Art Brut

アール・ブリュット / 1945– / Style / Subculture Style

A concept framed to name work made outside art education and the art market, relying on nothing but a system of its own. Repetition filling the whole surface, private alphabets and sign systems, and the exhaustive reuse of materials recur across it. Less a style than the name for the conditions under which a style arises.

Art Brut — Adolf Wölfli, Ring of Sea and Islands — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain — Adolf Wölfli, Ring of Sea and Islands — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

Art Brut — Adolf Wölfli, The Catholic Spiritual Centre in Rome — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain — Adolf Wölfli, The Catholic Spiritual Centre in Rome — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

Art Brut — Adolf Wölfli, Saint Adolf's Throne — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain — Adolf Wölfli, Saint Adolf's Throne — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

At a glance

Visual cues

A surface filled with no margin left
Private systems of letters and signs
Exhaustive reuse of the materials to hand
A self-sufficient world built by repetition

Best used for

Publishing and exhibition design where the work's own visual logic has to be presented without being tidied into a house style
Identity for small labels, community projects and artist-run spaces that need to feel personal and unmanaged

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Dictionary entry

Type: A hand-drawn alphabet used consistently, its own rules kept even where they are inconvenient.
Composition: Fill everything: no margin, no hierarchy, the field worked edge to edge at one density.
Material: Whatever is at hand and reused, ballpoint on envelope, thread, cardboard, with the reuse left visible.
Caution: Faking the naivety with a wobbly font and some scribble: the force of this work comes from a real and internally consistent system, and imitation reproduces only its tics.
Further study: Dubuffet's collecting and naming of it / The collection in Lausanne / Its English rendering as Outsider Art

Related entries

Naïve (ナイーブ)Shared effects: Intimacy / Play.Compare Art Brut and Naïve
Lowbrow (Pop Surrealism) (ローブロウ)Shared effects: Rebellion / Play.Compare Art Brut and Lowbrow (Pop Surrealism)

Often confused with

Art Informel (アンフォルメル)compare

Cite this entry

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Link: https://indexstyle.org/styles/art-brut
Markdown: [Art Brut — IndexStyle](https://indexstyle.org/styles/art-brut)
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