Dubuffet's idea
Art in its raw state before culture refines it.
Sailko — CC BY 3.0 · Jean Housen — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Jean Housen — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Jean Housen — CC BY-SA 4.0
Yes — perhaps more than most. It requires no artistic background, because the works were never made for the art world; all you need is curiosity about what people make when nobody is watching. Many visitors describe it as the museum they remember longest from an entire trip. But be prepared: some of the stories behind the works are harsh, and the atmosphere is dark and intense.
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The Collection de l'Art Brut is a museum like no other: the French painter **Jean Dubuffet** devoted it to work by people **entirely outside the art world** — patients in psychiatric hospitals, prisoners, recluses, people with no artistic training, no knowledge of art history and no intention of exhibiting or selling. He called it art brut, art in its raw state before culture refines it. Dubuffet gathered the works from the 1940s onward and gave the collection to the city of Lausanne in 1971; the museum opened in 1976 in a small eighteenth-century mansion — and today holds thousands of works from dozens of countries, shown in darkened rooms that concentrate the light on the work alone. The effect is powerful and at times unsettling: drawings made with thread, handkerchiefs and materials smuggled from hospital wards, and entire worlds invented by their makers with their own languages and maps. It is not a comfortable or decorative museum — but it is among Europe's most original and affecting, and unique in the world.
Art in its raw state before culture refines it.
Whole languages, maps and systems made by individuals.
Thread, handkerchiefs and humble matter turned into work.
Avenue des Bergières 11, 1004 Lausanne