Brut or Surrealist? On the Problem of Culture in Naïve and Outsider Art

In 1948, the surrealist poet André Breton and artist Jean Dubuffet co-founded the Compagnie de l’Art Brut, intending to collect and exhibit works and objects by untrained, “isolated” individuals that they believed to exhibit a spontaneity and originality unseen in the works of professional artists. Amateurishly made or incomplete, these productions are brut (“raw” or “crude”) according to Dubuffet due to being unprocessed by education and culture. But this fantasy of an art without culture would prove illusory; Hal Foster has recently charted Dubuffet’s gradual disenchantment until finally admitting in 1968 that “the man without culture...doesn’t exist.”

In this paper, I will suggest that Dubuffet’s disenchantment is anticipated by Breton and the surrealists’ prewar reception of naïve and outsider art, which they saw as ingenious but in no way antithetical to culture. While both perspectives seek to universalize socially marginalized or unrecognized forms and expressions, I will show that Dubuffet’s idea of the absence of culture is distinct from the surrealists’ conception of naïve and outsider art as displaying the foundations of culture in ways comparable to poetry and mythology. Dubuffet’s hegemonic conception of culture as synonymous with discipline also differs from the surrealists’ pluralistic view of cultures as potentially creative, as evidenced by Breton’s frequent references to nonwestern societies that collectivize rather than simply repress forms and expressions associated with madness and disability. Finally, I will analyze the implication of both perspectives for the contemporary reception of outsider art outside Europe and for art-therapeutic practices.