The Museum of Art Brut, Montpellier
By Ellen Turner Hall
An adventure park of wonder and imagination
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.
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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