhibited works. These are works created without a shred of technical knowledge and very often using only makeshift materials. The authors are mostly misfits, outcasts, and psychopaths, but there are also inmates, people who are generally antisocial, like vagabonds. All characters who share a “lucid madness,” an inner restlessness more evident or more cultivated than in others.
Art brut should not be confused with naive art. The latter targets a market, has techniques and standards to follow, while art brut is an end in itself, it is a sort of personal diary, it is an absolutely private world. The approach to the works must therefore be with humility and without criticism.
The great creativity and vigorous imagination of these artists provoke a violent break with everyday reality, and translate into practical terms the “good” side of the word “madness.” A term with a double meaning: constructive and creative or potentially dangerous for the community, and not only in a physical sense but especially moral. According to Western culture, the only acceptable, justified madness is only that encountered in the world of art. But here we are beyond madness. Art brut comes out of any track and is naturally welcomed eagerly by psychotherapists and psychiatrists, who see great research possibilities in it.
Art for business or art for art?
The creator of the Art Brut Museum was the Frenchman Jean Dubuffet. One day he asked himself: what should I expect from art? Perhaps only aesthetic beauty? Or objects to be used 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 which bound to only officially recognized procedures. The fruits of that lifelong research were gathered in a very special museum, the Art Brut Collection in Lausanne, Switzerland.
The Art Brut museum is unique in its kind and collects works by artists from all over the world, united by the “non-norms” typical of this type of art. 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 over 1200 works created by artists of different nationalities, and in 1967 he exhibited part of them at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris. In 1976 the collection was transferred from France to Switzerland and the Art Brut Collection of Lausanne was inaugurated.
Two representatives of the Bel Paese
Among the works in the collection are the sculptures of Filippo Bentivegna, born in 1885 in Sciacca in 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 equivocal figures with unexpected metamorphoses. Then there are the works of Carlo, born in 1916, originally from S. Giovanni Lupatolo, a small town in the province of Verona. Since 1957 Carlo dedicated all his time to drawing. A solitary man with a dog as a companion, he was drafted and sent to the front from where he returned in shock. Over time he worsened and since he was subject to visions and persecution mania, he was committed to the psychiatric hospital of Verona.
Today Filippo and Carlo are respected and admired. In the Art Brut Museum in Lausanne.
