The childhood of art: When dubuffet and cobra reinvented beauty

What was at stake then was not just a quarrel between aesthetes. It was a fundamental question: what if beauty lay precisely in what we have learned to hide? In children’s drawings, the scribbles of the mad, the graffiti in prisons? What if art, instead of being the preserve of salons, was first and foremost a cry, a gesture, a trace left without calculation? Let us dive into this era when Europe, still wounded by war, chose to look at itself in the distorting mirror of its own lost innocence.

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The asylum walls: when Dubuffet discovered the art of the "mad"

Imagine a forty-year-old man, dressed in a crumpled three-piece suit, wandering the corridors of a Swiss psychiatric hospital in 1945. Jean Dubuffet, until then a failed wine merchant and Sunday painter, holds in his hands a book that will change everything: Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the Mentally Ill) by psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn. The pages are filled with strange drawings, obsessive patterns, faces distorted by a hand that seems to ignore the rules of perspective. What strikes Dubuffet is not the madness of these works, but their freedom. Here, there is no learned composition, no search for conventional beauty. Just an urgent need to create, as if art were a matter of survival.

Back in Paris, he begins to collect feverishly. Not masterpieces, no: children’s drawings, prisoners’ letters, sculptures made from breadcrumbs by asylum inmates. In 1947, he coins a term for this unexplored continent: Art Brut. The word is chosen carefully. "Brut" like a diamond before polishing, like wine before bottling. Brut, meaning unfiltered by conventions, uncorrupted by public expectations.

His first exhibition, in 1949 at the Galerie René Drouin, causes a scandal. Critics call it "scribbles," "delirium," some even accuse Dubuffet of exploiting the misery of the mentally ill. Yet what the rare sensitive visitors see is something else: a wild, almost sacred beauty. In the paintings of Aloïse Corbaz, a Swiss schizophrenic who drew princesses with oversized dresses, or in the labyrinthine architectures of Adolf Wölfli, a patient who covered thousands of pages with compulsive patterns, Dubuffet perceives a truth that official art has forgotten: creation does not need permission.

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The café of savages: CoBrA, or art as child’s play

While Dubuffet scours asylums, another group of artists, younger and more restless, prepares its own revolution. They are called Asger Jorn, Karel Appel, Constant Nieuwenhuys. They come from Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam—hence the name CoBrA, an acronym of their cities. Their headquarters? A Parisian café where they smoke Gauloises and drink red wine at ten in the morning.

What unites them is a visceral rejection of anything that smacks of academism. For them, art must be like a cry, like a kick in an anthill. Their manifesto, written in one night on a corner of the table, is a manifesto of spontaneity: "We want to work without a safety net, like drunk tightrope walkers." Their method? To paint quickly, without sketches, letting the hand guide the brush. Their models? Children’s drawings, African masks, graffiti in public toilets.

Their first exhibition, in 1949 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, provokes an uproar. Visitors, used to tame landscapes and smoothed portraits, discover canvases covered with violent stains, misshapen figures, garish colours. One critic writes: "It’s as if monkeys had dipped their paws in paint and wiped them on the canvas." Karel Appel, one of the group’s members, will later reply: "A five-year-old could do that? Well, do it then!"

What CoBrA brings that is radical is the idea that art does not have to be serious. Their canvases are full of stifled laughter, visual puns, mischievous winks. In Questioning Children (1949), Appel paints faces with bulging eyes, as if drawn by a child who had watched too many horror films. The colours are bright, almost aggressive—blood red, electric blue, screaming yellow. Nothing to do with the subtle harmonies of American abstract art, which was seducing collectors at the time. CoBrA is art that refuses to grow up.

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Mud and blood: the materials of rebellion

If you get too close to a Dubuffet painting, you risk getting dirty. His paintings are not smooth surfaces, but battlefields where the material has been kneaded, scraped, incised. He mixes oil with sand, coal dust, sometimes even tar. In La Métaphysique (1950), the canvas looks like an abandoned construction site, covered with graffiti and footprints. Dubuffet calls this technique "hautes pâtes"—impasto so thick it seems to want to escape the frame.

Why this obsession with texture? Because for him, painting should not just represent the world, it should be an extension of it. His materials are not chosen at random: tar evokes the streets of Paris, sand recalls the beaches of his childhood in Le Havre, coal dust smells of industry and war. In Corps de Dame (1950), a series of female nudes with grotesque forms, the paint is so thick it seems to pulse. These bodies are not painted, they are sculpted in the material, as if Dubuffet wanted to give physical existence to his fantasies.

CoBrA, for its part, favours more direct, almost primitive techniques. Karel Appel paints with his fingers, Asger Jorn uses DIY tools, Christian Dotremont invents "word-paintings" where letters become drawings. Their studio looks like a playground: overturned paint pots, brushes stuck in wine bottles, canvases pinned to the wall with drawing pins. Nothing of the meticulous order of a classical studio. Here, art is born from disorder, like a game that has escaped its author.

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The scandal of "bad" drawings

In 1951, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Liège hosts CoBrA’s second exhibition. The organisers, cautious, have placed warning signs at the entrance: "Caution, these works may shock." They are not wrong. Visitors discover canvases where hybrid animals seem to emerge from a child’s nightmare, portraits with features distorted as if reflected in a funhouse mirror. Some cry charlatanism, others speak of "decadence." One man, outraged, even tries to slash a painting by Constant with his umbrella.

Yet what shocks the most is not so much the ugliness of the works as their apparent ease. "Anyone could do that," people whisper in the corridors. Dubuffet, who is exhibiting not far away, hears these criticisms and smiles. For him, that is precisely the point: to show that art is not reserved for an elite. In a text published in 1947, he writes: "Art must be like a kick in the backside of society. It must wake up, not put to sleep."

This idea that art should be accessible, even democratic, is revolutionary for the time. The Surrealists, with their obscure symbols, and the American Abstract Expressionists, with their immaculate canvases, cultivate a form of hermeticism. CoBrA and Dubuffet, on the other hand, want to speak to everyone—especially to those who never set foot in a gallery. Their canvases are open windows onto the collective unconscious, mirrors held up to our most childish fears and desires.

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The legacy of the "barbarians": when art learned to laugh at itself

Today, when you enter a contemporary art gallery, you often come across works that seem to have come straight out of Dubuffet’s or CoBrA’s studios. Basquiat’s graffiti, Franz West’s soft sculptures, Thomas Hirschhorn’s chaotic installations—all owe something to this era when art dared to become wild again.

But the deepest influence of these movements may lie elsewhere: in the way we conceive of creation. Before CoBrA and Art Brut, the artist was a being apart, a solitary genius. After them, it becomes possible to create without training, without theory, without even knowing how to draw. Art therapy workshops, children’s painting classes, street art festivals—all these phenomena owe something to the idea that art is first and foremost a universal language, that of raw emotion.

Towards the end of his life, Dubuffet begins to create monumental sculptures, his "Hourloupes"—black and white forms that coil like snakes, like tangled thoughts. These works, less provocative than his early paintings, retain the same energy. They seem to say: "Look how simple it is. Look how within your reach it is."

Perhaps that is the most beautiful gift of CoBrA and Art Brut: to have reminded us that art, before being a profession, is a game. A serious game, of course, but a game nonetheless. And like all games, it is played best without rules.