Outside In

“Ah Jean Dubuffet / when you think of him / doing his military service in the Eiffel Tower / as a meteorologist / in 1922 / you know how wonderful the 20th Century / can be.” That’s how Frank O’Hara began his poem “Naphtha.” The lines, befitting the offbeat charisma of the great French artist, come to mind regarding “Art Brut in America: The Incursion of Jean Dubuffet,” at the American Folk Art Museum. It’s a fascinating show of outsider art from a collection with which Dubuffet (1901-85) sought to beget a climate change in the artistic cultures of Europe and, not least, the United States, where the collection resided from 1951 to 1962. Starting in 1945, he sought out, acquired, and documented works by untutored prisoners, children, people hospitalized for mental illnesses, and eccentric loners, mostly French, Swiss, or German, to make a point: “civilized” art was false to human nature and redeemable only by recourse to primal authenticities. He formed an organization, the Compagnie de l’Art Brut, with an international board of prominent artists, poets, and intellectuals (Wallace Stevens was a member), but, having no special program, it soon lapsed.