Abstract

Since the mid-twentieth century, the term art brut, coined by artist and collector Jean Dubuffet, has become the dominant framework for interpreting works produced in psychiatric institutions. Introduced into the anglophone context as “outsider art” by Roger Cardinal in the early 1970s, art brut defined these works as creations “untouched by any artistic culture,” emerging from the inner “depths” of their makers and driven by necessity rather than by the cultural field or institutional mediation.[fn 1] Rosalind Krauss has described how, haunted by the parable of Robinson Crusoe, “that tale of the shipwrecked sailor washed ashore with a few remnants of his culture,” Dubuffet conceived of art brut as an “anti-Duchampian” art, with no museums, no exhibitions, and no publics.[fn 2] While his formulation proved enormously influential, it also systematized a broader avant-garde fascination with the art of psychiatric patients. From Hans Prinzhorn to the surrealist movement, these works were often seen as privileged expressions of madness, of “primitive” drives or radical exteriority, while the voices of their makers and the institutional conditions of their production remained largely obscured. In doing so, art brut consolidated a powerful aesthetic paradigm that severed these productions from the milieus in which they had been situated and reconstituted them as oeuvres: objects of autonomous aesthetic and market value.