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Outsider art facts for kids

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Losanna, collection de l'art brut, 05
View inside the Collection de l'art brut museum, Lausanne

Outsider art is art that is non-commercial and that lives outside the usual art galleries.

Usually it is created by people who have little or no artistic training in art schools. In many cases, their work is discovered only after their deaths. Often, outsider art illustrates extreme mental states, unconventional ideas, or elaborate fantasy worlds. Some may have a mental illness like schizophrenia. People who do outsider art are called outsider artists. They create their art from their own inner experience, not caring or knowing what other artists maybe doing.

The term outsider art was coined in 1972 as the title of a book by art critic Roger Cardinal. It is an English equivalent for art brut ( "raw art" or "rough art"), a label created in the 1940s by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture. Dubuffet focused particularly on art by those on the outside of the established art scene, using as examples psychiatric hospital patients, hermits, and spiritualists.

These artists often create buildings with strange architecture they build alone. Some of them also do more conventional arts like painting, sculpture.

Outsider art includes the works of:

  • Stephen Judges (UK, still alive)
  • Facteur Cheval (French, died in 1924)
  • Robert Garcet (Belgium, died in 2001)

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See also

Kids robot.svg In Spanish: Arte marginal para niños

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