ABCD: A Collection of Art Brut
ABCD, the Paris foundation whose collection the show is drawn from, is dedicated to the propagation of art brut, a type of art French painter and sculptor Jean Dubuffet began to collect in 1945; the oxymoronic name translates as “raw art.” Art brut is a subcategory of outsider art (a term that came much later) and excludes naive and folk art. Dubuffet defined art brut in 1949 as work made by “persons unharmed by artistic culture” who draw everything “from their inner selves and not from the conventions of classic art or the art in vogue.” But as ABCD founder Bruno Decharme points out in the exhibition’s catalog, though art brut is often considered “free,” its creators tend to be in thrall to their own hallucinations, following “those laws, more totalitarian than the rules of a society which one can always overrule.”
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Part of what’s so extraordinary about this exhibit is its aesthetic quality (it was curated by Brooke Anderson and Jenifer Borum in association with the American Folk Art Museum in New York). The celebrated paintings of Adolf Wolfli can seem repetitive and overly systematic in large doses, but the examples here are wonderfully supple and suggestive. In two paintings, his geometric designs are tempered by the fluidity of his colors and shapes, which lead the eye in a variety of directions. A contemplative face at the center of Christoph Columbus (1930) is surrounded by multiple bands of color that form rough ovals; one of the outer bands is itself filled with ovals. A larger, untitled work circa 1926 reveals a complex mix of symmetry and asymmetry in its mosaiclike patterns: concentric rectangles contain a wide variety of similar shapes whose small variations seem nearly magical, as if filled with meaning. Also included are a few faces, one of which stares out enigmatically from bottom center.
An untitled, undated gouache-and-ink drawing by J.B. Murry–an American born in 1908 who began drawing in his 70s–has none of the exquisite symmetry of the European works but is no less compelling: elongated pink shapes resembling human figures because of their bulbous heads emerge from a field of enigmatic marks, “sacred texts” Murry claimed he alone could understand. While other pieces depicting an alternative world seem to invite entry, Murry offers an elegant rebuff to the viewer: neither the hovering shapes nor the script make any logical sense, but together they seem to offer an unknowable civilization.
