Through an exceptional deposit from the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire de l’Hôpital Sainte-Anne in Paris, ‘Le Plancher de Jeannot’, an art brut work by Jean Crampilh-Broucaret, is being presented in the exhibition ‘Le genre idéal’.
The work was discovered engraved into the floor of a farmhouse in Béarn and is presented in the section devoted to the history-painting genre.
Beyond its history, the four-year deposit by the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire de l’Hôpital Sainte-Anne, together with its current presentation, responds to a desire to question the place or role of curiosities.
Made in 1971–1972, the work consists of oak floorboards perforated and engraved in two sections, with the text cut using a drill and a woodcarving knife into oak floorboards.
It has no real equivalent except in the anonymous art of graffiti, the folklore of interloper places as understood by Brassaï and Dubuffet, or the agitation of écrits bruts.
Although all its words are legible and comprehensible, ‘Le Plancher de Jeannot’ takes on the character of a Rosetta Stone that, despite its testamentary quality, has not said its last word.
