Almanach de l’art brut

Almanach de l’art brut – Facsimile and critical edition presented and edited by Sarah Lombardi and Baptiste Brun, in collaboration with Vincent Monod
Texts by Sarah Lombardi, Baptiste Brun, Sarah Burkhalter, and Lia Bagutti

Jean Dubuffet, together with André Breton, Jean Paulhan, Benjamin Péret, and several others, launched his Almanac of Art Brut project in May 1948. The twelve notebooks, one for each month, revealed the work of over forty obscure, not to say unknown, artists and creators of the time: Gaston Chaissac, Aloïse Corbaz, Robert Tatin, Adolf Wölfli, Germain Vandersteen… A treatise on painting was added by Jean Dubuffet along with a calendar of saints, as is typical of all almanacs, which made fun of the art world of the period. The manuscript was ready for the publishers in October 1948, but in the end it never went to press. This large, almost 500-page book has been in the Art Brut Collection in Lausanne since it opened in 1976. The present facsimile edition provides the opportunity to rethink the whole context in which Art Brut was invented and sheds light on the links between the worlds of art, literature, psychiatry, and ethnology in the immediate post-war period. The book contains much previously unpublished material and includes illustrations based on photographic records of the period.