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Yesterday I mentioned Lausanne’s avant-garde. Decided to travel that road when discussing their visual arts.

Lausanne is home to one of the most interesting museums - the Collection de L’Art Brut, an internationally renowned museum for outsider art. The museum presents artists, who live on the fringe – many of them in psychiatric institutions – who have each created, through their art, an individual world of their own, characterized by great aesthetic intensity and passion. The paintings and graphics, sculptures and objects of these artists are presented together with touching documentary films that convey an impression of their lives, their particular circumstances, and their ways of working.

The collection of art has no particular theme, but the artists all share something in common: none of them have had any formal art training. Reading the short bios of the artists is worth the trip alone. One sculpture was carved by a man in a prison cell with the handle of his spoon. When they took his spoon away he began using a pot handle instead (I’m talking resourceful here.) A woman drew onto a huge scroll of paper in near darkness and due to the cramped space she was in, never actually saw her drawing unrolled. And that’s just the beginning of the strange.

About the piece to the right: Aurie Ramirez, a 46 year old Filipino-American woman, may have suffered slightly from a form of autism and perhaps dyslexia. Whichever the case, her art speaks volumes. She expresses herself in a unique language that is dreamy, haunting, fashion inspired and often humorous. Some of her work was inspired by television’s ‘The Addams Family.’ Her art is often vivid with color - or almost austere in its grays. Google her if you’re interested.

Henry Darger is the world’s most celebrated lifelong menial laborer, having worked unnoticed as a janitor, a dishwasher and a winder of gauze bandages. Darger is exposed in John MacGregor’s In the Realms of the Unreal, a definitive, 10-year, 720-page critical study of his life and work. Darger was mentally ill in the unspecific way of the self-muttering recluse, and his fame comes from what was discovered during the cleaning out of the room he inhabited for 40 years. The photo on the left was found in his 19,000 page illustrated manuscript. You can find much info about him online, as well as photos of his most famous works. The deranged man was clearly an outsider, and some believe the murderer of Elsie Paroubek, a Chicago girl whose murderer was never found. A loft in the museum contains excerpts from the novel found after his death.

Being home to the Collection de L’Art Brut says much about the cultural pulse of Lausanne.