Réunir une documentation pour l’Art Brut : les prospections de Jean Dubuffet dans l’immédiat après-guerre au regard du modèle ethnographique

Abstract

Jean Dubuffet became interested in the ethnographic question beginning in the interwar period. The early prospecting for artefacts from the fringes of the art world, which would lead the painter to develop the concept of art brut in the summer of 1945, was the occasion for a genuine sharing of experience with the world of psychiatry as well as that of ethnographers. For his project, Dubuffet adapted methods that were those of colonial ethnography and French ethnology. His relationship with the Oceania specialist Patrick O’Reilly in the second half of the 1940s was, within this context, exemplary.