29 Facts About Jean Dubuffet

Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet was a French painter and sculptor.

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

Jean 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.

Jean 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.

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

In 1942, Jean Dubuffet decided to devote himself again to art.

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

Jean 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.

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

Jean 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.

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

Jean 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 Jean Dubuffet had his first solo exhibition in America, in the same gallery as the Matisse exhibition.

Reviews were largely favorable, and this resulted in Jean Dubuffet having at least an annual, if not a biannual exhibition at that gallery.

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

The impermanence of this kind of movement attracted Jean Dubuffet and became a facet of art brut.

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

Jean Dubuffet felt that the simple life of the everyday human being contained more art and poetry than did academic art, or great painting.

Jean 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.

Jean 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.

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

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

Many of Jean 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.

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

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

In 1974 Jean Dubuffet created Jardin d'email: a very large outdoor painted sculpture designed for the Kroller-Muller Museum.

In 1978 Jean Dubuffet collaborated with American composer and musician Jasun Martz to create the record album artwork for Martz's avant-garde symphony entitled The Pillory.

Jean Dubuffet died from emphysema in Paris on May 12,1985.

The Fondation Jean Dubuffet currently collects and exhibits his work.