Through the summer and early Autumn of 2004, the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Les Halles, Paris, dedicated its walls and floors to one of the biggest exhibitions of Raw Art (Outsider Art, L’Art Brut, or Art of the Margins, if you prefer) ever held in the French capital. The organisers claimed they were displaying the work of hundreds of Outsider Artists. [see FT147:40-44]. The exhibition was certainly impressive, taking in art by psychiatric patients, alcoholics, visionaries, sociopaths, loners, naifs, vagrants, street kids and hobos.

That said, it’s not hard to mount the ‘biggest ever’ exhibition of Outsider Art in Paris: there haven’t been many others, of any size. Even though Paris saw the conception and first celebration of the Raw Art genre back in the 1920s (by Surrealists and Dadaists like Jean Dubuffet and Paul Klee), the city has been studiously neglectful of this kind of art ever since. From World War II to date, there has been only one serious Parisian exhibition of Raw Art, when Jean Dubuffet himself showed the kernel of his startling and unique collection in several Left Bank galleries during the late 1940s.

The irony of all this is that the City of Paris could have spared itself the bother and expense of curating special Raw Art exhibitions: once, it could have had the great Dubuffet collection for free, and for good. By the late Sixties and Seventies, Jean Dubuffet had personally amassed more than 15,000 works of Outsider Art, and was seeking somewhere to donate his enormous collection. Being a patriotic, if surrealist, Frenchman, Dubuffet naturally sought to donate it to France. But he was spurned by all the French authorities, who possibly viewed the raw, self-taught art-work of psychotics and criminals with distaste. Dubuffet was also thwarted when he tried to give the collection to friends in the USA.

In 1972, however, the collection at last found a home, in the Chateau Beaulieu in Lausanne, Switzerland. There it remains to this day, full of the strange, wonderful and, frankly, disturbing. Great raw artists like Scottish barrow boy Scottie Wilson, the Chicago lavatory cleaner Henry Darger, and the hallucinating pædophile collage-maker Adolf Wolfli, are all heavily and gloriously featured.

The collection, which Dubuffet called “a pool of moral health”, has not, however, remained static. Like the genre of Raw Art itself, it has expanded and broadened to take in people who, while they may not be as ‘outside’ the art world as psychotics, prisoners or hermits, still have some disjointed relationships with the mainstream: artists like Gaston Chaissac, Rosemarie Koczy, or Albert Louden. Dubuffet termed these people the “Neuve Invention” – the Fresh Invention – but most art critics have since preferred to use the handy, catchall term “Outsider Art”, coined by British art writer Roger Cardinal in 1972.

Of course, as the Collection de L’Art Brut in Lausanne has grown in fame and esteem over the years, the French art authorities have come to realise their mistake in refusing it. Since the 1980s, they have therefore sought to properly house the French patrimony of Raw Art in its own French gallery. In the early 1990s, it was proposed that Lille’s Museum of Modern Art should build a new wing to display the L’Aracine collection (an assembly of Raw Art consciously modelled on Dubuffet’s). The proposal was eventually accepted: the new L’Aracine Wing is expected to open in 2006.

The L’Aracine collection, while not as primary and extensive as Dubuffet’s, is still a fine one. Along with the usual Raw Art suspects (Darger, Wolfli, the one-eyed British ex-nurse Madge Gill) the collection notably features bipolar Russian folk-painter Alexandre Lobanov, and the heavily-dosed lunatic Guillaume Pujol (who used his medications as paint). Another highlight promises to be the so-called Dress of Bonneval, a rhapsodically intricate garment obsessively patched together from scraps or wire, wool, linen and other materials, by a French asylum inmate, early in the 20th century.

Intriguingly, the advent of the Lille Wing is just one example of a wave that is now sweeping the world: it’s not just the French who are finally getting the hang of this Raw Art thing. The Centre for Intuitive Art in Chicago, Galerie Hamer in the Netherlands, the National Collection of Outsider Art in Australia, and the Artists’ House in Vienna (an annexe to an actual asylum), have all opened in the last decade or so, specifically to house the world’s marginalised art. And more galleries are still being planned around the globe. Even the great Prinzhorn Collection in Heidelberg, Germany, brought into being in the 1920s by the first person to view Outsider Art as æsthetically interesting – Dr Hans Prinzhorn – is now rumoured to be getting some proper, dedicated gallery-space, after years of notorious and obscure neglect.

And where does Britain fit in? Does this country have a role to play?

The honest answer, perhaps surprising to some, is that the UK already has a profound and serious history of Outsider Art. Many of the great outsider artists are British (Gill, Wilson, etc). Indeed, the greatest outsider artist of all was British – the Victorian painter Richard Dadd, who was locked up as a criminal lunatic for killing his father, but went on to produce at least two world class Outsider Art masterpieces: The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke (Tate Britain) and Oberon and Titania (Andrew Lloyd Webber collection). Moreover, the first person to actually depict Outsider Art in the making was William Hogarth, who included a lunatic drawing on a wall in his 1735 engraving of the Royal Bethlem Hospital for the Insane (the painting was part of his sequence The Rake’s Progress). And it was again The Royal Bethlem that curated the world’s first ever exhibition of Outsider Art (or ‘art by patients’ as it was then called) as long ago as 1900.

So, even if the torch has since been passed on, the UK once had a definitive and formative influence on the genre. Yet, the appalling fact is that the only place in the UK dedicated to Outsider Art is a tiny brown bungalow – perhaps known to regular FT readers [see FT137:48], but not to the general public – hidden away in the grounds of the new Royal Bethlem, in South London. So small is this building, that the curators admit they can only show a minuscule tip of the great iceberg of asylum art they possess.

Yet, if the Bethlem’s poignant and absorbing displays are anything to go by, the entire collection must be remarkable indeed. For instance, the poky dark room that is the Bethlem’s gallery shows some fine works by the mad cat artist, Louis Wain, but the archivist at the Bethlem thinks they must have ‘hundreds’ they have never shown. Similarly, there are some extraordinary drawings by the psychotic brother of Victorian apocalypse painter John Martin (the gallery also shows the enormous irons in which Martin was clamped while he worked) – yet the Bethlem archivist thinks there are twice as many equally good works squirrelled away elsewhere.

Of course, the Bethlem gallery is still worth a visit in and for itself. There are disturbing paintings, coolly touching ceramics, inspired little cartoons, and some startling spiritual canvases by the mad Royal Academician Charles Sims. And there are oils, watercolours and sketches by Richard Dadd. Yet all these works are compromised by the fact that they share the display space with keys, tools, letters, uniforms, restraints, and sundry other exhibits, all relating to the treatment of mental illness at the Bethlem. These are deeply interesting in their own right, but they detract from or obscure the impact of the remarkable Outsider Art.

It is a travesty that this important and moving collection goes largely unexhibited – and that what can be exhibited is, of necessity, hidden away in a decidedly titchy bungalow and jumbled up with other items. So, what can we do? At the moment, the Bethlem gallery curators say they are applying for National Heritage funding – i.e. Lottery money – to extend their premises. This request should be met, and generously. Some of the world’s greatest Outsider Art is in the UK; much of it is in hidden away in the vaults of The Royal Bethlem. It needs a proper home.

The Royal Bethlem Hospital Archives and Museum are open from Monday to Friday, 9.30 to 5pm. Admission free. At various times the museum is closed, due to staff shortages: phone ahead on +44 (0)20 8776 4835.

The Royal Bethlem Hospital, Monks Orchard Road, Beckenham, Kent. Nearest station: Eden Park.

Collection de L’Art Brut, 11 Ave de Bergieres, Lausanne, Switzerland. Open 11-1, 2-6, Tuesday-Sunday. Admission 6 Swiss Fr.