29 Facts About Dubuffet

Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet was a French painter and sculptor.

Dubuffet is perhaps best known for founding the art movement art brut, and for the collection of works—Collection de l'art brut—that this movement spawned.

Dubuffet enjoyed a prolific art career, both in France and in America, and was featured in many exhibitions throughout his lifetime.

Dubuffet was born in Le Havre to a family of wholesale wine merchants who were part of the wealthy bourgeoisie.

Dubuffet moved to Paris in 1918 to study painting at the Academie Julian, becoming close friends with the artists Juan Gris, Andre Masson, and Fernand Leger.

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Dubuffet traveled to Italy and Brazil, and upon returning to Le Havre in 1925, he married for the first time and went on to start a small wine business in Paris.

Dubuffet took up painting again in 1934 when he made a large series of portraits in which he emphasized the vogues in art history.

Dubuffet often chose subjects for his works from everyday life, such as people sitting in the Paris Metro or walking in the country.

Dubuffet painted with strong, unbroken colors, recalling the palette of Fauvism, as well as the Brucke painters, with their juxtaposing and discordant patches of color.

In 1945, Dubuffet attended and was 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.

Dubuffet painted these portraits in the same thick materials, and in a manner deliberately anti-psychological and anti-personal, as Dubuffet expressed himself.

Dubuffet was friendly with the French playwright, actor and theater director Antonin Artaud, he admired and supported the writer Louis-Ferdinand Celine and was strongly connected with the artistic circle around the surrealist Andre Masson.

Dubuffet achieved very rapid success in the American art market, largely due to his inclusion in the Pierre Matisse exhibition in 1946.

Dubuffet's work was placed among the likes of Picasso, Braque, and Rouault at the gallery exhibit, and he was one of only 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 at least an annual, if not a biannual exhibition at that gallery.

Between 1947 and 1949, Dubuffet took three separate trips to Algeria—a French colony at the time—in order to find further artistic inspiration.

However, the art that Dubuffet produced while he was there was very specific insofar as it recalled Post-War French ethnography in light of decolonization.

Dubuffet was fascinated by the nomadic nature of the tribes in Algeria—he admired the ephemeral quality of their existence, in that they did not stay in any one particular area for long, and were constantly shifting.

Dubuffet later amassed his own collection of such art, including artists Aloise Corbaz and Adolf Wolfli.

Dubuffet 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, and wrote in his Prospectus aux amateurs de tout genre that his aim was 'not the mere gratification of a handful of specialists, but rather the man in the street when he comes home from work.

Dubuffet sought to create an art as free from intellectual concerns as Art Brut, and as a result, his work often appears primitive and childlike.

Dubuffet's form is often compared to wall scratchings and children's art.

Nonetheless, Dubuffet appeared to be quite erudite when it came to writing about his own work.

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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.

Dubuffet was the first artist to use this type of thickened paste, called bitumen.

Additionally, in his earlier paintings, Dubuffet dismissed the concept of perspective in favor of a more direct, two-dimensional presentation of space.

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.