Art Brut and "Outsider" Art

After World War II, culture became increasingly saturated by the mass media, and it grew difficult to find artists who were truly immune to outside influences. The French artist Jean Dubuffet therefore began collecting work by artists who, in addition to lacking formal training, for one reason or another were largely untouched by conventional culture. Many of these artists suffered from mental illness, and all were driven by arcane inner visions that often made sense only to themselves. What Dubuffet dubbed Art Brut--"Raw Art"--was translated into English as "Outsider Art" by the British art historian Roger Cardinal. However, as the term "Outsider Art" gained popularity in the U.S., it was applied to a broad range of self-taught art, much of which would probably not qualify as Art Brut according to Dubuffet's standards. African-American artists, in particular, have objected that the term "Outsider Art" reflects a white, Eurocentric bias.

We have chosen to group the artists handled by the Galerie St. Etienne according to when they were first discovered. For the most part, artists promoted in the first half of the 20th century tend to fall into the "naive" camp, while those discovered in the past half century fall more readily in to the Art Brut or "outsider" category.

However, as a practical matter it should be noted that the distinctions between "naive" and "Art Brut" go only so far. Even in Europe (where the categories are more distinct than in the U.S.) there are artists such as Nikifor and Wittlich (both considered "naives") who blur the lines. In the U.S., the distinctions between "naive" and "outsider" really have much more to do with when the artists were "discovered" than they do with any clear-cut stylistic boundaries. For this reason, many scholars prefer the modern designation "self-taught" to the more confusing (and often inadequate) adjectives "naive," "outsider," and "art brut."