Auguste Forestier

1887-1958 · Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole, France

A farm boy so besotted with trains that he piled pebbles on the tracks to see what would happen. It cost him his liberty, and gave France one of the great sculptors of art brut.

The life

Forestier was born into a farming family in Langogne in the Lozère in 1887. In 1914, aged 27, he placed stones on a railway line in his fascination with trains, and though no crash was ever proven he was committed to the psychiatric hospital of Saint-Alban, where he remained for the rest of his life. He worked in the warehouse and kitchens, set up a tiny workshop in a hospital corridor, and from the mid-1930s carved increasingly elaborate toys for the staff’s children. The poet Paul Éluard, sheltering at Saint-Alban during the war, carried his sculptures to Paris and showed them to Picasso, and Jean Dubuffet came to see for himself while forming his first art brut collection.

The work

Figures carved from salvaged wood with a cobbler’s leather knife and dressed in whatever came to hand: cloth, buttons, leather, string, medals, old coins, even teeth and bones retrieved from the hospital kitchens. Decorated generals, soldiers, boats and winged monsters, made with the gravity of a man building an empire in a corridor. His work is held by the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, the LaM in Villeneuve d’Ascq and the abcd collection.

Why we love them

Locked up over a handful of pebbles, he spent forty years quietly out-inventing the world that confined him. The monsters he made are still free.

Go deeper

• Auguste Forestier at the Outsider Art Fair
• Collection de l'Art Brut, Lausanne
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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