On Art Brut as Raw Artistic Creations of the Outsiders

“At the beginning of the twentieth century, creative works that were produced by inmates of mental institutions started to draw attention within psychiatric circles. In 1921, psychiatrist Dr. Walter Morgenthaler’s monograph about one of today’s most well- known Art Brut artists, Adolf Wölfli, entitled A Mental Patient as Artist, was published. Just a year later, in his work Artistry of the Mentally Ill, psychiatrist and art historian Dr. Hans Prinzhorn (1972) pointed out the aesthetic dimension of some of the visual imagery produced by psychiatric patients. His collection of the visual works produced by psychiatric patients and their analysis are considered as the first known systematic study that carried such creative works into the art scene. The then-contemporary artists, especially surrealists, had turned their attention to the creative works that were produced outside of the Western art world in search of novelty. As a reaction to the jarring consequences of the idea of progress and rationalism, surrealists were interested in unreason and were trying to restore its tragic character in a romantic fashion. Therefore, they took the creative works of those who were outsiders to the Western rationalist tradition, namely children, tribal people, and psychiatric patients, as inspirational sources for their art. In a similar vein, in midcentury, French artist and wine dealer Jean Dubuffet was interested in the artistic value of the works that were created outside of art circles. According to Dubuffet, the art world was dominated by concepts that were being passed on from one generation to the next through artistic and cultural education. Consequently, art had become an intellectual and institutional occupation that had nothing to do with authentic creation. For him, the authentic artistic creation could be found in the creative works of the outsiders. The outsiders that Dubuffet had in mind were not only outsiders to the Western art world or to Western culture but to the culture in general. Dubuffet pointed to the creations of those who were living at the edges of society and who were creating freely owing to an urge to express an intense outsider sensibility without having a particular art audience in mind. They were not in dialogue with either the art world or any cultural traditions. Hence, their creations were a form of soliloquy expressing an intense subjectivity. Being outsiders to society, they were less touched by education and cultural formation. Hence, their creations, which were untouched, or rather less touched by institutional art and cultural norms, were expressing the raw, authentic artistic creation. Dubuffet (1949) named the kind of creations he had in mind as l’Art Brut, which literally means raw art in French.

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In his essay, entitled Art Brut Preferred to Cultural Arts, written in the manner of a manifesto of Art Brut, Dubuffet claimed that the authentic art, as manifested in Art Brut works, was indefinable and that it would slip from hand the moment it was grasped through concepts, definitions, categories…Yet from then on for the rest of his life, he made several controversial attempts to define Art Brut as the authentic artistic creation. With the popularisation of the term in time, more and more problematic definitions of Art Brut emerged, especially within the Western art scene. Consequently, although Art Brut originally came out as a kind of outsider creation that would escape from the definitions of the institutionalised art world, the attempts to categorise and define the authentic Art Brut works soon gave way to a vast literature, where the term has been used vaguely and usually with semantic confusion, often calling the authenticity of Art Brut into question. In the 1970s, the term Art Brut was translated into English as Outsider Art. The translation caused a conceptual slippage, especially in the English-speaking world, shifting the focus from works that were raw and thus extremely subjective expressions of intense sensibilities of the outsiders to the outsiderness of the creators. The ambiguity of the notion of outsider fuelled the controversies surrounding the kind of creation in question. In some cases, the outsiders were considered as those who simply did not have a formal art education, covering a wide range of self-thought artists, among whom many were closely related to the art circles. In some other cases, regardless of their art education, the outsiders were considered as outsiders to society, such as psychiatric patients, people with mental disorders, criminals, people who withdrew from society, antisocial people, marginalised people, and so on, depending on one’s definition of the outsider. In the 1980s, a specific art market called the Outsider Art market emerged and grew in North America and Western Europe. Influenced by the conceptual slippage that the term Outsider Art had caused and the ambiguity of the term outsider, the definitions of the kind of creation in question proliferated almost arbitrarily within the Outsider Art market. Consequently, the coverage of this niche market kept expanding, so much so that it has often been accused of undermining the artistic integrity and authenticity of Art Brut for the sake of market expansion. Besides, the Outsider Art market is criticised for commercialising the outsiders by bringing them in, again for the sake of market expansion. While discussions on the definitions of authentic Art Brut and the legitimacy of Outsider Art were going on, in the 1990s, French philosopher and critic Pierre Bourdieu (1996) addressed the paradox of an outsider art. Bourdieu pointed out that an artistic act was given value through sociocultural relations and that the artistic productions were created and meant to make sense only within the frameworks of a specific art field. In this sense, defining a kind of creation in relation to the art field necessarily meant bringing it in. Therefore, appreciation of any kind of creation, even an outsider creation, as an outsider to the art world was paradoxical. The way Outsider Art was perceived had less to say about the kind of creation in question than about the insiders who conceptualised it the way they did.”

Celik (Mathur), Isil Ezgi. 2020. “On the Locus of Art Brut, Today.” The International Journal of Social, Political and Community Agendas in the Arts 15 (4): 1-8. doi:10.18848/2326-9960/CGP/v15i04/1-8.