Exhibition
Art Brut Writing

Starting in 1945 Jean Dubuffet was increasingly interested in paintings, drawings, sculptures, embroideries, and handwritten pages, that self-taught individuals produced on the periphery of the cultural field. While the French artist coined the term “Art Brut” – usually called outsider art in English – for all his discoveries, the writing formed from the very first a distinct body of work. In most cases elaborated in psychiatric institutions, these texts were conserved in medical files and viewed not as part and parcel of the visual artwork but as diagnostic supports.

Displaying enormous variety, these singular pieces were often crafted from makeshift materials and stand out thanks to their inventiveness and irreverence towards lexical, syntactic and spelling conventions.

In 1979 Michel Thévoz, the first director of Lausanne’s Collection of Art Brut, mounted a show that was accompanied by the seminal Écrits bruts, his authoritative book on the subject, and brought these texts out of the obscurity they had been consigned to. Once seen as merely tokens or symptoms of maladjusted patients and social deviance, today they are deemed works of art in their own right.

Through a selection of works from the holdings of the Collection of Art Brut, a number of which are being shown here for the first time, the exhibition invites us to explore a broad range of writing by Swiss outsider authors, those poets of the shadow world. They include Aloïse Corbaz (1886–1964), Joseph Heuer (1827–1914), Eugénie Nogarède (1882–1951), Pascal Vonlanthen (1957*), and Adolf Wölfli (1864–1930). Unreadable at times, fantasized, occasionally mixed with drawings, these graphic inventions display a formal and poetic expressiveness, mapping out a territory of power and freedom.