Art Brut

About

Before the term existed, a few psychiatrists had begun keeping their patients' drawings. Walter Morgenthaler published a study of Adolf Wölfli in 1921, and Hans Prinzhorn's book on the art of psychiatric patients followed a year later. Wölfli, confined in an asylum near Bern from 1895, filled thousands of pages with dense, musical, map-like drawings that tell an invented life story.

The French painter Jean Dubuffet coined the name in 1945 and spent decades gathering work by people untouched by art schools and cultural fashion: Aloïse Corbaz's coloured-pencil lovers and queens, Augustin Lesage's symmetrical spiritualist canvases, carvings and drawings by hermits, prisoners and mediums. He believed they showed an inventiveness that trained artists had lost. In 1976 his collection opened to the public in Lausanne. The English critic Roger Cardinal proposed Outsider Art as a counterpart term in 1972, and the field has since widened to many self-taught traditions.