Art Beyond the Norms: Art of the Insane, Art Brut, and the Avant-Garde From Prinzhorn to Dubuffet (1922-1949)

Abstract

From the early 1920s to the late 1940s, in a time of dramatic socio-historical upheavals, avant-garde movements challenged the boundaries of the “normal” and the “pathological”, of “art” and “non-art”, as part of a program of social and institutional critique. This dissertation focuses on one aspect of this broader phenomenon: the notions of “art of the insane” and “art brut” (today often referred to as “outsider art”) as specific instantiations of an elusive “elsewhere” for which avant-garde artists and writers seem to have been consistently longing, from Hans Prinzhorn’s The Artistry of the Mentally Ill (1922) to Jean Dubuffet’s Art Brut Preferred to Cultural Arts (1949). I argue that while this “elsewhere” was consistently described as being located outside of the field of artistic production and validation, this discursive object acted mostly as a reflective surface, shaped by the evolution of the esthetic and socio-political priorities of avant-garde movements such as German Expressionism, French Surrealism, and art informel. It was traversed by conflicting currents and ideologies, the locus of various attempts at redefining the role of the artist, the nature of the work of art, and the mechanisms of visual and verbal expression. The following study also sheds light on the limits and problematic aspects of such attempts, especially those pertaining to the exoticizing or essentializing tendencies of avant-garde primitivism.