Gaston Chaissac

French, 20th century.
Born 1910, Avallon, France; died 1964, La Roche-sur-Yon, France

Born in 1919 in rural Avallon, Chaissac supported himself with a variety of trade jobs, working ironmonger, a cobbler, and a brushmaker. He began to make art in his mid-twenties, a passion that was interrupted by World War II and poor health. He suffered from tuberculosis, and for a time, produced art while convalescing in a sanitorium. Chaissac married a schoolteacher and settled in the town of Vendee, where he was able to devote significant time to writing and making art. After the war, his poetry and prose appeared in French journals dedicated to proletarian writing.

Chaissac’s artwork is both playful and powerfully raw. His drawings and paintings are populated by primitive, childlike figures constructed by a patchwork mode of wildly colored elements, defined and held together by restless, black contours. He extended this signature, visual collage mode to three dimensions in sculptures and assemblages made of found objects and materials: cans, brooms, branches, and rocks to name only a few. His process involved a continual renewal and recharging of the discarded and the quotidian, a transfer of creative energy he traced to Druidic ancestry.

Chaissac’s autodidactic, transformative practice was initially celebrated but later dismissed by Dubuffet, who relegated his work to the Annex of the Collection de l'Art Brut, labeling it Neuve Invention (Fresh Invention), a designation secured for self-taught artists whose participation in the art world disqualified them from inclusion within art brut. The degree to which Chaissac’s art, writing, and thinking influenced Dubuffet’s art and the formation of art brut continues to occupy scholars of their complex friendship and rich correspondence. According to Chaissac: "Dubbufet talked about art brut. The phrase made a fortune, and I was fleeced."

- Jenifer P. Borum

Biography

CV