ART BRUT ENTERS THE MUSEUM! Sophie Duplaix in conversation with Bruno Decharme

SD What first prompted you to begin this collection, which in 2021 became the subject of an exceptional donation to the National Museum of Modern Art? Was Art Brut its focus from the outset?
BDI am not a collector by temperament; I do not like accumulation. In a way, I was ensnared by a passion for Art Brut. I could never have imagined collecting anything else. I first encountered Art Brut in 1977, when I discovered the Jean Dubuffet collection donated to the City of Lausanne. In the 1980s, I also regularly visited the small museum outside Paris that housed the L’Aracine collection, now on view at LaM in Villeneuve d’Ascq. I also became friends with the first private collectors of Art Brut. At that time, there were only a handful of us. My interest was initially more intellectual than visual, but I allowed myself a few early purchases—the works were very inexpensive then—and little by little I became “hooked.” That addiction had its roots in a period of my life in the 1970s, when I was studying philosophy. At the time, the dominant ideology of contemporary society was being radically challenged. There was a strong interest in the margins, in alterity. I attended the lectures of Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and many others. I had also learned that in Switzerland, a young professor named Michel Thévoz, director of the Collection de l’Art Brut, was communicating his passion with extraordinary brilliance. Discovering the works in Lausanne—works I felt had come from an utterly unknown world—was a profound shock, an emotion that has continued to nourish my life ever since. All the questions raised during my university years suddenly found meaning in these Art Brut works, in their histories and in their creative processes. With time, I realized that what gave me the greatest pleasure was not their intellectual interpretation but direct contact with the works themselves. Perhaps my retina is more developed than my brain. Collecting Art Brut may also be connected to my profession as a filmmaker, someone who tells stories and constructs fictions. It is also an intensely concrete activity, a little like architecture. For me, collecting is an act of construction… a cathedral, in fact: it is my Sagrada Família.
SD What is it that fascinates you about Art Brut?
BDFor me, collecting Art Brut is a kind of ritual enchantment. When one is under a spell, it is very difficult to recover one’s reason and rationalize things. But since you invite me to do so, I will try. Part of the spell lies in the enigma these works seem to contain. They are strange and troubling, at once disturbing and often very beautiful: they stop us in our tracks. Is it because they answer some archaic call buried deep within us? Perhaps they resonate with psychic structures formed in early childhood, that moment when messages from the outside world—parents, the surrounding environment—are experienced by the very young child as sounds whose meaning is not yet understood, a kind of amorphous magma that may be reassuring or threatening. Many of these works contain several levels of meaning. Let us take a drawing by Adolf Wölfli: musical staves become rivers or ornamental devices, even anthropomorphic motifs. In other cases, drawing becomes writing; a rain of heterogeneous, mysterious signs floods the page, as though boundaries were dissolving, as though our certainties, our norms, our hierarchies were giving way beneath our feet.
I am especially moved by artists who imagine systems intended to save or heal the world. Henry Darger’s work is devastating in this regard: his way of bearing witness to the horrors inflicted upon beings torn away from the wonderland of childhood derives its force from contrast. He depicts appalling massacres, but within idyllic settings; his indictment is therefore all the more merciless: Eden has been sullied, violated.
I am also fascinated by devotees of calendars, grids, and diagrams, as in the case of Zdeněk Košek and his meteorological charts. As I once said in an interview: “When one of these artists imposes order—provided it serves grand designs, that is, that it exceeds the organization of everyday life—the dream machine runs wild. Whether or not we understand them matters little; it is the ordering itself that fascinates, as in the enigmatic works of Melvin Way. Any ‘aesthetically posed’ formula is reassuring: is it because it takes on the appearance of a law and therefore suggests that the situation is, apparently, under control?”[1]
SD In selecting works, did you seek to take the history of Art Brut into account, gradually filling gaps with the aim of assembling an exemplary collection in this field?
BDThe formation of my collection has more or less followed two paths. One is intuitive and uncontrollable: a work appears and I feel, “I must have it.” In those moments there is no rational thought whatsoever. The other path is reflective: an attempt to encompass part of the history of Art Brut, to restore some of its key moments. I therefore made particular efforts to acquire works that stand as markers within that history. At the same time, I dug deeply, searched, prospected, in order to discover unknown works. Everything I had acquired gradually began to resemble a coherent whole, and I imagined developing a project that went beyond the mere constitution of a collection. From the late 2000s onward, that undertaking was enriched by the creation, under Barbara Safarova’s direction, of the association abcd (art brut connaissance & diffusion), a research group devoted to Art Brut. We began organizing exhibitions, publishing our work, and so on. Barbara’s role has been essential in my life as a collector. Without her, I would no doubt never have brought the collection to where it is today. She is a researcher, a gleaner of ideas, whereas I am a gatherer of objects. Possession does not interest her; what she values is the scientific gaze she brings to this art that I collect, whereas I like to build, stone by stone. Her thinking has fundamentally nourished my own way of seeing. I rely on her critical expertise, which allows me to surrender myself to the reverie the works inspire in me. We complement one another, and our fusion made it possible to create abcd: the fruit of both a collection and a reflection on Art Brut.
And even if I must confess that I rarely seek advice when a work first strikes me, I often ask Barbara’s opinion afterward. Yet not once in twenty-five years has she challenged my purchases, even though they were often made at the expense of our family’s comfort. Our collaboration has also proved immensely fruitful in the films devoted to these artists: Barbara is, in a sense, their author, and I their director. Later, from 2015 onward, I began to reflect on the future of my collection, on how best to safeguard this body of major works that is representative of the history of Art Brut while also shaped by my own subjective vision. Various options were considered. Some never came to fruition, such as a museum project linked to the Palais du Facteur Cheval. I had also imagined creating an endowment fund to protect the collection. Finally, in 2021, an opportunity arose to give Art Brut an exceptional place within the collections of the National Museum of Modern Art at the Centre Pompidou: a donation of around one thousand works, a dedicated room, and the creation of a center for research and reflection.
SD You have expanded your selection to include artists who are not “identified” as Art Brut artists in the original sense of the term, whether because they are younger, come from previously unexplored geographical areas, or for other reasons. Do you still feel comfortable with the term “Art Brut” as applied to your collection?BDThe history of Art Brut is fairly complex, notably because it does not form a school. It is not a movement; there is no unifying style, no shared doctrine. To a great extent, Art Brut depends on the eye of each individual collector. For my part, I refer back to the markers Jean Dubuffet established from the time he founded the Compagnie de l’Art Brut. His own perspective, however, evolved in the course of his research. The first director of the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, and the successive directors after him, also brought their own perspectives. The field of Art Brut evolves with its time. Productions born of alterity take on new forms, and collectors apply their own filters as well. Consequently, although I place myself in Dubuffet’s lineage, my eye is different, and I do not necessarily include some of the works he chose. But in the absence of a better term, what “Art Brut” designates—which, incidentally, I do not like very much—still suits me. It allows for change over time and across historical moments. Art Brut arises out of sociological, psychological, and psychic conditions that are often radically removed from those of the art taught and studied in schools. Yet these singular works also form part of the history of art. By removing them from the hospital or from social marginality, Jean Dubuffet placed them, despite himself, within that history, even if his stroke of genius also came with a form of ghettoization. Over time, however, the barriers gradually gave way, and Art Brut found itself exposed to every wind, for better and for worse. At times I think Dubuffet may ultimately have been right to want to protect these works from banalization and commodification, the problem being less the rise in prices than the inflation of often mediocre offerings—the market must be fed, after all. It is up to us, then, to remain vigilant. Respect for this double imperative—inscription within art history and attention to singularity—lay at the heart of my thinking when we considered a donation to the Mnam. In my view, it needed both to retain its own perimeter and to become integrated into the history of the museum’s collections. Not through “dialogue,” which would be illusory given how tenuous or even nonexistent these artists’ social link to us—to “the other”—so often was, but through confrontations and perspectives that we ourselves choose to establish.
All of us, whether artists or not, “mad” or “sound of mind,” share the same questions, more or less consciously articulated, the same existential anxieties, the same bewilderment before the enigmas that assail us. Each person brings his or her own answers, expressed in a personal language, through personal forms of knowledge, mirrors of an individual history. To place everything on the same level, as though there were a single mode of thought, seems to me dangerous. Art Brut belongs to an elsewhere that partakes as much of art as of a form of science or religion. We must therefore try to decipher these specificities in order better to understand the “other,” and in doing so, better to accept, respect, and perhaps even love that otherness.
SD More specifically, how did you go about selecting the works you wished to see enter the Mnam collections? And what do you expect from the framework established around your donation in terms of scholarship and public visibility?
BDThe selection was very simple. I took into account nearly all the artists in my collection. I chose the strongest works by each of them, and arrived at roughly one thousand works. It is a historical and geographical panorama that should allow the museum teams to undertake deep, sustained work on the basis of this corpus. That corresponds to the research dimension of my donation proposal, from which I expect a great deal. My first hope is to convince those working within the museum of the importance of this art and, perhaps, to awaken new vocations or at least new lines of research. I hope this donation will act as a spur, encouraging people to think about art differently and to break down categories of thought: art, science, philosophy, religion, and so on. It seems to me that twentieth-century art history is already defined by such attempts at rupture, and Art Brut fully testifies to that process of questioning. I can see how, over the past forty years, Art Brut has gained legitimacy. When I began collecting in the late 1970s, there were practically no private collections. The few Art Brut exhibitions that did take place were highly confidential, with only a meager audience of enthusiasts. Today, one of the greatest museums in the world houses my collection. The Grand Palais is organizing an exhibition intended to bring together the finest Art Brut works and recount their extraordinary history. Hardly a week goes by without some event on the subject. I also hope, at a later stage, to convince other collectors to imagine donations of their own, in order to enrich mine. It is my wish that, once its renovation work is completed, the Centre Pompidou will devote a larger space to Art Brut and give the subject even greater visibility.
SD Do you have favorite artists, or are they all equally your children?
BDThey are all my children, but as the coherence of my collection gradually imposed itself, I nevertheless made choices and established hierarchies. Some children are more gifted than others and must be guided toward excellence, without neglecting those with more modest capacities. Art history certainly calls for the strictest possible selection, but the collector’s subjective eye and discoveries ultimately take precedence. Thus I have championed overlooked artists whom I consider exceptional, such as Zdeněk Košek, or Janko Domšič, whose invaluable and previously unknown body of work I was able to save. Košek’s work fascinates me in particular. I came to know it thanks to Terezie Zemánková, the granddaughter of the artist Anna Zemánková. When I met him, he had just come through a very painful period in his life, marked by repeated stays in psychiatric hospitals. Košek’s work is distinctive in that it has, so to speak, a double face. He was a painter with a rather classic expressionist production. But he also developed a body of work of great inventiveness, entirely unlike his painterly output. It is an extraordinary oeuvre, testifying to his obsession with the sky, conceived during the darkest periods of his psychotic crises. After emerging from that painful chapter, and in an effort to detach himself from it, he wanted to throw everything away. I was able to rescue a large number of those works from the trash—fabulous talismans. Košek was convinced that he had a mission to command the universe. He felt himself traversed by an uninterrupted flow of information and inhabited by the need to record and transmit everything. That is why he noted, without hierarchy and on every kind of support—school notebooks, maps, magazine pages—the data he perceived as constitutive of meteorological phenomena that had to be mastered: letters, numbers, sounds, various signs. In the portrait film I devoted to him, he explained: “I was not only master of time but also of politics; I appointed Vaclav Havel President of the Republic. I believed myself immortal. My head was like a whirlwind, a fan, when I was making all those drawings. I was master of the world, and I had the enormous responsibility of solving all the problems of humanity. If I did not solve them, who else would?”[2]
Another artist whose work profoundly engages me is Janko Domšič. His drawings are filled with superhuman figures inhabited by divine powers. Made in colored pencil, ballpoint pen, and felt-tip marker, they are associated with geometricized figures and texts interweaving French, Croatian, and German, which list fragments of his life, repeat song lyrics, and place God at the center. His lexicon refers to mystical ideas, Freemasonry, and economics. Strong graphic symbols—the pentagram, the swastika, the dollar sign, the communist hammer and sickle, the Orthodox cross—together with rays descending from the heavens structure an intentionally coded body of work from which an enigmatic sense of power emerges. My fascination also lies in the fact that all these symbols are present in the iconography of the twentieth century and resonate deeply within us. The story of these acquisitions is itself a fairy tale. In 2004, I organized the exhibition À corps perdu at the Pavillon des Arts in Paris. I already owned two small drawings by Janko Domšič, purchased from Alain Bourbonnais. A reproduction of one of the works had been chosen for the poster, a large print of which hung at the exhibition entrance. A few days before the show closed, someone left a Post-it at the reception desk stating that he possessed a number of drawings by the same artist. At the time, I believed all of Domšič’s works were in Bourbonnais’s hands, so I was surprised. Suspicious and unconvinced, I called the man anyway, and we arranged to meet. In a modest apartment in the Avenue de Clichy neighborhood, Mr. Trovato ushered me into the dining room, and there on the table I discovered, dumbfounded, around fifty drawings, each more beautiful than the last, including five large formats—absolute masterpieces. Mr. Trovato was a house painter who had lived in the same building as Janko Domšič, who had died in 1983. Solidarity was strong in those days, and Avenue de Clichy was still a marginal area. The residents of the building had allowed Domšič to live on the top floor, under the eaves, at the end of a corridor lined with former maid’s rooms. He had built himself a kind of hut out of his drawings mounted on cardboard. Every day, Domšič worked in a café; it was there that Bourbonnais had first met him and acquired some drawings, but Domšič had kept some of the finest. When he died, the caretaker cleared out the cramped space he occupied and left the drawings in the street beside the trash bins. Leaving for work one morning, Mr. Trovato, who had a good eye, rescued these marvels from destruction. But because his wife found them hideous, he had to store them under the bed—until our meeting. I thus found myself in the uncomfortable position of a collector facing the stroke of luck of a lifetime, in front of a man who had no intention of giving up his rescue. His wife’s hatred of the works, combined with the sum I offered, ultimately convinced him. I selected around thirty of the finest drawings. The Centre Pompidou received a beautiful group of them through my donation, including a sumptuous large-format work.
SD Are there other themes specific to Art Brut works that particularly interest you?
BDThrough the two examples I have just mentioned, I realize that I am especially sensitive to artists of excess, to these celestial travelers who embrace the world. In this register, Adolf Wölfli is a master. At the moment of his confinement in a psychiatric hospital, he declared that from that day onward he had forgotten everything: for him this marked the beginning of a “second life.” One finds a similar metaphor in a statement by Aloïse Corbaz following her own confinement: she explained that she experienced a rebirth after feeling reduced to a state of “black mud” following a symbolic death. From then on, her world would be one of wonder and voluptuousness, embodied by kings and queens, princes and princesses bathed in flowers of soft colors, a world of which she imagined herself the great orchestrator. Wölfli, for his part, sought to dominate not only Space but also Creation and Eternity. His formal inventions are breathtaking: he organizes complex networks in which games of perspective and decorative dimension give the works an ornamental and rhythmic character at once. In the biographical notes Barbara and I devoted to the artist, we described his trajectory—from annihilation to the reinvention of the Whole, of history, geography, religion, music—in the following terms: “‘Rejected,’ victim of a ‘bitter accident,’ Wölfli names himself ‘Saint,’ ‘Great-Great-God,’ ‘Genius,’ or else ‘Adolf II,’ ‘Emperor.’ In his world, he escapes all accidents or ‘monster attacks.’ And if he dies, he is resurrected. But he also calls himself ‘Doufi’—a frail little being, lost in the midst of a terrifying world, enclosed in an endless spiral, stretched out on his deathbed, in his coffin, at the center of a labyrinth.”[3] This image is clearly visible in the right-hand section of the large 1915 drawing included in the donation. That work is probably one of the most important works in all of art. As a side note, I acquired it a very long time ago at a public sale in Switzerland. At the time, no one was interested in Wölfli, and I was able to obtain it for very little money. Since then, not a year has gone by without a collector making me an offer—sometimes stratospheric—to buy it. There would, incidentally, be fertile material there for a psychoanalyst: why was it impossible for me to sell certain of these marvels, preferring instead to give them away, whereas other works, not included in the donation and left to my children, I would have no difficulty seeing them return to the market if my children wished?
To return to Aloïse Corbaz, mentioned earlier: how could one fail to marvel at her large drawing, one of the jewels of the donation? Most of her works are made on Canson-type paper, doubtless supplied by the hospital. But the works that move me most are those on Kraft-type papers that had wrapped parcels she received or that were delivered to the hospital. Aloïse delighted in crumpling them and then ironing them flat—she was in charge of the laundry—and often one still finds the stamps and postal marks. These works bear witness to the precariousness of the materials employed, to the importance of their texture, but also to the significance the artist attached to the journeys made by the parcels, a link to the outside world from which she was cut off. One large roll had lain on top of a bookcase, covered in dust. The physician who owned it had received it from a colleague who had cared for Aloïse Corbaz—I do not know whether it was Dr. Hans Steck or Dr. Alfred Bader. This drawing belongs to her earliest large formats. Another wonder by Aloïse is the notebook La Blanche Cavale, which once belonged to Jacqueline Porret-Forel, the general practitioner who cared for her and carried out essential memorial work, including a catalogue raisonné. According to Porret-Forel, this notebook is the most exceptional in the series, by reason of its richness and complexity.
SD In your view, what would be the masterpiece of your donation?
BDAll the works in this donation were chosen with great care, and in my view they are all important. But among those I regard as masterpieces is that marvelous gouache by Georgiana Houghton. Here again, it is a collector’s fairy tale. About fifteen years ago, at an art fair in Cologne, the gallerist Susanne Zander showed me an unframed drawing set aside in a portfolio, one that appeared to be anonymous. I was fascinated by the gouache and bought it for next to nothing. Time passed, and I visited a major exhibition presenting works whose line closely resembled that of the drawing I had acquired. Through a comparison of formal and technical characteristics, it became obvious that mine was a work by Georgiana Houghton. She had developed a gouache technique of extraordinary precision that allowed no revision. What makes the drawing in my donation particular is that it is the most “dramatic” of her production, and also of a large format (48 x 35 cm), whereas most of her works are smaller. Until around ten years ago, her works remained dormant in two institutions, one in Australia and the other in England. Only two drawings, besides mine—or rather the one that now belongs to the Centre Pompidou—were in private hands. This face is fascinating: one feels drawn into its whorls, trapped by those labyrinthine lines, seized by those brain-like forms—an image of death. This drawing by Georgiana Houghton and the large graphite drawing by Adolf Wölfli are probably the two works to which I am most attached. Donating them was both a wrench and an immense happiness. But when I see them displayed to the public in the museum, my pleasure is intense, my joy complete. I have the sense of having fulfilled my mission. I “beheaded” my collection of its finest part in order to make this donation. I gave the rest to my children. My pleasure now lies in accompanying Art Brut initiatives at the Centre Pompidou.

Bruno Decharme is a filmmaker and collector of Art Brut. In 2021, he donated nearly one thousand works to the National Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou.

Sophie Duplaix is Chief Curator of Contemporary Collections at the National Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou. She has curated numerous exhibitions devoted to Jean Dubuffet, from the retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 2001 (with Daniel Abadie) to the one presented at the Fondation Pierre Gianadda in Martigny, Switzerland, in 2021–22.

[1] Quoted in Julie Rouart, “Entretien avec Bruno Decharme,” in B. Decharme and B. Safarova (eds.), Collection abcd/Bruno Decharme, Paris, abcd/Flammarion, 2014, pp. 340–341.

[2] Quoted in abcd. Le Journal, no. 2, “Janko Domšič et Zdenek Košek. Créateurs du ciel et de la terre,” November 2005, n.p. [Biographical note and index of works presented in the exhibition]; Zdenek Košek, 2005, directed by Bruno Decharme, 15 mins, produced by abcd.

[3] B. Decharme and B. Safarova, note on Adolf Wölfli, in Collection abcd/Bruno Decharme, op. cit., p. 384.

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