THE SWISS MUSEUM, THE LEADING INSTITUTION IN THE WORLD IN ITS FIELD, HAS ORGANIZED A SPECIAL SURVEY EXHIBITION FOR ITALIAN AUDIENCES
“Dubuffet e l’art brut” (“Dubuffet and Art Brut”)
Museo delle Culture (Mudec), Milan, Italy
October 12, 2024 through Febrary 16, 2025
Featuring works from the Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne, Switzerland
Produced by Mudec, the Collection de l’Art Brut, and 24 ORE Cultura
by Edward M. Gómez
MILAN — In the early 1940s, the French modern artist Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) began seriously investigating the phenomenon he came to refer to, in French, as “art brut” (literally, “raw art”).
In 1945, in search of representative examples of art brut — unusual, hard-to-classify creations produced by autodidacts who lived on the margins of mainstream society and culture, and who had never formally studied art-making or art history — Dubuffet traveled to Switzerland with his friends Jean Paulhan (1884-1968), a literary critic, writer, and publisher, and the architect Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, 1887-1965).
Among other key discoveries, during their prospecting journey, in Bern, the Swiss capital, they encountered the works of Adolf Wölfli (1864-1930), one of the most emblematic and definitive of all art brut creators. In time, other countries and places of interest emerged on Dubuffet’s radar screen.
An indefatigable correspondent, he communicated by letter with many contacts within Europe and beyond, seeking information about the paintings, drawings, and strange objects created by art brut makers in different countries. He continued his travels in search of such self-taught artists and built up a considerable personal collection of their works, which began to be shown publicly, in Paris, in the late 1940s.
By the early 1970s, Dubuffet had amassed some 5000 items, including paintings, drawings, carvings, and mixed-media sculptural objects. Looking for a place in which to establish a museum dedicated to the study and promotion of art brut, he donated his personal holdings to the lakeside city of Lausanne, in the French-speaking region of southwestern Switzerland. There, the city made a home for the artworks in an elegant, old château. Today, almost 50 years since the Collection de l’Art Brut, as the new museum was called, first opened to the public, it owns nearly 70,000 works of art by visionary, self-taught artists from around the world.
Inevitably, Italy became one of the countries in Europe in which Dubuffet and, later, the directors and curators of the Collection de l’Art Brut became interested and from which they acquired distinctive works produced by Italian art brut creators. Recently, the Swiss museum organized a special exhibition, “Dubuffet e l’art brut” (“Dubuffet and Art Brut”) for the Museo delle Culture (popularly known as “Mudec”) in Milan, a presentation that is now in the last phase of its run. This exhibition serves as an introduction to Italian viewers of the art brut phenomenon and its history, with its roots in Dubuffet’s research and his shaping of a definition for the enigmatic art forms that had so powerfully seized his attention as an artist, thinker, and collector.
The Museo delle Culture is located in a neighborhood of renovated industrial buildings to the southwest of central Milan. Housed in a contemporary building designed by David Chipperfield Architects, which opened in 2015, the museum boasts spacious, high-ceilinged exhibition spaces. For “Dubuffet e l’art brut,” color and dramatic lighting have been used in several large galleries to create an immersive environment for visitors’ encounters with a wide-ranging selection of works from the Collection de l’Art Brut’s holdings, along with rare publications and documents from its archive related to Dubuffet’s research.
Along with the artworks on view, these archival materials provide a vivid sense of how the French artist developed his thinking about the kinds of artistic expressions for which he would coin the name “art brut” and of the criteria he established by which to evaluate a work of art and determine whether or not it could be assigned this label.
Writing in the Mudec exhibition’s attractive catalogue, whose corrugated-cardboard cover evokes a sense of the humble materials many art brut artists have employed, Sarah Lombardi, the Collection de l’Art Brut’s diretor, observes that Dubuffet’s encounter with art brut “nourished his idea about art and his own work.”
She adds that, for the well-educated French modernist, this kind of art provided him with “a lever with which to overturn the dominant forces in the field of art while exalting art brut in preference to [what he called] ‘cultural art.’”
Lombardi curated the current exhibition along with the Swiss museum’s senior curator, Anic Zanzi. Their collaborators at Mudec included Paola Cappitelli, Elena Calasso, Francesca Calabretta, and other members of the Italian museum’s curatorial and administrative staffs.
The French scholar Baptiste Brun, a specialist in the career history and writings of Jean Dubuffet, organized the exhibition’s historical/biographical section focusing on the French modern artist’s life and the development of his thinking about art brut. The exhibition was realized in collaboration with 24 ORE Cultura, an organizer of cultural projects that also published its catalogue.
“Dubuffet e l’art brut” presents works by such emblematic art brut creators as Wölfli, Aloïse Corbaz, Fleury-Joseph Crépin, Gaston Dufour, Laure Pigeon, Madge Gill, Guillaume Pujolle, Guo Fengyi, Johann Hauser, and many others. Among the Italian creators of art brut whose works are featured in the exhibition: Giovanni Bosco, Giovanni Battista Podestà, Carlo Zinelli, Angelo Meani, and Antonio Dalla Valle, a maker of mysterious, wrapped found objects that bring to mind the early wrapped objects of the Bulgarian-born conceptual artist Christo Javacheff (known as “Christo,” 1935-2020), who, with his wife and artistic partner, Jeanne-Claude (1935-2009), famously wrapped whole buildings, like the Reichstag in Berlin.
The works from the Collection de l’Art Brut on view in Milan have been grouped under two thematic headings, “Body” and “Beliefs.” In fact, in choosing to explore art brut’s examination of these two themes, the exhibition’s curators are revisiting two big subjects that were the focus of past iterations of the Swiss museum’s popular Biennial presentations, which Lombardi initiated after becoming its director in 2013. Each of the Collection de l’Art Brut’s biennial exhibitions looks at a particular theme through a large selection of works culled from its own holdings.
In Italy, reaction to “Dubuffet e l’art brut” has been effusively positive, with newspapers like La Repubblica digging into the aesthetic challenges art brut poses (“The question [this exhibition asks] is the same one Dubuffet put forth: Is art valuable because it costs something or because it’s valuable in itself?”), and Il Giornale celebrating the “marvelous world” of creativity and imagination the show reveals.
In her essay in the exhibition’s catalogue, Lombard notes that Dubuffet wrote in a letter to one of his contacts in 1945 that he preferred art brut to what he called the “obscure art” of schooled, so-called professional artists, which, he observed, “doesn’t seem to me to be anymore clear or lucid.” In fact, he added, “I’d say that it’s the opposite.”
“Dubuffet e l’art brut” delivers a wallop of an introduction to the raw creative impulse and the enduring, fresh-feeling spirit of some of the genre’s most powerful — and memorable — creators, and an illuminating presentation of Dubuffet’s profound appreciation of their achievements.
[Scroll down to see more photos from the Mudec exhibition.]
