Jean Dubuffet first defined l’art brut in 1949 like this:

(i) We understand by this term works produced by persons unscathed by artistic culture, where mimicry plays little or no part (contrary to the activities of intellectuals)

(ii) We are witnesses here to a completely pure artistic operation, raw, brute, and entirely reinvented in all of its phases solely by means of the artists’ own impulses.

Back in time, only a few people realized the unique quality of Louis Soutter’s drawings and paintings: a couple of friends, his cousin Le Corbusier, the painter René Auberjonois, the writers Jean Giono and Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, the publisher Henry-Louis Mermod, and the gallerists Claude and Maxime Vallotton. But that’s it.

Today, however, Soutter is considered one of the most important Swiss visual artists of the early 20th century.

Most of the representatives of l’art brut (outsider art, raw art) are known for their achievements in the fields of visual, object or spatial art. For some of them – such as the Swiss Adolf Wölfl (1864 – 1930) – music was a central part of the creative work and power. Wölfl’s large-scale works are often densely filled with musical lines and notes, and he also composed music on a self-made paper trumpet.

Adolf Wölfli fulfilled the classic definition of l’art brut. He grew up in extremely poor conditions, never received any kind of education in visual art or music, and he spent a large part of his life in a psychiatric hospital in Waldau, outside Bern. Louis Soutter (1871 – 1942), by contrast, has been a bad fit for orthodox l’art brut from the beginning, the reason being that before his famous works, he had a lot of contact with the art world.

Louis Soutter

Louis Soutter was born in the small town of Morges in Switzerland. He grew up in a musical family: his mother was an excellent musician and teacher of singing, his sister became an opera singer, and his brother played the flute. Louis Soutter chose architecture, which he studied in both Geneva and Zurich until he announced that he would focus on playing the violin.

Soutter moved to Brussels in 1892, where he studied under one of the most famous and respected violinists of the era, Eugène Ysaye (1858-1931). Despite his skills as a violinist, Soutter decided to stop studying music, apparently for mental health reasons. He continued to create visual art, which he already had a good technical command of.

Soutter then moved to Colorado Springs, the United States, with a young American singing student, Madge Fursman, and married her in 1897. For a time, Soutter served as head of the fine arts department at Colorado College, but after separating from his wife, he returned to Europe to settle permanently in Switzerland.

By this time, Soutter’s mental and physical condition had already deteriorated considerably. He lost weight dramatically and often seemed to be in a delirious state. Soutter supported himself by playing the violin in symphony orchestras, later in silent film orchestras and in tourist resorts. As his health continued to deteriorate, his family decided to send him prematurely and reluctantly to a nursing home in the canton of Vaud, near the Jura mountains. Soutter was 52 years old.

The last 19 years

The last 19 years of his life Soutter spent in extreme loneliness and anxiety in the Ballaigues nursing home, with elderly people he did not care about at all. He asked to be let go, but his request was refused. So Soutter escaped his anxiety and suffering not only by losing even more weight, but also by taking long walks in the surrounding areas, trips that lasted for days. After returning from his travels, Soutter played the violin, but above all, he drew and painted with an enormous compulsive need.

He transferred into pictures the euphoric and hallucinatory visions of his walks, but also his inner musical world. Silhouettes of musicians and the figure of the violinist d’Ysaÿe often appear in Soutter’s works. And he was no longer limited in his creative work by the academic or other norms of the outside world.

The exhibition 2003

In 2003, the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne and the Collection L’Art Brut, Lausanne, organized an extensive double exhibition of Soutter’s art from 1923 to 1942. One of the exhibitions presented Soutter’s work, combining it with the music that was important to the artist.

The exhibition featured interpretations of music by Jean-Sébastien Bach and Alban Berg, which seem to have a rhythmic connection to the continuous movement of Soutter’s works, for example. The theme of the Passion of the Christ, which is present in many of Soutter’s works, seems to resonate well with Frank Martin’s Polyptyque concerto, and so on. The musical samples for the exhibition were selected with very strict criteria by Christian Zacharias, director of the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne, together with Patrick Peikert.

The Inner-Magazines would like to thank Vincent Monodia of the Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne, and Florence Pittet of the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne for their kind assistance with the material.

Sources:

Lucienne Peiry: “Peindre l’utopie”, in Louis Soutter 1871-1942, Ostfildern-Ruit, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2002.
Michel Thévoz: De la musique avant toute chose … , in Louis Soutter 1871-1942, Ostfildern-Ruit, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2002.
Pascale Marini: Louis Soutter at la musique, Archives de la Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne, 2003.
Press release, Archives de la Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne, 2003.

Collection L’Art Brut, Lausanne

The Collection L’Art Brut, in Lausanne, Switzerland, is one of the world’s leading museums of raw art, if not the best. South of Paris is La Fabuloserie, and in New York is the American Folk Art Museum.

The museum’s collections began when Jean Dubuffet discovered the visionary drawings of Clémentine Ripoche in 1923. In the 1940s, Dubuffet devoted himself entirely to the visual arts and began to systematically collect drawings and other works from psychiatric hospitals and prisons in Switzerland and France.

Professor Charles Ladame, in Geneva, opened a small cabinet in the lobby of the hospital he directed, where works collected from patients, among others, were exhibited. Ladame donated 40 of them to Jean Dubuffet, who, upon his return to France, first defined l’art brut and began to create norms for it. In 1948, Jean Dubuffet founded La Compagnie de l’Art Brut in Paris. He was assisted by, among others, André Breton, Jean Paulhan, Charles Ratton, Henri-Pierre Roché and Michel Tapié. The first public exhibition featured 200 works by 63 artists. For various reasons, the collection was in exile from 1951 to 1964, near New York, where a major exhibition was held in 1962. The collection returned to Paris in 1964, where its first truly public exhibition was held in 1967.

Dubuffet wanted to ensure that his collection of 4,000 works would remain in the public domain and offered it to the city of Lausanne in 1971, which the city accepted. In 1975, the collection was moved to its current location in the château Beaulieu. In the same year, Michel Thévoz, the museum’s conservator, published his groundbreaking book L’Art Brut, with a foreword by Jean Dubuffet.

In 1995, when the Collection L’Art Brut, Lausanne, celebrated its 20th anniversary, its collection contained over 20,000 works. The museum’s exhibition activity has been very active throughout these years. In the last five years, there have been almost 20 thematic exhibitions.