Artist/personality
Jean Dubuffet
Peintre, Sculpteur
Jean Dubuffet
Peintre, Sculpteur
Nationalité française
Birth: 1901, Le Havre (Seine-Maritime, France)
Death: 1985, Paris (France)
© Adagp, Paris
Biography
Painter, sculptor, musician, architect, poet and theorist, Jean Dubuffet was a multidisciplinary artist, who spanned the 1950s to 1980s while remaining loyal to absolute freedom in his entire body of work and standing out from all the avant-garde movements of his time. He used every possible technique and approach to rejuvenate academic culture. He is remembered as the father of Art Brut, an artistic movement that promotes free expression. His art is characterised by a desire to radically change the rules and eliminate all constraints restricting modern art.
Jean Dubuffet was born to a bourgeois family in 1901. Very early on, he lost interest in school, preferring to devote himself to drawing. He studied at École des Beaux-Arts du Havre, his birth city, and completed his training with artist Hélène Guinepied. From these classes, Dubuffet retained the Helguy method, which promotes free expression and a high level of creativity. After a brief stint at the Académie Jullian, Dubuffet created his studio in Paris. He painted alone and spent time with Suzanne Valadon and Max Jacob. He met André Masson, Fernand Léger and Juan Gris.
From the end of World War I through to 1931, Dubuffet stopped painting almost altogether, taking over the family wine merchant business. Disappointed by the propositions of his contemporaries and aware that an upheaval was underway in Western painting, he sought a path that could satisfy him.
When World War II broke out, Dubuffet was drafted in Paris, then sent to Rochefort for lack of discipline, before being released. In 1942, he returned to painting definitively. In his series of gouaches of the Paris Metro , he sought to paint with veracity. He opted for a clumsy line and a naive, childlike drawing style.
In 1944, he presented his first solo exhibition at Galerie René Drouin. The general public were dubious of Dubuffet’s wild lines, but connoisseurs were convinced. With his matterist and informal works, he transgressed all the established artistic and aesthetic norms, profoundly reinventing figurative vocabulary. From this exhibition onwards, Dubuffet marked his disapproval for academic culture. He opened the door for an approach to creation that aimed to liberate art from the "asphyxiating culture" (the title of an essay he wrote in 1968). He named a movement that would bring him great renown, "Art Brut". Art Brut is characterised by a desire to pay no heed to academic codes, to no longer be burdened by artistic references. This movement preaches spontaneity, to the detriment of any form of academicism. Materials become rough, forms abrupt.
Dubuffet never stopped challenging classical representation. He developed an interest in portraits, putting forward a raw version and focusing more on the materials used than the subject represented. He replicated these experiments in his work on grotesque female bodies throughout the 1950s. Similarly, Dubuffet was highly interested in a wide range of materials: sand, gravel, asphalt, plaster, hemp, fragments of coloured or mirrored glass, house paint, outdoor paint, cob, and so on. He then used various tools such as trowels, tablespoons, scrapers, knifes, wire brushes and his fingers.
From the 1950s onwards, Dubuffet also became interested in monumental works and outdoor installations. With his Jardin d’Hiver (Winter Garden), he created a three-dimensional work that visitors could enter. Inside, the twisting lines show the artist’s desire to cheat with the truth.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York dedicated a retrospective to him from February to April in 1962. He died in 1985. Recognised as one of the pioneers of Art Brut, Dubuffet marked his era through his constant desire to destroy cultural codes, which he deemed outdated.
