There is like a family resemblance between the devil et the fool. These two sculptures, horned heads, have the same size, the same black color, a similar patina – although one is in bronze and the other in wood – and large round eyes. Are we the only ones to see a formal proximity between The devil (the devil), a work by Johann Karl Brendel, known as “Case 17”, belonging to the Prinzhorn collection of the Heidelberg University Psychiatric Hospital, and the fool by Max Ernst, a work from the Center Pompidou? Rest assured, there is also the LAM, the museum of Villeneuve d’Ascq which works in favor of an art “open-ended”. And Max Ernst himself who, of course, knew the magnificent devil of “Case 17″… It was moreover the Dadaist painter who, from 1922, introduced the “schizophrenic masters” to the surrealists, by circulating expressions of madnessthe catalog of works by the mentally ill at Heidelberg Hospital, selected by psychiatrist Hans Prinhzorn.
In the dense and beautiful exhibition Look for the gold of time, a real research project, the LAM examines through 400 works what the surrealist movement owes to other forms of art, notably to art brut. Between the lines of the chronological journey, two mentors with strong character compete for the leading role: André Breton, artistic catalyst, and Jean Dubuffet, self-taught painter. The two men are first friends, then quickly angry. Because if history retains that Jean Dubuffet is the theoretician of art brut, the exhibition shows that the surrealists, from the 1920s, were passionate about asylum art. They see in it the proof of an unconscious origin of creation, a “field key”, and “reservoir of moral health”, as André Breton wrote. And a way to bypass positivist thinking…
hallucinating eyes
Remember that Breton studied medicine before being the leader of surrealism. During the First World War, assigned to the Saint-Dizier asylum in 1916, he encountered there both the theories of Sigmund Freud and the creative potential of madness, by questioning patients about their dreams. Then open up, for him and his friends, the artistic paths of the unconscious with new processes: automatic writing, exquisite corpses, games under hypnosis up to the critical paranoid method of Salvador Dali, based on the mental automatism. Very early on, therefore, the surrealists took an interest in the art of madmen and autodidacts. They collect them and are inspired by them. In the 1930s, they published them in their journals (Documents – Minotaur). Under the window, insane objects, touching little boxes filled with buttons, a soup tureen and mini tools, belonged to André Breton.
Naturally, formal echoes are created between the surrealist creations and those of the sick. More than the others, the dreamlike works of August Natterer, known as “Case 18”, from the Prinzhorn collection, fascinate. How not to see links between the extraordinary hallucinated eyes drawn by the schizophrenic and those of Max Ernst in his Natural History, famous notebook of fantastic drawings? For this portfolio, the artist used rubbing paper on relief (wood, stone, etc.) with a lead pencil – a process considered the graphic equivalent of automatic writing… But the surrealists did not stop there . Breakers of aesthetic categories, they marvel at stones, quirky vegetables, rockeries, bizarre animals, feathers, children’s drawings, mediums or the Ideal Palace of the postman Cheval…
One of the most beautiful rooms creates correspondences between exquisite corpses in colored pencils (collective work by Jacques Prévert, Camille Goemans, Yves Tanguy and André Breton), a plump root in ink by Victor Brauner, the organic forms of a gray board by Yves Tanguy with these incredible photographs of anthropoid turnips sculpted by a psychopath. Further on, concrete blocks sculpted by Max Ernst are placed in perspective with limestone rubble engraved by Adrien Martias, a former sailor interned in Sotteville-lès-Rouen.
Assembly of shells
The Second World War marked a turning point, the territorial struggles around art brut separated the groups. It was at this time that the poet Paul Eluard made Jean Dubuffet discover The Gevaudan’s beast, magnetic work, half wolf, half fish, assembly of wood, leather and animal teeth, sculpted by Maurice Forestier, a runaway patient from the psychiatric hospital of Saint Alban-sur-Limagnole. From then on, Jean Dubuffet, ex-wine merchant turned painter, rejecting the madness category (“There is no more art-of-mad people than art-of-the-knee-sick”), began to collect artefacts and in 1948 founded the Compagnie de l’art brut. Initially, André Breton is a member. The two men are even accomplices around an ambitious editorial project, the Almanac of Art Brut, but their divergences are right for the book which remains in the state of model. The LAM exhibits in a room the works of the aborted project, the breaking point between the surrealists and Dubuffet: burlesque assembly of shells by the mosaic artist Pascal-Désir Maisonneuve, oyster shells transformed into heads by Gaston Chaissac, drawing by the Swiss internee Adolf Wölfli, sculpted peasant tools, drawing by the schizophrenic Aloïse Corbaz…
Once the grip of the Surrealists on Art Brut was removed, Dubuffet, alone, went on a crusade against the«asphyxiante culture», for a “Art Brut” versus “a cultural art”. His collection will land in Lausanne. As for André Breton, he wrote magic art, a universal history of art seen through the prism of a “magic in practice”, understand by magic the power of “change the life”, which also exists among children, the sick and mediums… It includes objects of the insane, including the mysterious paintings of Friedrich Schröder Sonnenstern. At the very end of the exhibition, the astonishing faces in granite known as Barbus Müller – recently attributed to the Auvergne farmer and former Zouave Antoine Rabany – look at the visitor calmly, wide-eyed, seemingly in awe.