Art brut, an unconventional artistic movement celebrated this year in Lausanne
Jean Dubuffet Jean Paulhan Aloïse Corbaz Joseph Giavarini Adolf Wölfli
Radio Télévision Suisse, Melissa Härtel, 27 février 2026
If you live in Lausanne, chances are you are familiar with the concept of art brut. The famous Collection de l'art brut, nestled within the walls of Chateau de Beaulieu, is one of the must-see museums of the Olympic capital.
Its story began more than fifty years ago. In 1971, French painter, sculptor, and visual artist Jean Dubuffet, strongly attached to Switzerland, offered his art brut collection to the City of Lausanne so it could be shown to the public. A few years later, in February 1976, the museum opened its doors. Housing 5,000 works at the beginning, the Collection de l'art brut, directed since 2013 by Sarah Lombardi, now preserves 70,000. It has become an international reference point for this artistic movement.
In Europe, only a handful of museums are devoted to art brut. Notably, one can cite Art et marges musee in Brussels, the Musee de la Creation Franche in Begles near Bordeaux (France), or the Musee d’Arts Brut, Singulier & Autres in Montpellier (France). Note that in Paris, the large and beautiful art brut collection of French filmmaker and collector Bruno Decharme (nearly 1,000 works) was recently donated to the National Museum of Modern Art at the Centre Pompidou. The institution now has an entire room dedicated to art brut.
Art brut, definition
In 1949, in his publication "L’Art Brut prefere aux arts culturels," Jean Dubuffet gave the following definition of art brut: "By this we mean works executed by persons untouched by artistic culture, in which mimicry, contrary to what happens among intellectuals, has little or no part, so that their authors derive everything there (subjects, choice of materials used, means of transposition, rhythms, ways of writing, etc.) from their own depths and not from cliches of classical art or fashionable art. Here we witness the pure artistic operation, raw, reinvented in all its phases by its author, starting solely from his own impulses."