Jean Dubuffet

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Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet (31 July 1901 – May 1985) was a French painter and sculptor.

His idealistic and humanistic approach to beauty embraced so-called "low art" and discarded traditional beauty standards in favour of what he considered a more authentic and humanistic approach to image-making.

He is perhaps best known for establishing Art Brut and collecting works —Collection de l'art brut—that this movement spawned.

Dubuffet had a prolific art career, both in France and in the United States, and he was included in numerous exhibitions throughout his lifetime.

Early life

Dubuffet was born in Le Havre to a family of wholesale wine merchants who were part of the wealthy bourgeoisie. Raymond Queneau and Georges Limbour were two of his childhood friends. He went to Paris in 1918 to study painting at Académie Julian, becoming close friends of the artists Juan Gris, André Masson, and Fernand Léger. He left Académie to study independently six months later, after discovering academic training to be revolting. During this period, Dubuffet's interests spanned many other areas, including free noise music, poetry, and the study of ancient and modern languages. Dubuffet has also traveled to Italy and Brazil, and after returning to Le Havre in 1925, he married for the first time and established a small wine company in Paris. When he created a large series of portraits in which he emphasized the vogues in art history, he took up painting in 1934. However, during France's German Occupation, he stopped growing his wine company at Bercy. He wrote an autobiographical book years ago about how much money he had gained by exporting wine to the Wehrmacht.

Early work

Dubuffet decided to return to art in 1942. People sitting in the Paris Métro or walking around the country were often selected for his artwork from everyday life. Dubuffet painted in vivid, unbroken colors, recalling Fauvism's palette as well as the Brucke painters' juxtaposing and discordant patches of color. Multiple of his paintings featured an individual or individuals in a cramped space, which left a strong psychological impression on viewers. Jean Paulhan was invited to the artist's studio by writer George Limbour, a friend of Dubuffet from childhood. Dubuffet's work at the time was unknown. Paulhan was enthralled, and Dubuffet's meeting proved to be a turning point. In October 1944, his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Rene Drouin in Paris began in October 1944. This was Dubuffet's third attempt at becoming a well-known artist.

Dubuffet was highly impressed by a show in Paris of Jean Fautrier's paintings in which he recognized meaningful art that spoke clearly and purely the depth of a person. Dubuffet, Emulating Fautrier, began using thick oil paint mixed with mud, sand, coal dust, pebbles, pieces of glass, string, straw, cement, and tar. Dubuffet developed a paste that could be used to create physical marks, such as scratches and slash marks, which allowed him to abandon the traditional technique of applying oil paint to canvas with a brush. In Dubuffet's series 'Hautes Pâtes,' or Thick Impastoes, he exhibited at his second major exhibition, entitled Microbolus Macadam & Cie/Hautes Pates in 1946 at the Galérie René Drouin, the impasto technique of mixing and applying paint was best displayed. Critics who accused Dubuffet of "anarchy" and "scraping the dustbin" reacted an angrily to his use of crude materials and the irony he infused into several of his works. Dubuffet seems to be the most original painter to have come out of the School of Paris since Miro,' Greenberg continued with: 'Dubuffet seems to be the one new painter of utmost importance to have appeared in Paris in the last decade.' In fact, Dubuffet was very popular in the United States in the year after his first exhibition in New York (1951).

Dubuffet began a series of portraits in 1946, with his own acquaintances Henri Michaux, Francis Ponge, George Limbour, Jean Paulhan, and Pierre Matisse as'models.' As Dubuffet stated himself, he made these portraits out of the same thick fabric and in a way intentionally anti-psychological and anti-personal. He joined the surrealist group in 1948 and later the College of Pataphysique in 1954. He was a good friend of French playwright and theater director Antonin Artaud, and he admired and supported writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and he was closely linked to the surrealist André Masson. He started a crucial friendship with author and French writer Jean Paulhan in 1944, who was also combating "intellectual terrorism" as he described it.

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