The Art Brut Collection Lausanne

In the early 20th-century, European avant-garde artists began to look beyond the accepted canons of Western art in a search for new sources of inspiration. "Primitive" art, drawings by children, the art of the insane, and graffiti all opened up new avenues for experimentation and artistic creation. At the end of World War II, leading French artist Jean Dubuffet became interested in the works being produced by psychiatric patients and by other social outcasts. In 1948 he founded the Compagnie de l'Art Brut to document the collections he had begun, and in 1976 the collection moved to its permanent home in Lausanne. This critically acclaimed book traces the history of the concept of Art Brut, a movement which has had a profound effect on artistic and social history. The account is completed by biographical notes on the featured artists and an extensive bibliography. This revised edition contains up-to-date information about modern exponents of Art Brut and the collection itself, including two new images of artist Judith Scott's work. All the works reproduced, most from the collection created by Dubuffet, have retained their subversive freedom, which continues to fascinate and inspire artists and collectors today.

This third volume (after Vehicles and Architecture) in the series entitled Art Brut: The Collection, accompanying the Biennales de l'Art Brut, includes only works from the Lausanne museum, some of which have rarely been exhibited. The book contains a large number of drawings, paintings, photographs and sculptures, reflecting the manifold representations of the human body in Art Brut, while paying close attention to the intimate relationship the artists have established with their creations. These works represent a sort of hand-to-hand combat; they are 'battles' in which no quarter is asked or given between the creator and his own image and unique personal history. For some the body is the refuge of a complex intimacy, for others it is a prison from which to escape, and for still others a storehouse of energy that needs to be set free and transformed. Rarely exhibited or published, Jean Dubuffet's prisoners' tattoos reveal how creations lying on the margins of art's traditional subject matter held a magnetic attraction for the founder of the concept of Art Brut, the core of the Lausanne museum's collection. The great 'classics' of Art Brut, such as Alo se Corbaz, rub shoulders with more recent discoveries, such as Eric Derkenne's body-faces, or the all-powerful 'nuclear trans-sexuality' of Giovanni Galli. The doubling of the self and a play of mirrors highlight the instinctive search for identity typical of Josef Hofer and Robert Gie. Whether dismembered and fragmented in Giovanni Bosco's work, or tightly gathered in cosmic unity in Guo Fengyi's creations, the body gives form to a perpetual flux which art can exploit to express existential experience.

In the early 20th-century, European avant-garde artists began to look beyond the accepted canons of Western art in a search for new sources of inspiration. "Primitive" art, drawings by children, the art of the insane, and graffiti all opened up new avenues for experimentation and artistic creation. At the end of World War II, leading French artist Jean Dubuffet became interested in the works being produced by psychiatric patients and by other social outcasts. In 1948 he founded the Compagnie de l'Art Brut to document the collections he had begun, and in 1976 the collection moved to its permanent home in Lausanne. This critically acclaimed book traces the history of the concept of Art Brut, a movement which has had a profound effect on artistic and social history. The account is completed by biographical notes on the featured artists and an extensive bibliography. This revised edition contains up-to-date information about modern exponents of Art Brut and the collection itself, including two new images of artist Judith Scott's work. All the works reproduced, most from the collection created by Dubuffet, have retained their subversive freedom, which continues to fascinate and inspire artists and collectors today.

A debut entry in a diverse art collection series showcasing more than 60,000 thematically arranged pieces focuses on approaches to motion in the form of sculptures, drawings and constructions ranging from Mootooka locomotives and Franz Kernbeis's bicycle to Willem van Genk's airships and Auguste Forestier's boats.