By Jean Dubuffet
Located in Surfside, FL
Galerie Beyeler Exhibition Poster
Signed in plate
Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet (French, 1901 – 1985) was a French painter and sculptor of the École de Paris (School of Paris). His idealistic approach to aesthetics embraced so-called "low art" and eschewed traditional standards of beauty in favor of what he believed to be a more authentic and humanistic approach to image-making. He is perhaps best known for founding the art brut movement, 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.
His childhood friends included the writers Raymond Queneau and Georges Limbour. He moved to Paris in 1918 to study painting at the Académie Julian, becoming close friends with the artists Juan Gris, André Masson, and Fernand Léger. Six months later, upon finding academic training to be distasteful, he left the Académie to study independently. During this time, Dubuffet developed many other interests, including free noise music, poetry, and the study of ancient and modern languages. Dubuffet also 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. He 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, Dubuffet decided to devote himself again to art. He often chose subjects for his works from everyday life, such as people sitting in the Paris Métro 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 1943, the writer George Limbour, a friend of Dubuffet from childhood, took Jean Paulhan to the artist's studio. Dubuffet's work at that time was unknown. Paulhan was impressed and the meeting proved to be a turning point for Dubuffet. His first solo show came in October 1944, at the Galerie Rene Drouin in Paris. This marked Dubuffet's third attempt to become an established artist
In 1945, Dubuffet attended and was strongly impressed by a show in Paris of Jean Fautrier paintings in which he recognized meaningful art which expressed directly and purely the depth of a person. Emulating Fautrier, Dubuffet started to use thick oil paint mixed with materials such as mud, sand, coal dust, pebbles, pieces of glass, string, straw, plaster, gravel, cement, and tar. This allowed him to abandon the traditional method of applying oil paint to canvas with a brush; instead, Dubuffet created a paste into which he could create physical marks, such as scratches and slash marks. The impasto technique of mixing and applying paint was best manifested in Dubuffet's series 'Hautes Pâtes' or Thick Impastoes, which he exhibited at his second major exhibition, entitled Microbolus Macadam & Cie/Hautes Pates in 1946 at the Galérie René Drouin. His use of crude materials and the irony that he infused into many of his works incited a significant amount of backlash from critics, who accused Dubuffet of 'anarchy' and 'scraping the dustbin'. He did receive some positive feedback as well—Clement Greenberg took notice of Dubuffet's work and wrote that '[f]rom a distance, Dubuffet seems the most original painter to have come out of the School of Paris since Joan Miro...' Greenberg went on to say that 'Dubuffet is perhaps the one new painter of real importance to have appeared on the scene in Paris in the last decade.' Indeed, Dubuffet was very prolific in the United States in the year following his first exhibition in New York (1951).
After 1946, Dubuffet started a series of portraits, with his own friends Henri Michaux, Francis Ponge, George Limbour, Jean Paulhan and Pierre Matisse serving as 'models'. He painted these portraits in the same thick materials, and in a manner deliberately anti-psychological and anti-personal, as Dubuffet expressed himself. A few years later he approached the surrealist group in 1948, then the College of Pataphysique in 1954. He was friendly with the French playwright, actor and theater director Antonin Artaud, he admired and supported the writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline and was strongly connected with the artistic circle around the surrealist André Masson. In 1944 he started an important relationship with the resistance-fighter and French writer and publisher Jean Paulhan who was also strongly fighting against "intellectual terrorism", as he called it.
Reception in America
Corps de dame jaspé [Marbleized Body of a Lady] (1950) at the National Gallery of Art in 2022
Dubuffet achieved very 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. Matisse was a very influential dealer of contemporary European Art in America, and was known for strongly supporting the School of Paris artists. Dubuffet's work was placed among the likes of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Henri Rouault at the gallery exhibit, and he was one of only two young artists to be honored in this manner. A Newsweek article dubbed Dubuffet the 'darling of Parisian avant-garde circles,' and Greenberg wrote positively about Dubuffet's three canvases in a review of the exhibit. 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.
His reception in America was very closely linked to and dependent upon the New York art world's desire to create its own avant-garde environment.
Specific examples of American artists interested in Dubuffet’s art were Alfonso Ossorio and Joseph Glasco. At the end of 1949, while Pierre Matisse was preparing Dubuffet’s January 1950 show, Alfonso Ossorio had traveled to Paris to meet Dubuffet and buy some of his paintings. Then in 1950, at Ossorio’s urging, his young friend Joseph Glasco left New York for Paris to meet Dubuffet. Glasco credited this encounter as having had an influence on his own art, and Dubuffet frequently asked about “Jackson Pollock and Glasco” in his letters to Ossorio.
Between 1947 and 1949, Dubuffet took three separate trips to Algeria—a French colony at the time—in order to find further artistic inspiration. In this sense, Dubuffet is very similar to other artists such as Delacroix, Matisse, and Fromentin. 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. The impermanence of this kind of movement attracted Dubuffet and became a facet of art brut. In June 1948, Dubuffet, along with Jean Paulhan, Andre Breton, Charles Ratton, Michel Tapie, and Henri-Pierre Roche, officially established La Compagnie de l'art brut in Paris. This association was dedicated to the discovery, documentation and exhibition of art brut. Dubuffet later amassed his own collection of such art, including artists Aloïse Corbaz and Adolf Wölfli...
Category
1960s Abstract Sam Gilliam Art
