Art brut. Part 1. Art without admixture of culture
Art brut is not just art. This is "a journey into the depths of the human psyche, where sensations and emotions overflow." There is something repulsive and at the same time alluring in these works, as if the ability to look beyond the edge of our reality is the dream of any sound engineer.
Do you know the answer to the question: "What is art?" Technique mastery? Wild fantasy? The ability to match colors? Jean Dubuffet found his answer to this question, laying the foundation for a whole direction in art, called art brut (from the French art brut). The crude, raw art of psychiatric patients, outsiders and just freaky loners. Sometimes really ugly and repulsive and at the same time hypnotically attractive … Such works were collected by Dubuffet.
Once Jean Dubuffet was not simply misunderstood - they laughed at him and his works. Now his collections have become the object of dreams of the best contemporary art museums around the world. Collectors give mountains of gold for another standard of "rough art", and the name of Jean Dubuffet will soon be on a par with such masters as Picasso and Salvador Dali.
The path of Jean Dubuffet is quite long and sometimes very winding, full of mental rushes and suffering. For a very long time, like many people with a sound vector, he was in search of himself and the work of his whole life. I tried myself in painting, music, and literature. He even tried to follow in his father's footsteps and was engaged in winemaking.
There is a stereotype in the world that a person's talent is revealed at an early age. Years up to 21. Maximum up to 27. Jean Dubuffet, for whom, as we will see later, there are no frames, this cliche destroys, because he found his way only after forty, when he finally realized that his main passion is painting.
What qualities and properties should a real artist have? People with anal and visual vectors, people with golden hands and golden heads often become masters of color. Thanks to the perseverance, patience and meticulousness of the anal vector, as well as good taste and an impeccable sense of excellent visual, such people can create real masterpieces, clearly depicting every detail, every bend. Anal visual masters are artists, sculptors, designers, and couturiers - in a word, those who create culture and preserve it.
Jean Dubuffet, possessing both anal and visual vectors, was an artist (he graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Le Havre), but for some reason he hated this very culture with every fiber of his soul and opposed it. Against her "dead language", against her ossified spirit, against everything that is connected with her. For example, Dubuffet called museums "morgues of embalmed bodies", where people come "as on Sundays to a cemetery, with the whole family, in silence and on tiptoe."
Following the traditions and all the rules created over the millennia, according to Jean Dubuffet, kills art, deprives it of its soul. True art must be sought in other places - in the work of children, crazy people, eccentrics, with whose hands the unconscious creates, the very spirit of destruction and barbarism that the artist was looking for. Where art is not created for the sake of exhibitions and praise, where it acts only as a self-realization.
“For me, there is no beauty anywhere. The very concept of beauty is hopelessly mistaken, "Jean Dubuffet said. The secret of such a furious antagonism of the artist lies in his unconscious, namely in the presence of a sound vector for which the very concept of freedom is very valuable. It is not at all about the will, not about the urethral "to walk like this," but about personal freedom, which is the main value of a sound engineer who tries to look beyond the framework and conventions in everything, to plunge into the depths and understand the meaning.
In general, it is not at all surprising that back in 1924 Jean Dubuffet was interested in the monograph of Hans Prinzhorn "Painting of the Mentally Sick", after reading which the young artist realized that his own paintings were useless and destroyed them. From that time on, the life of Jean Dubuffet is directly related to the search for himself, with the search for that very freedom, uncut diamond, art "in its pure form" without an admixture of culture.
Truth is in imperfection. In the embryo, the embryo hides a lot of meaning and great potential. Dubuffet suffered from the fact that he graduated from the School of Arts, so to speak, "cultivated", found a framework, fetters, preventing him from creating. You won't lose your special technique and won't forget … And the artist was more and more fond of the works of others - he collected pictures of madmen, "mediums", murderers and other "eccentrics", examined them, studied and tried to reveal the secret.
And the chest, as they say, just opened. After all, all of these types of people, as a rule, have a sound vector, and hence a similar perception of life. Like is attracted to like - and it is often the sound people who are drawn to the madmen, for everything is united in sound: both genius and madman. Jean Dubuffet's heightened interest is primarily a search. Search for oneself and search in oneself: the path through difficult paths through others to the knowledge of one's essence, to one's “I”.
Time after time, with uncertain steps, Jean Dubuffet tried to return to creativity, but failed. New attempts to create that same "free" art turned into bitter disappointment: inventing something new, the artist began to understand that it was all "not that", it had all already happened. And this is not art, but again following the canons, rules and frameworks. The shackles of culture were firmly ingrained in the hands of Dubuffet, and he destroyed all his paintings, once again completely abandoned the idea of painting, looked for himself in other spheres of activity (drawing, making wine, taking care of the family), but sooner or later returned to painting again. The last and final return at the age of 41 was successful: the artist finally found what he was looking for.
Jean Dubuffet develops the "rising dough" technique. The artist, abandoning not only traditional techniques, but even traditional painting materials, made a mixture of plaster, lime and cement, smeared the resulting "dough" on the canvas, and then applied scratches to the resulting surface. A kind of rock painting (which, by the way, was also very interested in Dubuffet). Another technique created by an unusual artist was spontaneous drawing with ballpoint pens and was called hourloupe.
Jean Dubuffet found, in his opinion, exactly what art expresses “outside the context of culture,” a barbaric spirit, spontaneity. Chaos is the complete opposite of culture, space, and this is precisely what is reflected in the artist's works: ugly, frightening forms filled with sound suffering and meaning, disorderly compositions reflecting the author's internal psychological states, polysemantic abstractions. The lack of meaning, any kind of ideological presentation or encrypted message is also meaning. So for some pictures, mostly created by means of spontaneous drawing, it is precisely this departure "to the minus", meaninglessness, complete "nothing", from which "something" is born, is characteristic.
The first two exhibitions of Jean Dubuffet's works were met with incomprehension and even ridicule. However, the artist was not surprised. He did not expect that his contemporaries would understand his "non-art". The indignation of critics did not stop him: surprisingly, during his life the artist created more than 10 thousand works, which are now the property of museums in Lausanne, New York, Berlin, Rotterdam, Paris and even Moscow.
Among other things, during his creative career, Jean Dubuffet has repeatedly organized exhibitions of so-called neo-primitivism, which included so carefully selected works of children, non-European "savages", the work of the mentally ill, peasant and urban folklore and much more (we will talk about this collection in the next article). The Dubuffet collection, coupled with his own works, became the foundation of the art-brut direction, which is popular among the same sound artists to this day.
Art brut is not just art. This is "a journey into the depths of the human psyche, where sensations and emotions overflow."
There is something repulsive and at the same time alluring in these works, as if the ability to look beyond the edge of our reality is the dream of any sound engineer.
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