Sarah Lombardi – författare

This A3-format title brings together a selection of 50 exhibition posters designed by Werner Jeker (Les Ateliers du Nord, Lausanne) presented at the Collection de l’Art Brut between 1976 and 2026. This renowned Lausanne-based German-Swiss graphic artist has worked with the museum since it opened and is also responsible for the layout of this publication. The Collection de l’Art Brut would like to take advantage of this project to show its appreciation of this fruitful collaboration spanning five decades.Text in English and French.

Swiss Art Brut 1945–2026 is being published to coincide with an exhibition celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Collection de l’Art Brut (Swiss). It brings together a wide range of works from the Lausanne museum’s collection that were created by Swiss artists or artists who worked in Switzerland. With Switzerland as the common thread, this publication and the accompanying exhibition highlight the close and lasting ties between the originator of the concept of art brut Jean Dubuffet and this country. Indeed, it was this close bond that led him to donate his collection of outsider art to the City of Lausanne in order to ensure its preservation and the public’s access to it.The book includes a foreword by writer Metin Arditi and a presentation by Sarah Lombardi, director of the museum and curator of the exhibition, followed by Jean Dubuffet’s own handwritten notes recounting his trip to Switzerland in search of extra-cultural works in the summer of 1945. This previously unpublished document is reproduced here in facsimile. Other authors provide further analyses of the works: Michel Thévoz, the museum’s first director; Lucienne Peiry, who succeeded him until 2011; Andreas Steck, president of the Aloïse Corbaz Association; and Astrid Berglund and Eleanor Philippoz, respectively curator and outreach coordinator at the Collection de l’Art Brut.

In the years 1945-1963, Jean Dubuffet set about documenting his collection of Art Brut. He had the pieces photographed by recognised photographers on the Paris art scene, including Henry Bonhotal and Emile Savitry. But he also had pieces photographed that were not in his own collection, including works that interested him because, like Art Brut, they were marginal to the official art world. These notably include works of popular and naïve art, children's drawings, tattoos, graffiti photographed by Brassaï and graphic works from the Solomon Islands.Dubuffet arranged these photographs of artworks by over a hundred artists - including Gaston Chaissac, Aloïse Corbaz, Joseph Crépin, Auguste Forestier, Somuk and Adolf Wölfli as well as anonymous artists - in extraordinary sequences contained in 14 albums (755 pages in total). These have been preserved since 1976 in the archives of the Collection de l'Art Brut, Lausanne. Classified by artist, the images document paintings, drawings, embroideries, sculptures and collages. In assembling this image bank in the years 1945-1963, Dubuffet set up a dialogue between highly diverse forms of expression of his period, all of which flowered away from the more familiar terrains of art history and culture.This facsimile edition of the Photographic Albums of Jean Dubuffet is combined with a booklet of essays by specialists: preface by Sarah Lombardi, Director of the Collection de l'Art Brut and essays by Baptiste Brun, Nicolas Garnier, Karoline Lewandowska, Jean-Hubert Martin, Jérôme Pierrat and Michel Thévoz.Text in English and French.

A largely unpublished collection of Japanese Art Brut. A new selection of twenty-five Japanese Art Brut new artists.Following the publication of Art Brut du Japon, co-published in 2008 by the Collection de l'Art Brut and editions Infolio, this catalogue presents pieces by twenty-five new Japanese artists from different regions of Japan, whose works drawings, paintings, photographs, sculptures, and textiles - are largely unpublished. The authors explore the assimilation of Japanese Art Brut into the larger culture from 2008 to the present. As they point out, whereas the notion of mental handicap resides in aesthetic and sociological criteria (these artists are self-taught, and often socially marginalized misfits, draft dodgers, prisoners, psychiatric patients, the elderly, etc. who create outside of the official art system), the condition whether mental or physical is not a criterion in itself. Accompanying an exhibition at Collection de l'Art Brut, Lausanne from November 30, 2018 to April 28, 2019, this catalogue of new Japanese works expands our understanding of Art Brut in a contemporary albeit different cultural setting.Text in English and French.

This catalogue for the 5th Art Brut Biennial at the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne highlights the museum’s holdings with a focus on the subject of belief. In a wide range of mediums, the show reveals the particular link between Art Brut and Outsider artists, religion, and the occult. The subjects of these works include deities, saints, religious figures, as well as abstract compositions, symbolist paintings, and ritual objects. With their diverse and original representations of belief, these artists transcend the often difficult conditions of their lives.