Outsider Art (Art Brut): Art Beyond the Institutional Art World

In 1923, a Swiss psychiatrist named Hans Prinzhorn published a book called Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the Mentally Ill). The book collected hundreds of drawings, paintings, and sculptures made by patients in psychiatric hospitals across Europe. Prinzhorn was not an art critic. He was a psychiatrist who believed that the creative impulse was universal and that the art of the mentally ill revealed something about human creativity that academic art could not. The book fell into the hands of a French wine merchant named Jean Dubuffet, who could not read German but spent hours studying the illustrations. Twenty years later, in 1945, Dubuffet coined the term "Art Brut" to describe this kind of work, and the category of Outsider Art was born.

Outsider Art is art made by self-taught individuals who have little or no contact with the institutional art world: art schools, galleries, museums, and the commercial market. The term was coined in 1972 by the English art critic Roger Cardinal as an English equivalent for Art Brut, the label created by Jean Dubuffet in the 1940s. Art Brut, literally "raw art," referred to art that had not been "cooked" by academic training or cultural convention. Outsider Art and Art Brut are often used interchangeably, though some scholars maintain distinctions between them.

This entry covers what Outsider Art is, how Dubuffet developed the concept, which artists define the category, and how it has influenced mainstream art since the 1940s.

What Is Outsider Art?

Outsider Art is defined by what it is not. It is not made by artists who attended art school. It is not made for galleries or collectors. It is not informed by art history or by awareness of current trends. The Outsider Artist typically works in isolation, driven by an internal compulsion rather than by external expectations. The art is often discovered after years of private production, sometimes only after the artist's death.

Dubuffet defined Art Brut as "works executed by people untouched by artistic culture, works in which imitation, contrary to what occurs among intellectuals, has little or no part, so that their makers derive everything from their own resources." He contrasted this with "cultural art," which he regarded as derivative and constrained by convention. In his 1949 manifesto, L'Art Brut préféré aux arts culturels, he wrote that cultural art was "the game of a futile society, a fallacious parade" compared to the "pure and authentic creative impulses" of Art Brut. Read about Dubuffet's writings at the International Journal of Art and Art History.

The category is controversial. Some critics argue that "Outsider Art" is a label imposed by the art establishment on work it does not fully understand, and that the label itself creates a hierarchy between "insider" and "outsider" that reproduces the very structures Dubuffet wanted to dismantle. Others point out that once an Outsider Artist is discovered, exhibited, and sold, they are no longer an outsider. The editors of Raw Vision, the leading journal in the field, have warned against using "outsider artist" to refer to almost any untrained artist: "It is not enough to be untrained, clumsy or naïve. Outsider Art is virtually synonymous with Art Brut in both spirit and meaning, to that rarity of art produced by those who do not know its name."

Dubuffet and the Collection de l'Art Brut

Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) was a French painter and sculptor who began collecting Art Brut in 1945. He had been painting since the 1920s but worked as a wine merchant for many years before committing to art full-time at age 41. After reading Prinzhorn's book and visiting psychiatric hospitals in Switzerland, he began collecting works by patients, self-taught artists, and other marginal creators.

In 1948, Dubuffet founded the Compagnie de l'Art Brut with the Surrealist writer André Breton and the critic Michel Tapié. The company was a non-profit organization dedicated to collecting and studying Art Brut. Dubuffet collected approximately 5,000 works by 133 creators, including the Swiss psychiatric patients Adolf Wölfli and Aloïse Corbaz, the British psychic medium Madge Gill, and the French mailman Ferdinand Cheval, who spent 33 years building a palace from stones he collected on his delivery route.

The collection is now permanently housed at the Musée de la Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland, which opened in 1976. Dubuffet dissolved the Compagnie de l'Art Brut in 1951, but the collection continued to grow. The National Galleries of Scotland notes that Dubuffet "dedicated three decades (1945-1975) to bringing psychiatric art out of the cabinet of curiosities of the medical sciences and to affirming the dignity of this type of creation as equal to that of 'cultural art.'" Read more at National Galleries of Scotland.

Key Outsider Artists

Adolf Wölfli (1864-1930)

Wölfli was a Swiss patient at the Waldau Clinic near Bern, where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent the last 35 years of his life. He produced over 25,000 pages of drawings, text, and musical compositions. His work is a part-real, part-fantasy autobiography that fills thousands of pages with geometric patterns, fantastical maps, and invented narratives. Wölfli's work was central to Dubuffet's collection and remains the most extensively documented Outsider Artist. The Wölfli Foundation at the Kunstmuseum Bern preserves his complete output.

Aloïse Corbaz (1886-1964)

Corbaz was a Swiss woman who worked as a governess before being diagnosed with schizophrenia and institutionalized in 1918. She began drawing in secret, using crayons and paint on whatever paper she could find. Her drawings depict romantic scenes of royal couples, theaters, and operatic performances, filled with vivid color and pattern. Dubuffet discovered her work in 1946 and brought her better materials, after which her drawings increased dramatically in scale and complexity.

Madge Gill (1882-1961)

Gill was a British housewife from East London who began drawing after the death of one of her sons in 1920. She claimed to be guided by a spirit named Myrninerest and produced thousands of intricate drawings, many on large rolls of calico, depicting girls' faces surrounded by dense patterns of lines and architectural elements. She rarely exhibited her work and refused to sell it, believing it belonged to Myrninerest.

Ferdinand Cheval (1836-1924)

Cheval was a French rural mailman who spent 33 years (1879-1912) building a palace from stones he collected on his daily delivery route. The Palais Idéal, located in Hauterives in southeastern France, is a massive structure combining architectural styles from Hindu temples to Algerian palaces to Swiss chalets. Cheval had no architectural training. He built the palace alone, at night, with a wheelbarrow and a trowel. The Palais Idéal is now a national monument and receives over 100,000 visitors per year.

Henry Darger (1892-1973)

Darger was a reclusive American janitor who lived in a single room in Chicago. After his death, his landlords discovered a 15,000-page illustrated novel called The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, along with a 5,000-page sequel and a 10,000-page autobiography. The manuscript was accompanied by hundreds of watercolor drawings and collages depicting a fantasy world of children at war. Darger's work is now held by the American Folk Art Museum in New York and has been the subject of major exhibitions and a documentary film by Jessica Yu, In the Realms of the Unreal (2004).

Outsider Art and the Mainstream

Outsider Art has had a significant influence on mainstream art since the 1940s. Dubuffet's own paintings were directly influenced by the Art Brut he collected. His haute pâte works of the 1940s and 1950s mixed paint with sand, tar, and gravel, scratched into with raw marks that emulated the untrained quality of Art Brut. The National Galleries of Scotland notes that Dubuffet was influenced by "the discovery of the Lascaux cave paintings in 1940, as well as street graffiti, which he felt revealed a primal urge to produce art."

The Surrealists, particularly André Breton, were drawn to Outsider Art because it seemed to confirm their belief in the power of the unconscious mind. The connection between Outsider Art and Surrealism is close: both value automatic, unmediated expression over conscious control. But the Surrealists were trained artists who deliberately sought to access the unconscious, while Outsider Artists typically had no awareness of Surrealist theory.

In the United States, Outsider Art gained recognition through exhibitions like "Masters of Popular Painting: Modern Primitives of Europe and America" at the Museum of Modern Art in 1938. The American Folk Art Museum in New York, founded in 1961, has been the primary American institution dedicated to this work. The Intuit Art Center in Chicago, founded in 1991, focuses specifically on Outsider and self-taught art.

Related Terms and Distinctions

Outsider Art overlaps with several related categories, but the distinctions matter. Naïve Art refers to work by self-taught artists who are aware of the art world but choose to work in a simplified style. Henri Rousseau, the most famous naïve artist, exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants and knew Picasso. Outsider Artists, by contrast, are typically unaware of or indifferent to the art world. Folk Art refers to work produced within a traditional community, where skills and patterns are passed down through generations. Outsider Art is the product of individual invention, not communal tradition.

Dubuffet also coined the term "Neuve Invention" to describe artists who, while marginal, have some interaction with mainstream culture. This category includes artists who may be self-taught but who actively seek exhibition or recognition, placing them between Art Brut and the conventional art world.

See Outsider Art in Person

The Musée de la Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland, holds Dubuffet's original collection of approximately 5,000 works. The American Folk Art Museum in New York holds the largest collection of Outsider Art in the United States, including the work of Henry Darger. The Wölfli Foundation at the Kunstmuseum Bern preserves Adolf Wölfli's complete output. The Palais Idéal du Facteur Cheval in Hauterives, France, is open to the public as a national monument.

If you want to understand Outsider Art, start at the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne, where Dubuffet's collection is displayed in a 19th-century château. Then visit the American Folk Art Museum in New York to see how the category developed in the United States. For more on related categories, read our entries on Naïve Art and Folk Art, or explore our post on how to read a painting to see how untrained artists approach composition and color differently from academically trained ones.