Outsider art

Outsider art is created by people who have no formal training in the arts and little to no exposure to the norms of the art world. The term was introduced in 1972 by art critic Roger Cardinal as the title of a book, serving as the English equivalent of *art brut*—a French phrase meaning "raw art" or "rough art" coined in the 1940s by artist Jean Dubuffet. Dubuffet used *art brut* to describe work made outside official culture, often by psychiatric hospital patients, hermits, and spiritualists.

Since 1993, an annual Outsider Art Fair has been held in New York, and at least two regular journals focus on the subject, showing that outsider art has become a successful marketing category. The label is sometimes applied broadly to any art created by people outside the mainstream art world or gallery system, regardless of their specific circumstances. A related term, "outsider music," was later adapted for musicians.

Interest in the art of the mentally ill, as well as children and peasant artists, grew from the late 19th century onward. Psychiatrists like Cesare Lombroso, Auguste Marie, and Marcel Réjà studied it, as did artists from the group Der Blaue Reiter, including Wassily Kandinsky, August Macke, Franz Marc, and Alexej von Jawlensky. They saw an expressive power in what they considered a lack of sophistication. Examples appeared in the 1912 issue of the group’s *Der Blaue Reiter Almanac*. After Macke and Marc were killed in World War I, Paul Klee continued to draw inspiration from such "primitive" work.

In the 1920s, interest in asylum art grew further. In 1921, Dr. Walter Morgenthaler published *Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler* about Adolf Wölfli, a psychotic patient who took up drawing spontaneously, finding it calming. Wölfli created a monumental illustrated epic of 45 volumes, with 25,000 pages, 1,600 illustrations, and 1,500 collages, narrating his imaginary life story. He also made many smaller works, some sold or given away. His work is now at the Adolf Wölfli Foundation in the Museum of Fine Arts, Bern.

A key moment came in 1922 with Hans Prinzhorn’s *Bildnerei der Geisteskranken*, the first formal study of psychiatric art, based on thousands of examples from European institutions. The book and its collection attracted avant-garde artists such as Paul Klee, Max Ernst, and Jean Dubuffet. Even artists with formal training can be institutionalized for mental illness. William Kurelek, later awarded the Order of Canada, was treated for schizophrenia at the Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital, where he painted *The Maze*, a dark depiction of his youth. He then transferred to Netherne Hospital from November 1953 to January 1955 to work with Edward Adamson, a pioneer of art therapy and creator of the Adamson Collection.

Jean Dubuffet, struck by Prinzhorn’s book, began his own collection of such art, which he called *art brut*. In 1948, he formed the Compagnie de l'Art Brut with others, including André Breton and Claude Lévi-Strauss. The collection, curated by Slavko Kopač for nearly three decades, contains thousands of works and is now permanently housed in Lausanne, Switzerland. Dubuffet described *art brut* as work created from solitude and pure creative impulses, free from competition, acclaim, or social promotion, making it more precious than professional productions. He argued that mainstream culture assimilates every new development, stripping it of power, and that only *art brut* was immune to this because its creators could not or would not be assimilated. However, Dubuffet’s championing of *art brut* did not last. Scholars note that his distaste for the mainstream art world prevented the movement from surviving commercially. Three years after forming the Compagnie de l'Art Brut, he dissolved it and established the more conventional Collection de l'art brut.