Carlo Zinelli is a canonical Art Brut figure. He suffered from schizophrenia exacerbated by his experiences as a soldier during the Spanish Civil War and WWII. In 1947 he was committed to a psychiatric hospital, but it was not until ten years later that he was allowed to work in a painting studio on the hospital grounds.

Zinelli painted for up to eight hours a day, producing nearly two thousand works of art. He painted animals and people in profile using gouache and embellished with inscriptions, often working on both sides of the paper. Zinelli's mental state deteriorated after he was relocated to a new hospital in 1969; he painted very little and died five years later.

The artist Jean Dubuffet - w...