Art Brut

I have recently been exposed to some modern art movements through my reading, and to actual pieces of contemporary art and design in magazines that I was scanning for a guy. The guy is not immediately important. I'll say that the art movement I'm most interested in is Art Brut, a term coined by the French artist Jean Dubuffet in the 1940s. He heralded the art made by mental patients and the criminally insane that was first treated extensively in Dr. Walter Morgenthaler's 1921 book "Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler" (A Psychiatric Patient as Artist). Art Brut does away with tradition in place of the erratic, ecstatic, and primitively constructed works of untrained, sometimes disturbed people who are inspired to create art in much the same way a child is inspired to play with his food. One of my favorite Art Brut artists was Ferdianad Cheval, a French postman in the 19th-century who spent 33 years building his "Palais idéal." It actually looks like it might be made of expertly molded mashed potatoes (purée de pommes de terre):



Dubuffet himself had enough talent to sustain an artistic career, a term he probably would have rejected for himself. Here's a beautiful collage of his from 1977, "Les Vicissitudes":



This reminds me of a time in about 6th grade when I made a collage of cut-out pictures of supermodels and anonymous lingerie models. I cannot provide an image of this piece because it has been lost.