Feature Articles


May Issue 2002

Halsey Gallery in Charleston, SC, Offers Exhibition of Art Brut Collection

The Halsey Gallery in the School of the Arts at the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC, will present Portraits et Personnages: Selected Works from the Collection de l'Art Brut's Neuve Invention opening May 8 and continuing through June 8 as the Gallery's Piccolo Spoleto offering this year. The exhibition presents selected works from the internationally recognized Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland. A lecture by co-curator Tom Stanley, Director of the Winthrop University Gallery, titled Art Brut: Truth and Sincerity will be held on May 23, at 4pm in room 309 of the Simons Center for the Arts.

Portraits et Personnages: Selected Works from the Collection de l'Art Brut's Neuve Invention presents 50 works on paper that depict portraits or human characterizations. Co-curated by Genevieve Roulin and Tom Stanley, the exhibition provides a glimpse of some of Roulin's favorite artists from the museum's Neuve Invention Collection. Roulin was the curator at the Collection de l'Art Brut until her death in 2001.

The Collection de l'Art Brut was established in Lausanne in 1976 to house art works collected by French modern artist Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985). Disillusioned from an early age by what he considered the "artificial, elitist, venal and publicity-seeking institutions set up to support the arts," Dubuffet looked outside of the established art world for a purer, more honest art form. He found it in artwork that had not been compromised by the academy or gallery system.

Though the artists that Dubuffet discovered often existed on the margins of society, he contended that their art revealed a raw, singular vision. According to Michel Thevoz, director of the Collection de l'Art Brut, Dubuffet sought out "an art free of the dictates of tradition or fashion, an art liberated from all social compromise, an art which draws its strength from an impassioned way of thinking and an almost autistic inner necessity."

In addition to the primary collection of Art Brut. Dubuffet established a second collection called Neuve Invention (fresh invention). Though many of these works did not represent the initial "radical distancing" from the art world that typified Art Brut, they nonetheless challenged the fine-art system that, according to Dubuffet, stifled a revolutionary art of consequence. In many ways, Dubuffet's passionate advocacy of Art Brut and the Neuve Invention was a political attack on what he considered to be a stagnant cultural establishment.

"Another aspect of this exhibition, which is meaningful, is the opportunity to see an aesthetic accepted by many collectors in Europe. Certainly different from 'Outsider' or contemporary folk art that has a following in the US, Art Brut and the Neuve Invention has a more psychological edge" said co-curator Stanley.

This is an official Piccolo Spoleto Exhibition.

For more information check our SC Institutional Gallery listings or call the gallery at 843/953-5630.

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