Jean Dubuffet

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(b Le Havre, 31 July 1901; d Paris, 12 May 1985). French painter, sculptor, printmaker, collector and writer. He was temperamentally opposed to authority and any suggestion of discipline and devised for himself a coherent, if rebellious, attitude towards the arts and culture. For all his maverick challenges to the values of the art world, Dubuffet's career exemplified the way in which an avant-garde rebel could encounter notoriety, then fame and eventual reverence. His revolt against beauty and conformity has come to be seen as a symptomatic and appreciable influence in 20th-century culture.

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The French painter Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet (1901-1985) explored the possibilities of materials and surfaces in works that depict commonplace subjects. Throughout his career he reacted against conventional ideas of beauty and remained apart from artistic movements.

Jean Dubuffet was born on July 31, 1901, in Le Havre, the son of a wealthy wine merchant, whose lifestyle young Jean found bourgeois. He began attending art classes when he was 15 years old, and in 1918 he went to Paris to study painting at the Académie Julian. Six months later he left school to paint on his own.

Questioning his originality and the value of art and of culture, Dubuffet stopped painting in 1923, traveled to Italy and Brazil, but returned to Le Havre in 1925 to study commerce. He married Paulette Brey in 1927, with whom he had a daughter, but they divorced just a few years later, and remarried just a few years after that. In 1930 he began a wine business in Paris which he subsequently left in the hands of an associate to resume painting. He returned again to the wine business in 1937 when the associate was failing at it, but when war broke out in 1939 he closed it down. From 1942 on he devoted himself exclusively to painting, allowing a new, more capable associate run the business until it was sold in 1946.

Dubuffet had his first exhibition in 1944 in Paris. With a crudeness reminiscent of the art brut (raw art) he so much admired, Dubuffet portrayed such ordinary subjects as people riding the Paris subway and a girl milking a cow. He was attempting "to bring all disparaged values into the limelight." These early paintings display the interest in texture, earth colors, and ironic humor that is characteristic of all Dubuffet's work. He researched the style of drawings done by children and the insane, and applied those to his works.

When Dubuffet's second major show took place in Paris in 1946, the popular response was one of outrage. Strongly influenced by graffiti, Dubuffet had broken all accepted visual conventions by his choice of subject and technique.

Spurred by his interest in naive art, Dubuffet made his first visit to North Africa in 1947. He made two subsequent visits to the Sahara between 1947 and 1949, and he responded to his experience by creating works in which landscape and texture became increasingly important.

In 1950 Dubuffet began a series of paintings of female nudes which he called Corps de Dames. The formless, grotesque, and often humorous figures represent the direct antithesis to classical proportion and beauty. Dubuffet wrote extensively about his rejection of esthetic conventions, which was a current running through all his work.

Because of his wife's ill health Dubuffet moved to Vence in the south of France in 1955. He was increasingly preoccupied with creating a new kind of landscape painting. With an inventiveness that is typical of his approach to his work, he tried out new methods, which included scattering sand on the painting, scratching it with a fork, and assembling pictures out of butterfly wings. From the new techniques and materials arose a rich variety of works, among them a cycle called Texturologies. These pictures, which celebrate the ground and contain no figures, appear to be nonrepresentational, but Dubuffet's works, however abstract they may appear, are always about something. The Texturologies are about matter, and by using the same thick impasto that he used to depict figures he suggests the oneness of nature and man.

When Dubuffet returned to Paris in 1961, he again took to depicting people and their environment. The bright colors and subject matter of these works recall the panoramas of city life he painted in 1943-1944. This return to an earlier style and subject matter was characteristic of Dubuffet; there was in his work a fundamental consistency in its dedication to "disparaged values" and in its aim of removing the boundaries between man and nature.

In 1962 Dubuffet moved to Le Touquet. At this time he began his longest series, entitled L'Hourloupe (a word he invented), which possess a decorative quality that is not evident in his earlier work. He also continued to paint everyday subjects, concentrating on inanimate objects such as typewriters, scissors, and clocks. In spite of their stylistic departure, these paintings are consistent with Dubuffet's entire output in their humor and naiveté.

Most of Dubuffet's later works involved large painted polyester resin sculptures, which still retain his offbeat sense of humor yet also have a grotesque and violent nature to them. Some critics consider him a predecessor to later trends in Pop Art and Neo-Dada. He died in 1985.

Further Reading

The best book on Dubuffet is by Peter Selz, The Work of Jean Dubuffet (1962). It is a thorough commentary on his life and work and includes translations of many of his writings. Alan Bowness's introduction in Jean Dubuffet: Paintings (1966), the catalog for his Tate Gallery retrospective, is very useful. An indispensable book for placing Dubuffet in the context of his century is Werner Haftmann, Painting in the Twentieth Century (1954; trans., 2 vols., 1961; rev. ed. 1965).

Dubuffet, Jean (1901-85). French painter and writer. As original with the pen as with the brush, Dubuffet used both instruments to state his belief in the demolition of orthodoxy, and in art as révolution permanente and fête amusante. He celebrated his own notion of l'art brut (‘raw art’, including the work of psychotics and children), and donated a large collection of naïve painting to the city of Lausanne. His robustly inventive tracts, essays, articles, and poems, many collected in Prospectus et tous écrits suivants (1967), decry the asphyxiation exercised on originality by bourgeois culture.

[David Steel]

Quotes:

"Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp."

"The State has but one face for me: that of the police. To my eyes, all of the State's ministries have this single face, and I cannot imagine the ministry of culture other than as the police of culture, with its prefect and commissioners."

"What culture lacks is the taste for anonymous, innumerable germination. Culture is smitten with counting and measuring; it feels out of place and uncomfortable with the innumerable; its efforts tend, on the contrary, to limit the numbers in all domains; it tries to count on its fingers."

Jean Dubuffet
Jean Dubuffet, Court les rues, 1962, Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI. An example of a non-painterly Dubuffet painting
Born	July 31, 1901(1901-07-31) Le Havre, France
Died	May 12, 1985 (aged 83)
Nationality	French
Field	Painting, Sculpture

Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet (July 31, 1901 - May 12, 1985) was one of the most famous French painters and sculptors of the second half of the 20th century.

Contents 1 Life and work 2 Selected bibliography 2.1 Catalogue Raisonné 2.2 Writings 2.3 Principal studies 3 External links

Life and work

Dubuffet was born in Le Havre. He moved to Paris in 1918 to study painting at the Académie Julian, but after six months he left the Académie to study independently. In 1924, doubting the value of art, he stopped painting and took over his father's business selling wine. He took up painting again in the 1930s, when he made a large series of portraits in which he emphasized the vogues in art history. But again stopped, only turning to art for good in 1942 when he started to paint figures of nude women in a impersonal and primitive way, in strong and unbroken colours. Also he chose as subjects people in the commonplace of everyday life, such as people sitting in the underground, or just walking in the country. His first solo show came in 1944.

In 1945 he became strongly impressed by a show in Paris of Jean Fautrier's paintings in which he recognized meaningful art which expressed directly and purely the depth of a person. As Fautrier he now started to use thick oil paint, but mixed with sand and gravel, by which he could model the paint as a skin of the painting. This resulted in the series 'Hautes Pâtes', he exhibited in 1946 at the Galérie René Drouin. After 1946 he started a series of portraits, with as 'model' partly his own friends Henri Michaux, Francis Ponge, Jean Paulhan and Pierre Matisse. He painted these portraits in the same thick materials, and deliberately anti-psychological and anti-personal, as Dubuffet expressed himself. A few years later he approached the surrealist group in 1948, then the College of Pataphysique in 1954. He was befriended with the French writer for theater Antonin Artaud, he admired and supported the writer Celine and was strongly connected with the artistic circle around the surrealist André Masson. In 1944 started an important relation with the resistance-fighter Jean Paulhan who was also strongly fighting against 'intellectual terrorism', as he called it.

Influenced by Hans Prinzhorn's book Artistry of the Mentally Ill, Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut (meaning "raw art," oftentimes referred to as ‘outsider art’) for art produced by non-professionals working outside aesthetic norms, such as art by mental patients, prisoners, and children. He amassed his own collection of such art, including artists such as Aloïse Corbaz and Adolf Wölfli. The collection is now housed at the Musée de l'Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland. Dubuffet sought to create an art as free from intellectual concerns as Art Brut, and his work often appears primitive and child-like.

Many of Dubuffet's works are painted in oil paint using an impasto thickened by materials such as sand, tar and straw, giving the work an unusually textured surface. From 1962 he produced a series of works in which he limited himself to the colours red, white, black, and blue. Towards the end of the 1960s he turned increasingly to sculpture, producing works in polystyrene which he then painted with vinyl paint.

In late 1960-1961, Dubuffet began experimenting with music and sound and made several recordings with the Danish painter Asger Jorn. The same period he started making sculpture, but in a very not-sculptural way. As his medium he preferred to use the ordinary materials as papier mâchier and for all the light medium polystyrene, in which he could model very fast and switch easily from one work to another, as sketches on paper. At the end of the sixties he started to create his large sculpture-habitations, such as 'Tour aux figures', 'Jardin d'Hiver' and 'Villa Falbala' in which people can wander, stay, contemplate etc.

In 1978 Dubuffet collaborated with American composer and musician Jasun Martz to create the record album artwork for Martz’s avant-garde symphony entitled The Pillory. The much written about drawing has been reproduced internationally in three different editions on tens-of-thousands of record albums and compact discs. A detail of the drawing is also featured on Martz’s second symphony (2005), The Pillory/The Battle, performed by The Intercontinental Philharmonic Orchestra and Royal Choir.

Scratched and trowelled in their mud like pigment, their outlines scrawled in a sophisticated parody of the hasty gential urgency of street graffiti, Dubuffet's cruel portraits of French intellectuals and writers in the 1940s go beyond caricature; they are pathetic monsters.

Robert Hughes

One of Dubuffet's later works was Monument With Standing Beast (1984). Dubuffet died in Paris in 1985. The Fondation Jean Dubuffet collects and exhibits his work.

Selected bibliography

Catalogue Raisonné

• Catalogue des travaux de Jean Dubuffet, Fascicule I-XXXVIII, Pauvert: Paris, 1965-1991
• Webel, Sophie, L’Œuvre gravé et les livres illustrés par Jean Dubuffet. Catalogue raisonné. Lebon: Paris 1991

Writings

• Jean Dubuffet, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, Tome I, II, Paris 1967; Tome III, IV, Gallimard: Paris 1995
• Jean Dubuffet, Asphyxiating Culture and other Writings. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1986
  ISBN 0-941423-09-3

Principal studies

• Michel Ragon, Dubuffet, New York: Grove Press, 1959
• Peter Selz, The Work of Jean Dubuffet, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1962
• Max Loreau, Jean Dubuffet, délits déportements lieux de haut jeu, Paris: Weber, 1971
• Andreas Franzke, Jean Dubuffet, Basel: Beyeler, 1976
• Andreas Franzke, Jean Dubuffet, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 1981
• Michel Thévoz, Jean Dubuffet, Geneva: Albert Skira, 1986
• Mildred Glimcher, Jean Dubuffet: Towards an Alternative Reality. New York: Pace Gallery 1987
  ISBN 0-89659-782-2
• Mechthild Haas, Jean Dubuffet, Berlin: Reimer, 1997
• Jean Dubuffet, Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 2001
  ISBN 2-84426-093-4
• Laurent Danchin, Jean Dubuffet, New York: Vilo International, 2001
  ISBN 2-87939-240-3
• Jean Dubuffet: Trace of an Adventure, ed. by Agnes Husslein-Arco, Munich: Prestel, 2003
  ISBN 3-7913-2998-7
• Michael Krajewski, Jean Dubuffet. Studien zu seinem Fruehwerk und zur Vorgeschichte des Art brut, Osnabrueck: Der andere Verlag, 2004
  ISBN 3-89959-168-2

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Jean Dubuffet

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Jean Dubuffet

• Fondation Dubuffet
• Dubuffet at the Tate Gallery
• The Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne
• Dubuffet at Brain-Juice
• Music By Dubuffet
• (French) Jean Dubuffet

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