In the history of art, there are territories so far removed from the dominant lines of official art that it cannot even be said that they have been deliberately rejected or belittled. This is the case with art brut, "raw art," or outsider art: a type of work that is difficult to classify and united by its origin outside any artistic institution, whose discovery for the general public is due to the artist and art theorist. Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985), who defined art brut as an artistic practice carried out by people outside the mainstream of culture. Dubuffet was interested in the creations of the mentally ill, of children, of those who chose to distance themselves from society—works that resemble neither naive art, nor folk art, nor countercultural productions. His efforts materialized in a vast collection which, thirty years later, he donated to the city of Lausanne (Switzerland), where the Collection de l'Art Brut museum is located.

Genius and Delirium presents a selection from this collection, the largest and most important in the world, with works by twelve artists—taxi drivers, tailors, laborers, the mentally ill—with no biographical or intellectual connection and who were never part of a specific artistic group: Aloïse Corbaz, Paul Amar, Carlo Zinelli, Curzio di Giovanni, Josef Hofer, Madge Gill, Kunizo Matsumoto, Reinhold Metz, Nek Chand, Laura Pigeon, Eugenio Santoro y Adolf WolffiThe book includes previously unpublished texts by Lucienne Peiry, Director of the Lausanne Art Brut Collection, and Dolores Durán, as well as a complete bibliography.

Articles about Art Brut in the magazine Minerva