The Art Brut Collection invites you to a continuous workshop for the general public, to “favorite” visits for young and old, as well as to a voice-over of “Putzman” by the Diane M company. And as a bonus: the discovery of “the cabin”…!
Pascal Vonlanthen Pascal Vonlanthen is fascinated by typefaces and textual arrangement, although he cannot read. In copying text from newspapers, magazines and advertising materials, he produces his own, distinctive take on a language whose codes he cannot decipher. Over the course of a decade, he produced an original body of asemic writings – texts with no syntax but invested with immense formal power.
Learn more
Clemens Wild Clemens Wild’s paintings feature protagonists with names like Babsi, Sam and Uschi: these figures – with their colourful clothing and hair, smoking cigarettes – form a gallery of women who, despite a life of hardship, stand tall with confidence and dignity. They share the same modest backgrounds, low social status and distant origins. Through these works, they talk about their stories, their struggles, their pastimes, and their hopes for the future.
Learn more
12h00
16h00
Collection de l'Art Brut
Come and discover our new educational space for toddlers.
13h00 16h00
Collection de l'Art Brut
Decorate your tote bag! Painting, drawing, writing: all the techniques are at your disposal.
Take inspiration from the paper bags that Clemens Wild covered with very colorful drawings and the writings of Pascal Vonlanthen.
14h00, 17h00 (20m)
Collection de l'Art Brut
For children aged 3 to 6 years
With all your senses alert, discover a work from the Collection.
16h00, 20h00, 22h00 (20m)
Collection de l'Art Brut
By the museum guides
Our guides share with you their favorite work, an author. A unique opportunity to lift the veil on these universes, to discover their richness and to unravel their mysteries!
17h00, 21h00 (30m)
Collection de l'Art Brut
According to the diary of Armand Muller, a unionized cleaner at the Geneva Cantonal Hospital.
Reading: Diane Muller.
One day, I received a text from my uncle Armand Muller. The diary he had kept when he was a cleaner at the Geneva hospital. It is a rare ethnographic document, because you have to find the strength to write after a day of cleaning. But also the strength to go to a union meeting in the evening when you start "putzing" at 4:00 in the morning.
Lack of glances and greetings, invisibility of know-how, absurdity and difficulty of certain tasks, fear of being sent back home, difficult hours, dangerous products, but also mutual aid, support...: many themes of maintenance work are heard through this testimony.
Works of Art Brut are crafted by self-taught artists, non-conformists with a rebellious spirit or those impervious to the collective norms and values. The artists include prisoners, patients in psychiatric hospitals, eccentrics, recluses and outcasts who create without worrying about criticism from the public and other people’s opinions.
Seeking neither recognition nor approbation, they create a world that serves their own purposes. Their works, produced using methods and materials that are often unique, are unaffected by the influences of artistic tradition and use highly singular forms of representation. The notion of Art Brut is founded on both social and aesthetic characteristics.
We owe the invention of the term “Art Brut” , as well as the existence of the museum, to the French painter Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985). In 1971, Dubuffet donated his collection, an exceptional set of some 5,000 pieces, as well as his Art Brut archives to the city of Lausanne. The Collection de l’Art Brut, located in an 18th century château, was opened to the public on 26 February 1976.
