Tag: jean dubuffet

Jean Dubuffet

Jean Dubuffet, “Paysage aux Argus”, 1955, Collage with Butterfly Wings, 20,5 x 28,5 cm, Collection Fondation Dubuffet, Paris

“The things we truly love, the things forming the basis and roots of our being, are generally things we never look at. A huge piece of carpeting, empty and naked plains, silent and uninterrupted stretches with nothing to alter the homogeneity of their continuity. I love wide, homogenous worlds, unstaked, unlimited like the sea, like high snows, deserts, and steppes.”

“Art doesn’t go to sleep in the bed made for it. It would sooner run away than say its own name: what it likes is to be incognito. Its best moments are when it forgets what its own name is.”                                                                             ― Jean Dubuffet

Calendar: July 31

A Year: Day to Day Men: 31st of July

Oh, Happy Day

July 31, 1901 was the birthdate of French painter and sculptor Jean Dubuffet.

In 1945, Jean Dubuffet, impressed with painter Jean Fautrier’s abstract paintings, started to use thick oil paint mixed with materials such as mud, straw, pebbles, sand, plaster, and tar. He abandoned the tradition use of the brush; instead, he worked with a paste into which he could create physical marks, scratches and slashes. These impasto paintings, the ‘Hautes Pâtes’ series, he exhibited at his show in 1946 at the Galery Rene Drouin. He received some backlash from the critics but also some positive feedback as well.

Jean Dubuffet achieved rapid success in the American art market, largely due to his inclusion in the Pierre Matisse exhibition in 1946. His association with Matisse proved to be very beneficial. Dubuffet’s work was placed among the likes of Picasso, Braque, and Rouault at the gallery exhibit; he was only one of two young artists to be honored in this manner. In 1947, Dubuffet had his first solo exhibition in America, in the same gallery as the Matisse exhibition. Reviews were largely favorable, and this resulted in Dubuffet having a regularly scheduled exhibition at that gallery.

In his earlier paintings, Dubuffet dismissed the concept of perspective in favor of a more direct, two-dimensional presentation of space. Instead, Dubuffet created the illusion of perspective by crudely overlapping objects within the picture plane. Dubuffet’s “Hourloupe” style in later paintings developed from a chance doodle while he was on the telephone. The basis of it was a tangle of clean black lines that forms cells, which are sometimes filled with unmixed color. Dubuffet believed the style evoked the manner in which objects appear in the mind. This contrast between physical and mental representation later encouraged him to use the approach to create sculpture.

Between 1945 and 1947, Jean Dubuffet took three separate trips to Algeria—a French colony at the time in order to find further artistic inspiration. He was fascinated by the nomadic nature of the tribes in Algeria, particularly the ephemeral quality of their existence. The impermanence of this kind of movement attracted Dubuffet and became a facet of the new Art Brut movement.

Dubuffet coined the term art brut, meaning “raw art”, for artwork produced by non-professionals working outside aesthetic norms, such as art by psychiatric patients, prisoners, and children. He felt that the simple life of the everyday human being contained more art and poetry than did academic art, or great painting. Dubuffet found the latter to be isolating, mundane, and pretentious,  He sought to create in his own work an art free from intellectual concerns; and as a result, his work often appears primitive and childlike.

Jean Dubuffet

Jean Dubuffet, “Casino la Colle”, November 1955, Oil on Canvas Collage on Canvas, 23 x 28 Inches, Private Collection

Jean Dubuffet was an integral French artist known for his primal paintings and sculptures of vernacular subjects. His adoption of the term Art Brut or raw art, referred to the art of children, prisoners, and the mentally ill, was a reaction to what he called art culturel or refined art. It was his desire to break from tradition by implementing rudimentary mark making and emulsions made from sand, tar, and trash.

“A work of art is only of interest, in my opinion, when it is an immediate and direct projection of what is happening in the depth of a person’s being. It is my belief that only in this Art Brut can we find the natural and normal processes of artistic creation in their pure and elementary state.” – Jean Dubuffet

Jean Dubuffet

Figurative Art of Jean Dubuffet

French painter and sculptor Jean Dubuffet was one of the most influential and prolific artists of the 20th century. The founder of an entire art movement, ‘Art Brut,’ Dubuffet tore down the boundaries of the established art world and opened art up to self-taught outsiders. Join us, as we take a look at one of the most important artists of the 20th century.

Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet was born on July 31, 1901, in Le Havre, France. Raised in a middle-class family of wholesale wine merchants, he began painting in 1918 at the age of 17 and moved to Paris that same year to study painting at the Académie Julian. He was described as a rebel, one who resisted authority, which became evident when he dropped out of art school after just six months.

It wasn’t until his visits to Algeria between 1945 and 1947 that he created Art Brut. Inspired by the constantly shifting, nomadic tribes of Algeria, Dubuffet decided to create an artistic movement that would lie outside the boundaries of the art world and would exist ‘without walls.’ This new Art Brut, or ‘raw art,’ placed emphasis on art created outside the established art scene, including pieces produced by untrained amateurs, children and psychiatric patients. Dubuffet would go on to emulate this expressive and untutored style in his own work.

According to Dubuffet, Art Brut was more precious than art created by professionals because “These works are created from solitude and from pure and authentic creative impulses – where the worries of competition, acclaim and social promotion do not interfere.” He argues, “We cannot avoid the feeling that in relation to these works, cultural art in its entirety appears to be the game of a futile society, fallacious parade.”