Rough Art

rough Art is a term invented by the painter Jean Dubuffet to indicate the unscathed productions of people of artistic culture. It gathered these productions within a collection, the Collection of rough art.

Creation of rough Art

The concept of rough Art was invented in 1945 by the French painter Jean Dubuffet. It would have employed this term at the time of its first voyage in Suisse this year with Jean Paulhan, but the first time that the expression appears is in a letter that it addressed to the Swiss painter Rene Auberjonois, on August 28th 1945.

It thus prolongs the discoveries and the work made by Doctor Hans Prinzhorn in the Twenties on the art of the " fous" , but also the study which Doctor Morgenthaler devoted in 1921 to a psychiatric internee who will become famous representing rough Art, Adolf Wölfli.

Very quickly, by traversing the psychiatric asylums of Swiss and France, then in there integral of the isolated creators and those which one described as " médiumniques", Dubuffet constitutes a collection of works which will be managed by the Company of the rough Art (with which will be associated a time André Breton) with Paris and, afterwards many adventures, will be finally lodged with Lausanne in 1975, where it is always, under the name of the Collection of rough art.

Definitions of rough Art

The rough Art gathers productions carried out by unscathed not-professionals of the art of artistic culture working apart from the agreed esthetic standards (boarders of psychiatric asylums , Autodidacte S isolated, médiums…). Dubuffet understood by there a spontaneous Art, without cultural claims and thought processe.

Dubuffet will often redefine the rough Art , seeking to distinguish it from the popular art, of the Na5ive art, the drawings of children, creating even the " New Invention" within its collection (cf hereafter " Rough Art with Art singulier").

Quotations

We understand by there works carried out by unscathed people of artistic culture, in which thus the imitation, contrary to what occurs to the intellectuals, has little or not share, so that their authors draw there all (prone, choice of materials implemented, means of transposition, rates/rhythms, ways of writing, etc) from their clean funds and not from the commonplaces of the classic art or art to the mode. We attend to with it the artistic operation very pure, rough, reinvented in the entirety of all its phases by its author, to leave only its own impulses. Art thus where the only function of the invention appears, and not, those, constant in cultural art, of the chameleon and the monkey. Art does not come to sleep in the beds which one made for him; it is run away at once that his name is pronounced: what he likes it is the incognito. Its best moments are when he forgets how he is called.

Some creators of rough Art

Example of rough works of art

the Floor of Jeannot

Rough Art with Singular Art

As of 1960, an architect, Alain Bourbonnais, assembles his own collection of marginal artists in parallel to that of Dubuffet. It will meet this last in 1971 and then decides to open its own space, the Workshop Jacob, in 1972. Two new terms are create, art " out-the-normes" then " singulier" , which will bring to the great exposure of 1978, Singular of Art, with the Musée of modern art of the Town of Paris, which will largely contribute to make known the movement near the public. The Bourbonnais Collection will definitively settle with Dicy in 1983 under the name of Fabuloserie; association Aracine will succeed in as for it joining together a very complete collection of Rough Art by opening a Museum in 1984 (this one having been integrated into the Musée of Modern art Lille Métropole in 1999).

The House of the Artists of Gugging, initiated in 1981 in margin of a psychiatric hospital by Dr. Navratil, is a success. Dubuffet itself (with the complicity of the Conservative of its Collection, Michel Thévoz) labelling in 1982 under the label " New Invention" all those which did not return strictly speaking in its definition of the creator of Rough Art, and which were until there in a collection " annexe". In 1989, Gerard Sendrey creates the Site of Frank Creation which will become the refuge of many self-educated and singular creators. And this same year sees the day a specialized, demanding English review and of a great quality, Raw Vision, which will definitively give an international broadth to the movement, indicated then under the term of Outsider Art (term suggested as of 1972 by Roger Cardinal in its book éponyme).

The limits of the field of rough art are often badly included/understood because difficult to determine: one finds sometimes classified among the productions of rough art of works concerned with a contemporary creation which, not to be not professional and not to be distant stylistiquement from the rough works of art, are not less in the dialog with the traditional system of diffusion of the Art schools, from where a certain confusion which is reflected in the movement of the " Art Singulier" today…

Artists in the mobility of rough art

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