Description
The chart is an interactive lineage map. Art Brut sits at the center, on a timeline that runs from older movements at the top to newer ones at the bottom. The movements that influenced it appear above it, any parallel movements it developed alongside sit on its own row, and the movements it later influenced appear below. Every line is a real, cited connection between two movements: a solid line is an influence historians broadly agree on, and a dashed line is an indirect, parallel, or contested link.
For Art Brut (c. 1945 – Present), it traces one movement that shaped it, an indirect or contested link: Folk art; it runs alongside one parallel movement, a well-established link: Naive art.
Outsider art is creative work made by self-taught individuals who lack formal training and have minimal exposure to established artistic conventions. The term was coined in 1972 by art critic Roger Cardinal as an English translation of "art brut" (French for "raw art" or "rough art"), a label created in the 1940s by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe creations existing outside official cultural boundaries. Dubuffet concentrated particularly on works by those marginalized from the established art scene, including psychiatric patients, hermits, and spiritualists. Read more ↗