L’Art Brut: Jean Dubuffet and the Outsiders
June 8 – July 22
Louis Stern Fine Arts is pleased to present L’Art Brut: Jean Dubuffet and the Outsiders. This exhibit brings together a collection of works by Jean Dubuffet and many of the outsider artists by whom he was inspired.
Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in the mid-1940’s. He believed that artists looked too much to the world of culture and societal mores, in particular that of the Academy, which he believed corrupted true artistic and inner expression. Dubuffet’s writings dictated that artists should instead turn away from culturally accepted products in order to get back to authentic expression of the unconscious mind.
In order for Dubuffet and his fellow artists to regain contact with their true inner feelings and find the rawness in art, Dubuffet urged artists to look to unexpected and untraditional sources: the art of the mentally ill, the spiritual, and tribal art. He found what he believed to be the truest Art Brut among the mentally ill while visiting psychiatric hospitals to gain inspiration. Dubuffet’s beliefs can best be summed up in a 1949 quote from Georges Bataille:
"The accomplishment of my totality in consciousness requires my relation to the immense, comic, painful convulsion which is that of all men. . . . Nevertheless it is true that the movement toward wholeness begins as madness. . . . It is, in our time, accessible to only a very isolated individual, through mental disorder conjoined with unquestionable vigor. He can, if chance is with him, discern incoherence an unforeseen balance."
The “balance” that Bataille discusses, is what Dubuffet reaches for in his own works, an attempt to get past the controlled consciousness into the uncontrolled, by regaining intimacy with the immediacy and spontaneity of the unconsciousness.
Included in this exhibition are works by Aloise, Anselme Boix-Vives, Carlo, Philippe Dereux, Madge Gill, Martha Grunenwaldt, Augustin Lesage, Scottie, Wilson, Adolf Wolfli, and Anna Zemankova. Dubuffet considered these individuals to be true artists, creating real and “raw” art unimpeded by conscious and cultural mores.
This exhibition is presented in collaboration with Jennifer Pinto Safian of New York.
There will be a reception in collaboration with the West Hollywood Galleries Thursday, June 8, from 6PM to 9PM.