MADRID.- The Circulo de Bellas Arts presents for the first time in this country a selection of Works of art from the Collection de l`Art Brut of Lausanne, the great collection initiated by Jean Dubuffet which gathers the main Works of art of this art produced parallel to the main and dominating artistic currents and official culture. The first contact Dubuffet had with art brut, during the forties, started when he became interested in the works of art created by the mentally insane. Soon his fascination for these unique works took him to preoccupy himself with an ample spectre of authors, not necessarily crazy or on the brink, whose works of art circulated through peripheral terrains of the history of art. Those efforts by Dubuffet materialized in an enormous collection of 4,000 works, that thirty years after, donated to the city of Lausanne, where the Museum of the Collection de l’Art Brut is located. The exhibit Genius and Delirium presents a selection from this collection, the biggest and most important in the world.

The appearance of the notion of art brut is inscribed in the precise form of the artistic revolution from the beginning of the 20th century. Even though the myth of the “good savage” appears in the 16th century, interest for the primitive expands all over Europe at the beginning of the 20th century and profoundly alters the intellectual and aesthetic thinking. Artists feel the necessity to liberate themselves from tradition and look for new values and references. The exotic, the primitive and folklore are favoured, to different rivals, a liberating return to the beginnings. Some artists are oriented towards other altering poles, with regenerating virtues: children´s creation, spiritualist art and the production from the asylums. This enthusiasm for the altered occupies a determining place in the history of art brut.