It’s been more than 70 years since Jean Dubuffet introduced the idea of Art Brut, and the art world is still learning to embrace the genre of art made outside of more industry-approved avenues of production. Now, there’s another evolution of the genre to consider, called Photo Brut.
The exhibition brings together some 400 works picked from the unparalleled collection of French filmmaker Bruno Decharme, as well as the museum’s own holdings. It includes works by 40 artists, who found in photography a space to reconstruct their lived realities into new worlds.
For the artists “art making and the way they are living on a daily basis is fused; art is not a separate activity”, Valérie Rousseau, who co-organized the show said.
These artists “use the camera to play against type, by making their daily life an unreality or making their chimeras hyperreal,” said art historian Michel Thévoz. “They use photography in spite of or beyond its presumptive objectivity, to imbue fantasy with the stamp of realism or, inversely, to sublimate an ordinary subject.”
The work of Morton Bartlett, one of the best known artists in the exhibition, is a helpful entry to the subject. From 1936 to ’63, Bartlett meticulously fabricated a series of lifelike plaster dolls, all styled as young girls and boys, and photographed them in sweet and sexual, pure and prurient way.
Bartlett was clearly aware of the camera’s capacity for world creation. His work was undeniably artistic in its craft and concept, but whether or not it was intended for an audience beyond himself is unclear. Similar points could be made for nearly all of the artists in the show. They operated from a place of marginality, made work with little intention to show it, and, with few exceptions, experienced a great deal of trauma in their life. Czech artist Miroslav Tichy, for instance, who made his own low-quality cameras to surreptitiously photograph women in public places, resisted showing his work even as curators took a liking to it late in his life.
“Photo Brut” is on view through June 6, 2021 at the American Folk Art Museum in New York.