Marcel Armand Bascoulard-Mulet (10 February 1913 – 12 January 1978) was a French photographer, illustrator, painter, poet, and designer.
[2] In 1932, when Bascoulard was 19, his mother shot and killed his father after attempting to flee, and was committed to the Beauregard Psychiatric Hospital for the rest of her life.
[4][5] After his father's death, Bascoulard moved to the neighborhood of Avaricum in Bourges, to be closer to the mental asylum where his mother stayed.
[6] He began his career as an artist by making landscapes of the city's and nearby suburbs' streets, architecture, and nature and in ink, gouache, and lithography.
[4] Having a life-long interest in locomotives, Bascoulard took photographs of trains and drew maps.
[11] He was known to adorn his outfits with signs saying "screw society," which attracted further attention from authorities[4] In addition to French, Bascoulard also spoke German, English, Swedish, and Russian.
He has had exhibitions at Musée d’art moderne et contemporain in Saint-Etienne, the Fort Institute of Photography in Warsaw, Halle Saint Pierre in Paris; the Musée de Grenoble, Grenoble, the Punta della Dogana in the Pinault Collection, Venice, and during the Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, France.
[8] He was first shown in the United States in 2021, in the seminal exhibition Photo Brut at the American Folk Art Museum.