So many labels have been attached to art brut: madman’s art, self-taught art, outsider art… One of the great merits of Simon Backès’ documentary, La Folie art brut, is to re-examine these terms, necessarily reductive or -everything, from collectors, gallery owners, etc. Above all, the director gives the floor to living artists – Julius Bockelt, Jill Galliéni, Marilena Pelosi, George Widener… – and it is with this dialogue between experts and contemporary creators that reflection is sharpened, beyond aesthetic categories. , mental.
It is to Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) that we owe the expression “art brut”: in 1945, the painter had been at the initiative of a collection of works produced by residents of psychiatric hospitals , prisoners, so-called marginalized people, who created without worrying about the codes in force or criticism. A pure artistic irruption that Dubuffet did not limit to the expression of an illness.
Returning to the journey of these men and women – in particular that of Aloïse Corbaz (1886-1964), who became the figurehead of art brut -, the film asks this central question: while these artists create the value (evidenced by the enthusiasm at auctions today), how to preserve the authenticity of their approach, while allowing them to benefit from their work?
Burst of the art market
A few well-chosen interviews allow us to grasp the issues, past and present: Bruno Decharme, a great collector who donated his entire treasure in 2021 to the Center Pompidou in Paris (921 works by 229 authors), retraces the inevitable burst into the art market, and underlines the “irony” of history, most creators having lived “under terrible conditions”. The Parisian gallery owner Eric Gauthier (Le Moineau écarlate, in the 20th arrondissement) evokes the story of the artist Hassan, of Senegalese origin, whom he discovered in 2009 in Barcelona: he lived in the street and collected wood from boxes of wine to design very graphic houses, whose popularity soared after his death in 2012.
One of the fruitful initiatives was the creation of the Atelier Goldstein, in Frankfurt (Germany), which welcomes in residence artists from psychiatric places: it was absolutely necessary to get them out, because they had little possibility of s to express, explains its founder, Christiane Cuticchio. The camera captures the floating portraits of Perihan Arpacilar, the paper planes of Hans-Jörg Georgi, the choreography of lines drawn by Julius Bockelt, echoing the vibrations that the young man hears.
The aesthetic abundance renders any attempt at definition obsolete. Jill Galliéni, former guardian of the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris, recounts how she began to transcribe into notebooks, in indecipherable handwriting, the “prayers” that she mentally addressed to a saint; Marilena Pelosi settles in front of her white sheet, calmly, so that her female executioners and victims spring from her unconscious, she says; George Widener, who has Asperger’s Syndrome and became famous for his canvases full of numbers and dates, sums up the debate this way: “I hope people see me as more than an autistic gifted calendarer. »
