Jean Dubuffet
Figure Xl 1974
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.
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Art is the most enrapturing orgy within man’s reach.. Art must make you laugh a little and make you a little afraid. Anything as long as it doesn’t bore
July 31, 2008Happy Birthday Jean Dubuffet
French avant-garde painter, born in Le Havre (1901-1985). Dubuffet took over his father’s wine business in 1925, and withdrew from the art world. He stayed in the wine business until 1942, when he returned to painting, having developed a distinctive style of simple, primitive images in a heavily encrusted canvas. This style helped Dubuffet gain a worldwide reputation. Fascinated by the art of children and the insane, for which he coined the term art brut (“raw art”), he emulated its crude, violent energy in his own work. Critics soon applied the term art brut to Dubuffet’s paintings, rather than to their stylistic source as he had intended.
Many of Dubuffet’s works are assemblages (combining found objects and other elements into a three-dimensional integrated whole), as for example Door with Couch-Grass (1957, Guggenheim Museum, New York City), which is composed chiefly of fragments of paintings, grass, and pebbles. During the early 1960s, Dubuffet produced a series of paintings that resemble jigsaw puzzles, such as Nunc Stans (1965, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City), in which tiny, obscure, closely spaced figures and faces dominate. His later work consists of large painted polyester resin sculptures. In all of his work the violence is tempered with elements of vitality and broad humor.
Art must make you laugh a little and make you a little afraid. Anything as long as it doesn’t bore.
January 20, 2008Jean Dubuffet
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, but again stopped, only turning to art for good in 1942. His first solo show came in 1944. He approached the surrealist group in 1948, then the College of Pataphysique in 1954.
At his death in 1985. at the age of 84,
Jean Dubuffet was acknowledged to be
one of the most important artists of the
post-war generation. A wine merchant
turned polemicist turned art rebel, the 43-
year-old Dubuffet had his first one-man
show in Paris in 1944, with the Germans
barely departed. Violently anti-tradition at
a time when many of the French longed
for a return to normalcy, Dubuffet antagonized
the art establishment with his dynamic style–
and his articulate arguments justifying his
new way of thinking.
