Collection de l’Art Brut/ Olivier Laffley/ Folk Art Museum
Brut Force
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10th November 2015
May Red Shoes Blaze the Trail: Reflections on an Art Brut Retrospective
For the past one hundred years, European artists have been fascinated with the idea of the “primitive” ̶ an individual who exists outside modern society, untainted by the industrial revolution. Gauguin ventured to Tahiti and painted portraits of the natives. A destitute Van Gogh went to small villages in the French countryside and painted the peasants. Picasso, on the other hand, went to the Trocadero, the ethnographic museum in Paris, and reportedly experienced a revelation about a new kind of art while looking at African masks. While the reference to Picasso in the exhibition is intended to show outsider art's reputable origins, in fact it evokes a troubled history.