ABSTRACT
Chateau Beaulieu had fallen into the hands of the City of Lausanne, and they bequeathed it to house a significant collection of ‘art brut’, donated to the city in 1971 by the prominent French artist, Jean Dubuffet. While art brut was admirable and inspiring to Dubuffet and his followers, they understood the dangers of allowing it to come under the gravitational pull of the art world and so maintained its separation categorically and physically. Curiosity is a powerful motive for exploration. Jean Dubuffet’s riddle suggests that, unlike academic/conventional art, all people can understand or at least relate to art brut. The Japanese artist, Masao Obata was filmed making his art and talking about it while working on his Kobe hospital bed shortly before he died in 2010. In the absence of other channels for dialogue and expression, art is available to these authors as a form of catharsis, hope and assertion, and perhaps justice and resolution of some kind.
