Jean Dubuffet and the Invention of Art Brut

Who was Jean Dubuffet?

Jean Dubuffet was a French artist, born in Le Havre in 1901, who came to art late. He trained briefly in Paris as a young man, gave up, and spent years in the family wine business. He committed to art in his early forties. His own paintings were rough, textured and deliberately anti-elegant, with thick surfaces of paint mixed with sand, tar and gravel. He distrusted museums, art schools and what he called "cultural" art, and he went looking for something rawer.

When and where did Dubuffet coin "art brut"?

Dubuffet first used the term in 1945, during a trip to Switzerland, where he visited psychiatric hospitals and saw work by patients such as Adolf Wölfli. He discovered the drawings of Aloïse Corbaz two years later, in 1947. The Collection de l'Art Brut dates the word to that journey. He meant art made by people "unscathed by artistic culture": psychiatric patients, mediums, prisoners, children and isolated individuals who invented their own techniques and subjects.

He had a clear model in mind. In 1922 the German psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn had published a lavishly illustrated book of patients' art from Heidelberg, which deeply impressed Dubuffet and many avant-garde artists. See art from the asylum.

What was the Compagnie de l'Art Brut?

The Compagnie de l'Art Brut was the association Dubuffet set up in Paris in 1948 to collect, study and show the work. Its founders included the Surrealist leader André Breton and the critic Michel Tapié; the writer Jean Paulhan was also involved. Works were shown in the basement of the Galerie René Drouin in Paris.

In October 1949 the Compagnie mounted its landmark exhibition at the Drouin gallery: about 200 works by 60 makers. Dubuffet wrote the catalogue text, a manifesto titled L'Art brut préféré aux arts culturels, "Art brut preferred to the cultural arts". It argued that true art was to be found where nobody expected it, not in museums.

Why did the collection go to America?

The Compagnie did not last. Breton and Dubuffet fell out, and Dubuffet's hostility to the commercial art world meant the group never had a sound financial footing. In late 1951 the collection, then about 1,200 pieces, was shipped to the United States and installed in the East Hampton house of the painter Alfonso Ossorio, a friend and supporter. It stayed there for about a decade before returning to France in 1962, when Dubuffet relaunched the Compagnie in Paris.

How did the collection end up in Lausanne?

Dubuffet wanted a permanent home where the collection would be kept together and shown on its own terms, not mixed with "cultural" art. France did not offer one. In 1971 he donated the whole collection, about 5,000 works by 133 creators, to the City of Lausanne, a choice that reflected his long ties with Switzerland. The Collection de l'Art Brut opened to the public on 26 February 1976 in the Château de Beaulieu, an 18th-century mansion. Its first director was the art historian Michel Thévoz.

Dubuffet died in 1985. The collection has kept growing through donations and acquisitions, including a large group of Henry Darger works in 1992. It celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2026, when it held more than 70,000 works. Read about the anniversary in our journal.

What did Dubuffet look for in art brut?

• Invention: techniques and subjects the maker had worked out alone.
• Independence: no training, no imitation of fine art, no wish for a career.
• Intensity: work made from inner necessity, often in large quantities.
• Distance from culture: he excluded naïve painters and folk traditions, however fine.

His definition was romantic and, critics say, often unfair to the artists, whose lives were rarely as cut off from culture as he imagined. We look at those criticisms in the labels debate.

Why does Dubuffet still matter?

Without Dubuffet, much of this work would have been lost or left in hospital archives as medical curiosities. He insisted it was art, gave it a name, kept detailed records of the makers, and built an institution to protect it. Every later museum and fair in the field, and the English term "outsider art" itself, grew from his collection.

Where to go next

Read how Roger Cardinal brought art brut to Britain, meet Adolf Wölfli and Aloïse Corbaz, two of Dubuffet's first discoveries, or plan a visit with our guide to museums in Europe and the US.