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INDEXES ON

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Published by The Bee Publishing Company, Newtown, ConnecticutNewsstand Rate $1.75

December 4, 2015

By James D. BalestrieriNEW YORK CITY Before you read this, look

at the images that accompany this essay. Con-sider them individually, then compare them. Areyou curious, enthralled, appalled, dismissive? Doyou want to know more? Do you recoil? Do yousay to yourself or out loud to the person besideyou, I could do that. Jean Dubuffet (19011985)collected these works and thousands more underthe banner of a term he coined: Art Brut brutmeaning crude, unformed, raw. The French paint-er, sculptor and printmaker would grant not onlythe validity but the necessity of all your viscer-al reactions. But, to your I could do that, hemight reply, True. Why dont you?

It is easier to define Art Brut by what it is notthan by what it is. Art Brut is not a movement,like Impressionism. It is not a school, like theHudson River School. It does not name a group

of artists, like the Taos Founders or the Ten. Itis, in a way, Outsider art, but it is not folk art,with its handmade, handed-down traditions of na-ivet and craft. Art Brut shares something withasylum art, yet it is not concerned with findingclues to pathologies in the productions of the in-stitutionalized. Childrens art begins as Art Brut,but as soon as children want their art to imitatethe world of their parents, Art Brut questions thepurity of the impulse.

Despite all that it is not, the exhibition Art Brutin America: The Incursion of Jean Dubuffet, atthe American Folk Art Museum through January10, is fascinating, not in the facile way that wethrow that word around, but in the way that thesun, scintillating on the water, or a fire, lickingand crackling in the darkness, fascinates us intoa kind of waking trance. If it sometimes takes an

effort to confront these works, it takes even more totear yourself away from them.Art Brut is found art, art that arises directly from

the impulse to make art, art that does not know itis art: doodles and scrawls, the productions of obses-sions and distractions. It is art before artfulness, artthat would surprise the artist if the artist knew itwas art. It is a beautiful cat the color of cappucci-no foam padding out of a shock of ruddy weeds andlemony brush beside the train tracks at the moment as I write this when the train stops to let anoth-er train pass. Art Brut is accidental art, a car crashbetween the psyche and the image. (The images ofthe cat and the car crash should give you the flavorof Dubuffets own, extensive writings on art and hisinsistence on setting down the lightning immediacyof first reactions.)

In 1945, just as the horrors of World War II wereboth winding down and coming to light, Jean Dubuf-

fet began amassing an assemblage of works thatwould become the foundation for the Collection delArt Brut, based in Lausanne, Switzerland. Fromlate 1951 until 1962, the collection was displayed atthe Creeks, the East Hampton, N.Y., home of wealthyartist Alfonso Ossorio, and was available for privateshowings for artists like Jackson Pollock, Henri Ma-tisse, Mark Rothko and scores of others. Some wereenthralled by what they saw; many seemed indiffer-ent. Few, in hindsight, were entirely unaffected, for,while Dubuffet found Art Brut at the edges of edu-cation, culture and sanity, he also insisted that thissame impulse slept in the breast of every one of us,that it was a common birthright, even if it came forthuncommonly and expressed itself idiosyncratically,under unusual conditions.

Plchinle gnsthrs vitrs-he [sic] (Punchi-nello gangsters vitrs-he) by Gaston Duf (GastonDufour) (19201966), Saint-Andr-lez-Lille Psy-chiatric Hospital, France, 1949. Colored pencil ondrawing paper; 27 by 197/8inches.

Arnaud Conne photo

Le Diable (The Devil) by Pascal-Dsir Mai-sonneuve (18631934), Bordeaux, France, circa19271928. Shells; 91/8by 85/8by 7 inches.

Arnaud Conne photo

Untitled by Gaston Chaissac (19101964), Vende,France, circa 1948. Ink on paper, 87/8by 6 inches.

Amlie Blanc photo

Untitled sculpture by Auguste Forestier (18871958), Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole PsychiatricHospital, France, circa 19351951. Carved andpainted wood with fabric, leather, zipper, but-tons, medallions, aluminum foil and nails; 20by 73/8by 105/8inches. Claude Bornand photo

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Perhaps the best definition of ArtBrut in English is the translation ofDubuffets own words by his friend Os-sorio for a 1949 exhibition of the worksin New York: We mean by that termworks done by people uncontaminat-ed by artistic culture, works in whichthe sense of mimicry, contrary to whathappens among intellectuals, playslittle or no part, with the result thattheir makers draw all (subjects, choiceof materials used, means of transposi-tion, manner of writing, etc) from theirown being and not from hangovers ofclassical or fashionable art. We witnesshere the artistic process in all its pu-rity, raw, reinvented on all its levelsby the maker, starting solely from his

own impulses. Many of the objectsshown are the work of inmates of psy-chiatric hospitals. We see no reason formaking of these works, as is so oftendone, a special department. All con-tacts that we have had (and they aremany) with our more or less confinedcomrades, have convinced us that themechanisms of artistic creation are ex-actly the same in their hands as theyare among people reputedly normal.

Jean Dubuffet was himself uncom-mon. The son of a prosperous Frenchwine merchant could this be theorigin of the word brut, as in Cham-pagne brut? he was a Modernist whodespised Modernism. Nevertheless,Dubuffet is a seminal figure in post-World War II art. He sought and em-ployed new and nontraditional materi-

als restlessly, daring almost willing his art to destroy itself. He scratchedportraits into paint mixed with dirtand sand, faces innocent in executionand frank in expression, rising aboveugliness to become, in their own way,beautiful. He covered supports in crin-kled gold and silver foil in an attemptto convey the energy of the births ofstars and universes.

But he is perhaps best known for hislarge-scale paintings and sculptures ofabstract outlined forms in reds, bluesand whites. These pieces hit the eyelike interlocked layers of diacriticaland punctuation marks of some un-known language or, perhaps, like a

childs bucket of toys wooden letters, toysoldiers and animals, toy cars and trucks strewn on the floor in a jumbled heap.

Look again at the works illustrated here.Augustin Lesages 1932 Composition sym-bolique, amour pour lhumanit (Symboliccomposition, love for humanity) is a mandalato some lost faith of Byzantium, while AdolfWolflis 1921 untitled (Saint Adolph bittenin the leg by the snake) is sheet music fora melody heard in a dream, something youhear while the avant-garde composer JohnCage sits at the piano and plays nothing forfour minutes and 33 seconds (which he did in1952), Robert Gies Distribution deffluvesavec machine centrale et tableau mtrique(Distribution of emanations with central ma-chine and metric table), executed (there is aninteresting word for how this piece came intobeing) circa 1916, is reminiscent of the sci-fi

drawings some of my grade-school classmatesdreamt up during dreary filmstrips about soil.Are the figures connected by the energy of lifeor in the simultaneous shock of electric death,or in their sudden awareness of that death?

We all share a touch of pareidolia, seeingwolves and ships and faces in clouds, but Pas-cal-Dsir Maisonneuves shell art Le Diable(The Devil) transforms objects we generallysee as beautiful into a visage that taunts uswith its wild, spiraling eyes.

Francis Palanque scrawled on crushed egg-shells. Jeanne Tripier out-Rorschached Ror-schach in sugar and ink. Jean Marchand andJuliette Bataille worked in bits of string andyarn they found. Art Brut is a primer for con-temporary practice.

It is hard these days to imagine any corner ofhuman experience that might be somehow un-tainted, unmediated by culture. Philosophers

of French Structuralism and Post-Structural-ism Barthes and Derrida, for example might have argued that Dubuffets quest wasnothing more than an exercise in futility. But,like all Holy Grails, the journey may well bemore important than the object of the quest.Perhaps no single Art Brut work shows theartistic impulse in full, made visible, yet theshadow of the impulse shimmers in each ofthem in ways that sent, and continue to send,shock waves.

If we collect art in order to partake, in someway, of some narrow slice of the impulse thatgives rise to the work in the first place, thedesire to see that impulse made manifestspeaks to a need to connect on an even deeperlevel. Something in us wants access to a pre-

Untitled by Jean Mar (Jean Marchand) (cir-ca 18281911), Bel-Air Clinic, Chne-Bourg,Switzerland, circa 1905. Newsprint, blue pa-per, plant fiber and white and black string;35/8by 2 inches.

Caroline Smyrliadis photo

Baptme de Pie XII / Un Baiser laviateur Le Pape Pie XII monnay-eur et son Sphinx sur le sige (Baptism of Pius XII / A kiss to the aviator Pope Pius XII counterfeiter and his Sphinx on the seat) by AloseCorbaz (18861964), De La Rosire Psychiatric Hospital, Gimel, Switzer-land, circa 1955. Colored pencil on a sheet of paper folded in the middle,double-sided; 59 by 393/8inches. Olivier Laffely photo

Composition symbolique, amour pour lhu-manit (Symbolic composition, love for hu-manity) by Augustin Lesage (18761954), Pas-de-Calais, France, 1932. Oil on canvas; 38 by27 inches. Claude Bornand photo

Untitled by Heinrich Anton Mller (18691930), Mnsingen Psychiatric Hospital, Bern,Switzerland, circa 19271929. Colored pencilon drawing paper; 225/8by 16 inches.

Claude Bornand photo

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cognitive plane, wants to borrow from WilliamBlake to experience innocence. In books, playsand films from Candide to Huck Finn, from For-rest Gump to Nell, we create characters throughwhose eyes we try to see the world as i f for the firsttime. In music think Philip Glass, hip-hop andour keen interest in traditional music from aroundthe world we discard tonality and return to therhythms of our bodies and the earth. In the visu-al arts Richard Serras bioform art, Ugo Rondi-nones giant cyclopean figures, Maya Lins site-spe-cific works at Storm King ephemeral art, artthat is meant to decay, to rust, to vanish, is a thing,a movement.Yet to assert that Art Brut, or any of the works I

have just mentioned, seeks meaning in the savage,the primitive, the aberrant, is to contradict whatDubuffet was all about. Dubuffet, as the catalogdescribes it, famously shared a meal with the artcritic Clement Greenberg, and the argument be-tween them surely about Art Bruts rawnessversus Greenbergs endeavor to present Modernart as an outgrowth of a carefully considered aes-thetic, unless it was about the peas led to thetwo men dining at separate tables.

No, the art and artists Dubuffet discovered andchampioned are more akin to the sensitive souls inH.P. Lovecrafts weird fictions (The Call of Cthulhusprings immediately to mind) who channel visionsof a primordial past that are also prescient harbin-gers of an unimaginable future. For a time, thesecharacters paint and sculpt incredible, impossible,

grotesque works, automatically. Then something tran-spires; the impulse recedes. They snap out of theirpersonae, sometimes cease making art altogether. Buttheir works remain as a testament and puzzle. Fur-ther, and this is the point, the art does not really stop.It just stops being made where we can see it.Art Brut does not express otherness or indulge in

nostalgia for a lost Eden. What it offers is a glimpseinto an archetypal impulse buried deep within, insideall of us, one we carry everywhere, at all times, an im-pulse hard to recognize, still harder to tap, impossibleto maintain, an impulse that is nevertheless essentialto our sense of ourselves as a species. On some con-scious, or unconscious, level, we are all always makingart.

See Art Brut in America: The Incursion of JeanDubuffet at the American Folk Art Museum. Look atyour doodles. Look.Jim Balestrieri is the director of J.N. Bartfield Galleries

in New York City. A playwright and author, he frequentlywrites about the arts.

Untitled by Francis Palanque (FrancisPalanc) (19282015), Vence, France, 1953. Fine-ly ground eggshells on canvas; 31 by 23inches. Henri Germond photo

Dcor de nuit (Night setting) by Juliette Elisa Bataille(1896?), Ville-Evrard Psychiatric Hospital, Neuilly-sur-

Marne, France, 1948. Wool and cotton embroidery on card-board; 8 by 71/8inches. Ulrich Choffat photo

Distribution deffluves avec machine centrale et tableau mtrique (Distribution ofemanations with central machine and metric table) by Robert Gie (1869?), Rosegg

Psychiatric Clinic, Switzerland, circa 1916. Pencil and India ink on tracing paper;19 by 263/8inches. Arnaud Conne photo

Untitled by Guillaume Pujolle (18931971), Tou-louse Psychiatric Hospital, France, 1938. Water-color, ink and colored pencil on paper; 113/8by87/8inches. Amlie Blanc photo

Untitled (Saint Adolph bitten in the leg by

the snake) by Adolf Wolfli (18641930), theWaldau Clinic, Bern, Switzerland, 1921. Col-ored pencil and pencil on paper; 26 by 201/8inches. Marie Humair photo

Petit dossier no. 10 (Little folder no. 10) byJeanne Tripier (18691944), Maison BlanchePsychiatric Hospital, Neuilly-sur-Marne, France(circa 19351939). Ink, varnish, and sugar on pa-per; page size between 85/8by 6 inches and 135/8by 85/8 inches. Jean-Marie Almonte and Mi-chael Legentil photo

AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM

All works illustrated are from the Collection delArt Brut, Lausanne, Switzerland.