RETHINKING ART BRUT: the Decharme Collection and the Institutional Stakes
Art Brut: a concept under tension
The history of Art Brut—a term also claimed by our association abcd (art brut connaissance et diffusion), formed around the Decharme Collection—continues to raise questions of definition, use, and legitimacy, particularly in the context of its gradual integration into museum institutions. Jean Dubuffet, who coined this concept in 1945 after discovering the works of Adolf Wölfli and Heinrich Anton Müller at the Waldau psychiatric hospital (Bern), himself altered its definition several times.
After his trip to Switzerland, he designated these productions as “art brut,” which he preferred to “art obscur”: according to him, the art of professionals is not distinguished by greater lucidity—quite the contrary. “Long live buffalo milk, raw, warm, freshly drawn[1],” he wrote, laying claim to an immediate, unfiltered creation, freed from cultural codes.
While the term quickly took hold, its definition remains elusive. Dubuffet himself underscored the difficulty: “It is very difficult to define without becoming confused […] but it is not because a thing is indefinable […] that it does not exist[2].” Initially intuitive—founded on the idea that authentic creation can exist outside institutional circuits—his thinking gradually took shape in stricter criteria.
More than eighty years after its emergence, Art Brut appears as a more flexible tool for reflection, open to new interpretations[3]. Questions nonetheless persist: is it a concept, a label, or a category in the history of art? And how should it be thought today on the basis of collections that have now become institutionalized?
In L’Art brut préféré aux arts culturels (1949), Dubuffet opposes “high culture”—which he judges sterile and mimetic—to productions that he considers radically autonomous. He makes of it a counter-model founded on a self-generated creation, drawing from the individual’s own “inner fund[4].”
This gesture is accompanied by a decisive terminological shift: in replacing “art of the insane” with “art brut,” he breaks both with the medical approach and with its poetic appropriation by the Surrealists. He no longer distinguishes between “normal” artists and creators in psychiatric contexts, inscribing all authentic creation within one and the same inner necessity.
This position, which was intended to be emancipatory, now appears problematic. It rests on a binary opposition—“cultured” artists versus “authentic” creators—difficult to sustain in light of the diversity of trajectories. Figures such as Carl Fredrik Hill, Fernand Desmoulin, or Louis Soutter illustrate, on the contrary, complex circulations between academic training and marginalization. Moreover, the implicit notion of “madness” now appears imprecise and stigmatizing; more nuanced formulations are preferred, such as “psychic disorders” or “singular psychic experiences.”
Finally, the idea of a creation wholly external to artistic frameworks must be qualified: the conditions of production and reception of works are always intertwined. Likewise, Dubuffet pays little attention to classical aesthetic questions, privileging extrinsic elements such as the biography of creators. His intuition that creation is transformed as soon as the artist knows he is being watched nonetheless remains fruitful, inviting us to question the social and cultural conditions of the production of works.
From the concept of Art Brut to outsider art: a semantic shift
The speech delivered by Jean Dubuffet at the Arts Club of Chicago on December 20, 1951, entitled Anticultural Positions, marks a decisive stage in the international dissemination of Art Brut. This intervention aroused the interest of American collectors and opened the way to major research, notably that of John MacGregor.
However, Roger Cardinal’s translation of the term as outsider art in the 1970s accentuated the ambiguity of the initial concept. Where Dubuffet insisted on opposition to official culture and academic mimetism, Cardinal shifted the emphasis toward the social and cultural exteriority of the artist. This reading gradually became simplified, often reducing the work to the supposed marginality of its author—self-taught, isolated, or socially “outside.” Such an interpretation now appears problematic, insofar as the figure of the self-taught artist has become commonplace and the categories of exclusion prove historically shifting.
In the Anglo-American context, the definition of outsider art has thus broadened to rest mainly on the gap between the artist and his or her public, according to variable criteria—pathology, criminality, gender, sexuality, or cultural and religious identity. By encompassing every form of alterity, the concept tends to lose its analytical force. Based more on biography than on formal analysis, it comes to cover highly heterogeneous fields: self-taught creation, folk art, naïve art, or vernacular practices.
This evolution is reinforced by the appearance, in the United States, of new designations such as vernacular art, African American vernacular art, grassroots art, or visionary art. These terminological shifts reflect a growing gap between the French tradition, which continues to question Art Brut on the basis of Dubuffet’s formulation, and Anglo-Saxon curatorial approaches, more grounded in inclusive categories linked to social or cultural difference.
This shift is also accompanied by a gradual effacement of reference to mental illness, as if the memory of “art of the insane” had to be neutralized. Yet, without returning to a strictly psychopathological reading, it seems difficult to ignore that certain works are inscribed in trajectories marked by psychiatric or psychotic experiences, which may help illuminate their formal and symbolic structure. Once these productions have been removed from the solely medical field, it becomes possible to think about the place of psychic disturbance in the economy of the work without diminishing its aesthetic value—an articulation still largely absent from recent research carried out in the United States and Great Britain.
From Art Brut to “raw writings”: the theoretical extensions of Michel Thévoz
In contrast to many American researchers, several French thinkers—Michel de Certeau, Michel Thévoz, and Gilles Deleuze—have integrated and examined the contributions of psychoanalysis in their aesthetic analyses, applied both to the visual arts and to literature.
A central place belongs to Michel Thévoz. Close to Jean Dubuffet, whom he accompanied in his activities as a collector before directing the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, he devoted more than fifty years to exploring cultural margins. In Art brut, psychose et médiumnité (1990), he extends Dubuffet’s anticultural tradition by describing creators as maintaining a direct relation to a form of “psychic childhood,” rather than as inscribed in an artistic filiation running from Raphael to Pablo Picasso. His position is nonetheless distinguished by the integration of psychoanalytic concepts, notably those of Melanie Klein.
Like Dubuffet, Thévoz relativizes the idea of a strictly pathological expression, suggesting that all creation involves a form of regression toward prepsychotic strata. One may nonetheless propose that certain works seem to be elaborated in a temporality closer to hallucination or inner compulsion—a necessity that is sometimes imperative, even persecutory—which contributes to their strangeness.
Thévoz avoids clearly settling the question of the difference between Art Brut and “cultural” art from the point of view of the work. Yet, faced with the progressive integration of Art Brut into institutions—a paradoxical reversal in light of Dubuffet’s positions—he reasserts a distinction. In Requiem pour la folie (1995), he defines Art Brut as a “specific form of creation,” irreducible to that of socially and culturally integrated artists. He thus opposes a “homeopathic dose” of transgression in professional artists to productions weakly oriented toward communication and relatively external to cultural frameworks.
These criteria nonetheless call for nuance. The question of the addressee—or, more precisely, of the relation to the public—proves complex. As for the idea of an absence of culture, it runs up against numerous counterexamples: certain works mobilize marked cultural or ideological signs, such as swastikas in Janko Domsic or August Walla, or portraits of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin in Alexander Lobanov.
Thévoz responds to this objection by denying the existence of any structured artistic relation—filiation, rivalry, or transgression—between these creators and the history of art, “regardless of whether the borrowed image comes from an anonymous reporter, Lucian Freud or Balthus[5].” Cultural elements would thus be integrated as simple materials, without conscious reference, in the service of a fundamentally autarkic expression.
This interpretation can nonetheless be discussed. Does the insistent presence of such signs not reveal, on the contrary, an acute—sometimes involuntary—capacity to capture fragments of the surrounding history and culture in order to recombine them according to singular logics? The issue would then not be the absence of culture, but its personal appropriation: a work of selection, displacement, and reinvention.
Another notion elaborated by Thévoz proves particularly fruitful for our approach: that of “raw writings.” By analogy with Art Brut, he designates texts produced by creators who ignore inherited literary models. These writings are characterized by an indifference to norms of communication and to the figure of the addressee. Words and letters acquire a singular autonomy there, becoming “magical substances with unpredictable effects”: language is less an instrument than a material.
These productions are often inscribed in a quest for truth without resolution, addressed to an “other” instance—spiritual, absolute, or indeterminate—whose response remains unstable. This expectation transforms the relation to language: language is diverted from its ordinary uses, as though worked by the search for an elusive origin. Meaning then tends to withdraw in favor of the sensible qualities of the signifier—sounds, rhythms, forms. For some, this process leads to a genuine artistic reconstruction, sometimes thought of as a rebirth, as evidenced by the works of Aloïse Corbaz, August Walla, or Adolf Wölfli.
From the Decharme donation to the stakes of institutionalization
Despite the difficulty of fixing its contours, a cluster of characteristics seems to connect these practices, outlining a coherence that is both fragile and persistent. It is within this framework that their growing recognition by institutions now profoundly redefines what is at stake: the donation of the Decharme Collection constitutes, in this respect, a key moment.
In 2021, the Centre Pompidou accepted the donation of 921 works from the abcd/Bruno Decharme Collection; it was enriched in 2025 by more than 50 new pieces. Until recently, a gallery in the museum, within the modern and contemporary collections, was dedicated to them, with a regularly renewed display. This space is currently closed for renovation, but this presentation is intended to be reinstalled upon reopening.
In the meantime, a significant group of works from the donation was highlighted in an exhibition at the Grand Palais[6], testifying to the growing importance accorded to these works in the institutional landscape. The curatorial choice also reflects our way of approaching Art Brut: as in several previous presentations of the collection, we favored a thematic itinerary. It did not seem relevant to us to organize it on the basis of sociological categories often associated with this field—mediumistic creators, marginals, or the institutionalized, to caricature—nor according to national logics, as was often the case in the 1990s and 2000s, with exhibitions devoted to Japanese, British, or other regional Art Brut. Likewise, imposing a chronology would have been artificial: while certain creations resonate with their time, many escape it; many of them are moreover neither dated nor attributed with certainty. We therefore chose to orient the itinerary around certain characteristics specific to the works. It was not a matter of reducing them to these aspects, but of offering visitors—many of whom were discovering this field—some points of entry for apprehending its diversity. By way of example, “Repairing the World” underscores that many of these creators, in addressing us through their works, seek to save the planet or to heal—well beyond a simple aesthetic problematic. Other sections were devoted to the exploration and reinvention of writing, to the necessity of putting order into the world, to chimerical bodies, or again to “dancing with spirits,” addressing creations produced without the creator’s conscious control.
The donation is the fruit of long-term work. For nearly thirty years, the association abcd has worked toward the recognition of Art Brut through exhibitions, publications, and documentary films—notably the feature-length film entitled Rouge Ciel, as well as around twenty shorter films devoted to artists—while also developing an ongoing theoretical reflection, in particular in the context of seminars that I led at the Collège international de Philosophie and at the École du Louvre, for master’s students in their second year. More recently, the exploration of the field of Photo Brut[7] has made it possible to broaden the corpus by integrating practices linked to the photographic medium. In this extension, the exhibitions were not organized around sociological problematics, but sought instead to explore several recurring themes: “Intimate Diaries / Journals of the World,” which highlights the interweaving between intimate histories and collective history; “Games for Two,” around fantasized relations between creators and their objects of desire; or again “Hauntologies: Spirits and Ghosts,” devoted to works that attempt to bear witness to the presence of the invisible.
Beyond the figure of the collector, this dynamic rests on a network of researchers, enthusiasts, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts. It is appropriate here to salute the role of Lise Maurer, whose work—notably around Jeanne Tripier, Laure Pigeon, or Emile Josome Hodinos—has profoundly marked reflection on these works, as well as that of Béatrice Steiner, involved in the promotion of productions arising from the hospital context, in connection with institutions such as the Société française de la psychopathologie de l’expression.
The donation now brings together 242 artists from very diverse cultural contexts, from Europe to Brazil by way of Japan. Among the oldest works is an 1867 gouache attributed to Georgiana Houghton, initially acquired as anonymous. Its reattribution and later valorization illustrate the evolution of the regard brought to bear on these productions, long marginalized.
This process of rediscovery concerns women artists in particular. Initiatives such as those of the Prinzhorn Collection have helped bring to light women creators who long remained invisible. In another context, the case of Hilma af Klint is also emblematic: long excluded from the canonical narrative of abstraction—still absent from the exhibition Inventing Abstraction at the Museum of Modern Art in 2012—she experienced spectacular recognition with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum exhibition in 2018, which attracted a record audience. Between critical skepticism and belated consecration, her trajectory testifies to the persistent biases of art history, notably with regard to women artists.
Women’s trajectories remain often less documented, relegated to the periphery of a narrative dominated by male figures. But this imbalance is part of a broader phenomenon: Art Brut itself was long kept at a distance from the canon of art history. Women artists thus find themselves doubly marginalized there, both because of their gender and because of their inscription within an already peripheral field.
If the recent multiplication of exhibitions and research seems to mark the beginning of a shift, it is also accompanied by a paradox: the institutionalization of Art Brut, while fostering the recognition and preservation of works, sometimes tends to attenuate its specificity. The temptation is indeed great to rid oneself of the very term “Art Brut” in favor of a full integration into the artistic field, as if this recognition were enough to abolish differences of conditions, trajectories, and statuses. Yet, far from disappearing, these gaps remain essential to think through. From this perspective, maintaining the notion of Art Brut appears less as a problematic survival than as a critical—almost political—tool, making it possible to resist a form of leveling and erasure. It is not a matter of excluding, but on the contrary of contextualizing: recognizing the works, preserving them, while continuing to question the singular conditions of their emergence and reception.
[1] Jean Dubuffet, letter to René Auberjonois, Lausanne, August 28, 1945, in Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, collected and presented by Hubert Damisch, Volume II, Paris: Gallimard, 1967, p. 240.
[2] Jean Dubuffet, letter to Jean Paulhan, November 7, 1945, in Jean Dubuffet Jean Paulhan, Correspondance 1944–1968, Paris: Gallimard, 2003, p. 249.
[3] When Michel Thévoz, Dubuffet’s spiritual heir and former director of the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, describes the concept of Art Brut, he prefers to give indirect indications, in support of the idea that this art escapes any simplistic definition: “Art Brut as defined by Jean Dubuffet is comparable to those wild flowers blooming everywhere except in the flowerbeds of culture, blooming preferably where no one thinks of looking for them: among the illiterate rather than among intellectuals, among the poor rather than among the rich, among the old rather than among the young, among women rather than among men, among the insane rather than among professionals, etc. It is an art fundamentally orphaned, that is to say freed from every model coming from tradition or fashion […] an art indifferent to the applause of initiates, an art proceeding from mental feverishness and an almost autistic inner necessity.” Michel Thévoz, Requiem pour la folie, Paris: La Différence, 1995, p. 49.
[4] Jean Dubuffet, “L’Art brut préféré aux arts culturels” [1949], in L’Homme du commun à l’ouvrage, Paris: Gallimard, 1973, pp. 91–92. Roger Cardinal explores ambiguities in Dubuffet’s definition in his essay entitled “Toward an Outsider Aesthetic,” in Michael D. Hall and Eugene W. Metcalf, Jr., with Roger Cardinal, editors, The Artist Outsider. Creativity and the Boundaries of Culture, Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994, pp. 20–43.
[5] Michel Thévoz, Requiem pour la folie, Paris: La Différence, 1995, p. 24.
[6] Art Brut. In the Intimacy of a Collection. Decharme Donation to the Centre Pompidou, June 20 – September 25, 2025.
[7] Photo/Brut #1. Collection Bruno Decharme et Compagnie was presented at the Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles (July 1 – September 22, 2019), then at the American Folk Art Museum, New York (January 14 – June 6, 2021), at La Centrale, Brussels (2022), at Museum im Bellpark, Switzerland (2023), and at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest (2026). In the meantime, a new selection was presented in Photo/Brut #2 at the Musée Botanique de Bruxelles (November 24, 2022 – March 19, 2023).