While painting evolves children’s drawings are timeless

 

The term Art Brut was first used by painter Jean Dubuffet to refer to a kind of art outside the conventional dictates of the art world. He collected a large number of graffiti art and paintings or drawings made by the mentally-ill patients, prisoners, children, and other naive artists. Dubuffet – who in 1948 established a society to encourage the study of Art Brut – also tried to imitate and accept that kind of forms in his works. The most important museums dedicated to Art Brut is the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne.

 

In the history of art we have traced an old ancestor of Jean Dubuffet, someone surprisingly intrigued by children’s drawings more than five hundred years before. He is the painter Giovanni Francesco Caroto (Verona, 1480 – ca. 1555). In 1515 ca., he executed a “Portrait of a Boy Holding a Child’s Drawing”, now preserved in the Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona. How can we look at this unsettling picture without thinking at Doctor Sigmud Freud?

July 26, 2015