Art Brut and creators of Art Brut

Art Brut is “fierce and furtive like a deer,” wrote Jean Dubuffet, unlike "customary art", which is most often discussed when we talks about art, whether it is classical, romantic, baroque, modern... The second is on the side of the stuffed, of the ordered. The first is on the side of the wild, of the elusive. It is difficult, however, to say more about Art Brut, without " almost kill him." So that he does not find himself caught in the vice of the cultural norms imposed by the social elite, Jean Dubuffet wanted to invent a way of not defining Art Brut. He insisted on this from 1947, with his sense of provocation: "To formulate what this Art Brut is, certainly it is not none of my business. To define a thing – or even to isolate it – is to damage it greatly. It is almost killing it." The ways of not defining Art Brut, for Dubuffet, are numerous, verbose, sometimes contradictory, in a claimed manner. It is what this volume gives to understand, bringing together all of its writings on the subject, from 1945 and 1985. Reflections for the Art Company Brut, which he founded in 1948 in Paris, letters to André Bretons, to the personalities of the psychiatric world Jean Oury or Jacqueline Porret-Forel, but also tributes to the works of Paul End, Clément, Joseph Heu, Berthe U, Aloïse, Laure–: multiple are the directions of his thought, which always aims to be open. If We cannot say what Art Brut is, but we can move theoretically on the traces of a plurality of practices. "Any assertion, if maintained over a long period, turns into absurdity. I I believe that thought only obtains usable fruits by constituting itself in plural circulation, by overlapping floors, like the direction of cars on the stepped tracks of Tokyo," Dubuffet also said. It is indeed this non-univocal way in which he considers Art Brut, as the fast lanes which cross a metropolis, intersect, branch off, spiral, paying attention to the incessant flow of lights in the night and to each "unleashing of ingenuity and innovation” in its singularity.