The letters that document how a pioneering French outsider-art collection was assembled
Unpublished Letters Between Dubuffet and Bourbonnais
Collectionner l’art brut is a French-language book built around a previously unpublished correspondence between Jean Dubuffet and Alain Bourbonnais. The letters have been gathered, presented and edited by Déborah Couette, an art historian whose research concerns the recognition and preservation of art brut and who has worked with the archives of both La Fabuloserie and the Fondation Dubuffet. Dubuffet, a painter and sculptor, is the figure who coined the term art brut — literally “raw art,” the rough equivalent of what is often called outsider art — to describe work made by non-professionals operating outside established aesthetic norms, including psychiatric patients, prisoners and children. The book turns the exchange between the two men into a sustained documentary account of one collection shaped by that idea.
The Story of a “Hors-les-Normes” Collection
The subject of the book is the collection of art “hors-les-normes” — art “outside the norms” — that Bourbonnais assembled on Dubuffet’s advice. Bourbonnais, who founded the Atelier Jacob in Paris and later La Fabuloserie in Burgundy, built one of the earliest collections in France related to art brut, and the correspondence traces that undertaking across the twelve years of activity that Dubuffet regarded as memorable and deserving of a written history. Rather than a general survey, the volume is a chronicle of a single collection’s formation, told through the letters of the two men most closely involved. Its editors present it as revealing a significant strand in the history of collecting, and of art more broadly, in the second half of the twentieth century.
A Practical Guide to Finding and Staging Art Brut
Beyond its documentary value, the book is described as a practical guide to two things: how to prospect for art brut and how to stage it. That is, the correspondence records not only the accumulation of objects but the working method behind it — where and how to look for such work, and how to present it. The cover adds a cluster of alternative labels for the material at the heart of the project: art inventif (inventive art), art d’instinct (instinctive art), art extraculturel (extracultural art) and art hors les normes (art outside the norms). These terms signal the book’s concern with art produced beyond the conventions of the professional art world, and with the collector’s practical task of recognising and framing it.
How the Volume Is Built
The core of the book is the correspondence itself, supplemented by a selection of documents gathered in an annex, a bibliography and an index. It is generously illustrated and conceived in part as a narrative told through images, running to roughly 480 pages in a large illustrated format. The result is at once a readable exchange between two figures in the field and a reference work on the early collecting of art brut in France.
The book was published in Paris by Albin Michel in 2016, with retail listings giving a publication date of 2 November 2016; the BnF record gives the deposit date as 2016 and notes that it was printed in Italy. The BnF description is one volume of 478 pages, illustrated in color, measuring 25 cm. Retail listings describe a bound “Grand Format” volume weighing 2.036 kg, with dimensions of 20.8 × 24.8 × 6.3 cm, in the “Beaux Livres” collection. The ISBN is 978-2-226-32153-4 (EAN 9782226321534), and the BnF lists a price of 49 EUR. The bibliography is paginated 469–472, and the BnF assigns Dewey classification 709.040 9 (23rd ed.) for the fine and decorative arts, 1900–1999, art brut. Catalog metadata lists subjects including Correspondence, Artists, Architects, Art brut, Outsider art, Art, and Collectors and collecting.
BnF and Publisher Records
The BnF record gives Dubuffet’s dates as 1901–1985 and Bourbonnais’s as 1925–1988, and lists Lehot-Couette, Deborah (1987–) as scientific editor. A publisher biography describes Déborah Couette as a doctoral candidate in art history at the Sorbonne and an independent exhibition curator, and calls La Fabuloserie one of the current high places of art brut.
Dubuffet’s Art-Brut Milieu
Dubuffet was a French painter and sculptor of the École de Paris whose idealistic approach to aesthetics embraced so-called “low art” and eschewed traditional standards of beauty in favor of what he believed to be a more authentic and humanistic approach to image-making. He is credited with founding the art brut movement and with the Collection de l’art brut, now housed at the Collection de l’art brut in Lausanne, Switzerland; that collection is often referred to as a “museum without walls” because it transcended national and ethnic boundaries and broke down barriers between nationalities and cultures. In June 1948, Dubuffet, along with Jean Paulhan, André Breton, Charles Ratton, Michel Tapié and Henri-Pierre Roche, officially established La Compagnie de l’art brut in Paris, dedicated to the discovery, documentation and exhibition of art brut. Hans Prinzhorn’s book Artistry of the Mentally Ill was an influence. Dubuffet’s collection included Aloïse Corbaz and Adolf Wölfli, and his art brut also encompassed folk art; he and Paulhan helped organise the first exhibitions of Somuk, an artist from Buka Island whose works had been collected by Catholic priest Patrick O’Reilly. Dubuffet also maintained an extensive illustrated correspondence with Jean-Joseph Sanfourche for eighteen years.
