The Museum of Art Brut, Montpellier

By Ellen Turner Hall

An adventure park of wonder and imagination

 Museum of Art Brut, Montpellier

An extraordinary collection of works produced by the crazy, the unattached and the marginal, the Museum of Art Brut  is a true delight in this all-too-rational world.

What is Art Brut? “It’s complicated!” In the words of Patrick Michel,  the  museum’s director, as he runs through  the history of definitions and variations. Coined in 1945 by the painter Jean Dubuffet, the term Art Brut referred to people locked up in asylums, prisons, or  in cages of their own making who  expressed their obsessions  with whatever material  was at hand.

Later, in 1972, Outsider Art (Art singulier in France) became the customary term  in the United States to denote   a more  inclusive category of self-taught  artists whose work  could be seen as a protest against the art establishment.

 Museum of Art Brut, Montpellier

Both  categories of  artists  aim  to reconstruct the world  in their own vision. Both have in common repetition (a Swiss who paints only cows, a Catalan who paints cars,  an American who paints self-portraits), obsession with minute details and a fascination with numbers, letters and magical symbols.

The visionary and mystic Joseph Crépin heard a voice that told him that WWII would come to an end  if he painted 300 pictures. He finished his 300th canvas on 7 May 1945.

Before you leave the museum, treat yourself to a visit to the workshop of Fernand Michel.   Starting life as a bookbinder, Fernand  explored the  tactile possibilities of his materials. Moving on to zinc,  the artist found a way of  transforming rigid pieces of scrap metal into almost liquid works of art.

Using Ferrand’s personal collection as a base, his  two sons  have created the museum in Montpellier  with over 2000 works.  The  once-rejects of society  have become famous the world over  with  their   astonishing assemblages of wood, feathers, shells,  machine parts, seeds, bones and tiles.  The  displaced and unclassifiable are now drivers of a flourishing global art market.  What  irony! What fun!

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