Jean Dubuffet

French, 1901–1985

BiographyIn 1918, Jean Dubuffet, the son of a prosperous wine merchant, left his home in Le Havre to study art in Paris. He abandoned painting for the life of "the common man" in 1924: he worked in an Argentine factory for a year, then returned to Le Havre and entered his father's business. In 1929, Dubuffet established a wholesale wine business outside of Paris, but within a few years had returned to painting. He was drafted into the French army in 1939, but was discharged the following year, and in 1942, he once more took up painting. In 1945, he went to Switzerland and began to collect examples of Art Brut ("raw art"): powerfully original, unschooled art produced by people working outside the established art world, such as psychiatric patients or prisoners. Throughout his career, Dubuffet sought a similarly instinctual and rawly expressive aesthetic, deprecating traditional artistic materials, methods, and tastes in both his art and his theoretical writings.

While Dubuffet's philosophy and practice overtly challenged conventions of painting and culture, he conducted his practice in a remarkably systematic fashion. He worked deliberately in series, focused on a single thematic and visual premise for a few years, and then presented the results in a well-planned exhibition, often writing the catalogue text himself. The Corps de Dames series of 1950-51 immediately followed a cycle of works called paysages grotesques (grotesque landscapes), whose similarly encrusted and inscribed surfaces and apparently aerial point of view anticipate the imagery, technique, and pictorial format of the Corps de Dame works.

Dubuffet was a significant force in postwar art. During the 1950s, his work became more abstract, with a concomitant emphasis on elaboration of surface texture. In 1962 Dubuffet created the formal idiom he termed "L'Hourloupe," in which black lines frame cells of flat, unmixed paint, predominantly white, red, and blue. From the late ‘60s, the artist experimented in this style with new chemical substances--polystyrene, polyester, epoxy--which produced slick, artificial surfaces in both paintings and sculptures. Dubuffet produced a series of ambitious sculptural and environmental projects, including several important public commissions, during the 1970s. He was prodigiously prolific; his oeuvre numbers more than ten thousand objects in all media.