ART BRUT

Art Brut, artists and art

The idea of "Art Brut" appeared around 1945. Its conception is generally attributed to the French painter Jean Dubuffet who meant by the term "works executed by those immune to artistic culture in which imitation has no role; in which their creators take all (subjects, materials, transposition, rhythm, style etc.) from their own individuality and not from the base of classical art or stylish trends". One can understand from this definition that parctitioners of "Art Brut" are mentally or socially marginal: prisoners, patients of psychiatric hospitals or other institutions, originals, solitary beings, condemned, all individuals who have a social status removed from the constraints of cultural conditioning. Their work is conceived and executed outside of that which we normally regard as the domain of the Fine Arts; that is to say, schools, galleries, museums, etc. These works are, therefore, conceived without consideration of the usual recipients of artistic production - in fact, without consideration of any specific destination. This rupture with collectivity and this indifference for the rules of comportment ans expression can be considered a pathological element in the medical sense. Nevertheless, this idea encourages the exercise and blossoming of mental virtues that ordinarily are stifled in the "norma" person. Whoever desires in art a disorientation and a heat of the spirit will find it in "Art Brut". Since 1945, Jean Dubuffet has searched for "extra cultural" works in psychiatric hospitals, especially in Switzerland and France, by the spiritual mediums, and by the renegades of the society in general. Although the collection was never normally excessible to the public at large, it nevertheless exercised a huge fascination. Wanting to assure a definitive public status to the collection, Dubuffet offered it to the city of Lausanne in 1971. The collection of "Art Brut" was inaugurated at the Chäteau de Beaulieu in Lausanne in February, 1976. It contains at present more than 15'000 items. With the help of all of those who hold it dearly, it will continue to enrich itself and enlarge its public.

>from here<

alexander

consuelo "chelo" gonzales amezcua

stanislav holas

alexandre p. lobanov

alexandre p. lobanov

alexandre p. lobanov

the images are from here

theo

l.c. spooner

l.c. spooner

fiodor smirnov

lubos plny

augustin lesage

augustin lesage

augustin lesage

images from the same link as above

fleury-joseph crepin

baudouin fierens

auguste forestier

auguste forestier

same image link

"Frances"

Czech nationality

Born in 1974

Frantisek Vanecek chose for himself the pen name of "Frances". He has trouble adjusting to being in school, tries out for an agricultural school, again without success. He then decides to work for the railroad company. In the spring of 1992, he spends three weeks in a forest where he gets arrested for vagrancy and is sent to the mental hospital of Horni Berkovice.

When he leaves the hospital a few months later, he begins the life of a "homeless anarchist". He starts drawing and writing a journal entitled The Night : poems, religious texts, drawings, collages, all made with different materials (papers, matchboxes, wire grids, nails or train tickets). His everyday life is gathered, sealed into a sort of books made into boxes.

It is as if he wanted to fix everything, create memories for himself and for others as not to forget his life in a dreary hospital where he gets brainwashed (he received electroshock therapy) or in a squat. This also explains why Frantisek has left part of his memories to be kept at the ABCD collection.

In 1996, he is taken in by the police who find him at the top of a chimney of a nuclear power station. Following an argument with his girlfriend, he breaks the windows of a restaurant, gets arrested again and sent for six months to a mental hospital.

After such events, one could wonder whether mental hospitals are not considered more as prisons than establishments to treat illnesses ; the communist tradition seems well anchored in these institutions, in which regulations are unfavorable to those who might be uncooperative with the system. Considered a danger to society, Frantisek remains institutionalized.

Henry Darger

American nationality

Born in Chicago, Illinois, on April the 12th, 1892

Dies in Chicago in 1973

Henry Darger is four years old when his mother dies, giving birth to a little girl. This little sister is given to a foster family and he will never see her again.

When he reaches the age of seven, his father, incapable of assuming the needs of his child, sends him to an orphanage. Henry will end up in an institution for retarded children where he suffers from violence and bullying. He runs away at the age of seventeen.

We know very little about the next phase of his life.It seems that in 1913, he witnesses the total destruction of a city by a tornado. Traces of him have been found from the early 20s when he was a janitor in a Chicago hospital. He will remain there his entire life, until his retirement after suffering a leg injury in 1963.

In 1911, at the age of nineteen, he begins writing a saga that will fill more than fifteen thousand pages. The fifteen volumes, abundantly illustrated, are entitled : The Story of the Vivian Girls in what is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.

He describes the combat of the virtuous and immortal Vivian girls, who are helped by Captain Henry Darger, the leader of an organization protecting children against the evil adults, the Glandelinians, who attempt to capture the children in order to induce them to slavery, torture them and assassinate them.

Darger illustrates his epic on large sheets of paper covered on both sides (some are more than nine feet), some with illustrations cut out from magazines. These drawings represent little girls (some with the genitals of little boys) pursued by cruel soldiers, terrorized by devastating tornadoes or deadly explosions. Some scenes depict these girls strangled by phantomatic adults. Every figure is enhanced with gouache.

Darger loves colors and one can only agree with John MacGregor when he says : "Nowadays very few artists can use yellows, reds and purples with Darger’s talent. There are even less of them who can render nature’s green light before the storm."

Darger’s obsession is about lost children and their adoption. A goal continuously destroyed by a powerless God who turns down this destiny. It could be the story of a fight, Henry Darger’s fight against the one that harasses him and is determined to destroy him. He seems often out of control, cursing at God, throwing small string balls against the little religious statues set on the mantelpiece to knock them down, like in those games with cans in the amusement parks ; and the next day, Henry spends the whole day in church, begging for forgiveness.

After 1946, he uses photographic enlargements and tracing paper in order to duplicate the same image. This cloning technique will help enrich his works, giving them a stronger imagery but also proving - by increasing their numbers - the power of the children’s army.

When Darger uses scissors and glue, it is not because he does not care about the drawing but it helps him with the military strategy and the symbolic rescue of the children. In his own way he feels that - by cutting out their images - he adopts them. One could also say that by exposing them to gunfire, he puts their lives in danger. The signification of this technique is as ambiguous and complex as Darger’s work. (Cf. Journal, Interpreting : Henry Darger, p.325.)

Darger’s landlord, the painter and photographer Nathan Lerner, never knew anything about his tenant’s activities. At the age of eighty-one, Henry Darger, incapable of climbing up the stairs to his room, asked Lerner to put him in a nursing home.

It was then that Nathan discovered Henry’s room. The walls of the room were blackened by soot coming from the coal heating ; the room itself had probably never been cleaned in fifty years. Heaps of newspapers, magazine clippings and objects were piled up to the ceiling.

The room guarded a treasure, an exceptional and disturbing work. Henry lived in absolute solitude, working during the day, going to church once or twice a day and spent nights drawing and writing. His work is also a diary, notes on weather reports, files full of newspaper clippings about lost or murdered children.

Henry Darger lived and created in total anonymity. When Kiyoko Lerner, Nathan’s wife, crossed the path of this bum looking old man returning from church and asked him how he was, Henry, without looking up, responded : "Maybe the wind will stop blowing tomorrow."