Jean Dubuffet’s Art Brut, between André Breton and Walter Benjamin

The fascination with the “art of the mentally ill”, pregnant in the Western cultural mainstream of recent years, has a long history that can be traced back to Romanticism and to the mystery represented by the enigmatic faculties of genius and inspiration and their purported ties with mental illness. The man who took the “art of the mentally ill” out of the underground represented by a handful of psychiatrists and artists and set it on its long way to cultural homologation and commercial success was the French visual artist, Jean Dubuffet. He invented a label for it (“art brut”) and set about endowing it with an entire critical apparatus and an institutional framework. Before him, however, the ground had been broken by the avantgardes at the turn of the century and especially by Surrealists. This article explores the degree to which the theoretical positions of the Surrealists on the one hand and of Jean Dubuffet on the other hand overlap and diverge. It will try to account for the effects of the brief association between André Breton and Jean Dubuffet on the crystallization of Dubuffet’s thinking about art brut, while also taking into account other “contaminations”, like the Theses of Walter Bejamin, on the aesthetic theory developed by Dubuffet.