Jean Dubuffet

Biography

Dubuffet’s first solo exhibition opened in October 1944 at René Drouin’s gallery in Paris, when he was forty-three. Critics accused him of “anarchy” and of “scraping the dustbin”. He himself counted it as his third attempt to become an artist.

The first two had come to nothing.

He was born on 31 July 1901 in Le Havre, into a family of wholesale wine merchants. Among his childhood friends were the future writers Raymond Queneau and Georges Limbour. In 1918 he went to Paris to study at the Académie Julian, but after six months he left, finding the academic training distasteful, and worked on his own. Around the same time he took up poetry, ancient and modern languages and free noise music; he travelled to Italy and Brazil. By some accounts he was deeply struck by Hans Prinzhorn’s book on the art of the mentally ill (1922). In 1925 he returned to Le Havre and joined the family business, and later opened a small wine business in Paris. In 1934 he briefly took up painting again, making a series of portraits, and stopped once more: during the German occupation of France he was building up his wine business at Bercy.

In 1942 he decided to commit himself to art. He took his subjects from everyday life: passengers on the Paris Métro, people walking in the country. His colours were strong and unbroken, like those of the Fauves and of the Brücke painters, and his figures are often crowded into a cramped space. In 1943 Limbour brought Jean Paulhan to his studio. Paulhan was impressed, and the meeting is generally regarded as a turning point.

In 1945 Dubuffet saw an exhibition of Jean Fautrier’s paintings in Paris and recognised in it an art that expressed the depth of a person directly. He began mixing thick oil paint with mud, sand, coal dust, pebbles, glass, string, straw, plaster, cement and tar. The brush was almost redundant: in the resulting paste he scratched and cut his marks. The method is best seen in the series “Hautes Pâtes” (Thick Impastos), shown in 1946 in the exhibition “Microbolus Macadam & Cie” at Drouin’s. Some critics received his work with hostility, but Clement Greenberg wrote that from a distance Dubuffet seemed the most original painter to have come out of the School of Paris since Miró. After 1946 he painted portraits of friends (Henri Michaux, Francis Ponge, Limbour, Paulhan, Pierre Matisse) in the same thick texture and deliberately without psychology.

Success in America came quickly. In 1946 he was included in an exhibition at Pierre Matisse’s gallery in New York, alongside Picasso, Braque and Rouault, and in 1947 his first American solo show was held there. After that he exhibited at Matisse’s every year, sometimes twice a year. Americans in search of an avant-garde of their own looked at him closely; Alfonso Ossorio travelled to Paris at the end of 1949 to meet him and buy paintings, and Joseph Glasco went there in 1950 at Ossorio’s urging.

Between 1947 and 1949 Dubuffet made three trips to Algeria, then a French colony. He was interested in the mobility of the nomadic tribes, their life without attachment to a place, and saw it as one facet of art brut. In June 1948, together with Jean Paulhan, André Breton, Charles Ratton, Michel Tapié and Henri-Pierre Roché, he founded the Compagnie de l’art brut in Paris, to seek out, document and exhibit such art. He applied the term “art brut”, “raw art”, to the work of people without professional training who stood outside aesthetic norms: psychiatric patients, prisoners, children. The collection he assembled, which includes Aloïse Corbaz and Adolf Wölfli, is in Lausanne. To my mind, what is most curious is how sophisticated his own writing about his work was, and the critic Hilton Kramer rightly observed that these texts sit badly with its professed naive primitivism.

In late 1960 and 1961 he experimented with sound and made several recordings with the Danish painter Asger Jorn. From 1954 he was a member of the Collège de ’Pataphysique. From 1962 he moved to series in red, white, black and blue only (the “Hourloupe” cycle), and towards the end of the decade he increasingly made sculpture from papier-mâché and polystyrene, painted with vinyl paint. Out of this grew huge sculpture-habitations that people can walk through: “Tour aux figures”, “Jardin d’Hiver” and “Villa Falbala”. In 1974 he made “Jardin d’émail” for the Kröller-Müller Museum, a large painted outdoor sculpture. In 1975 the Fondation Dubuffet was established in Paris. In 1978 his drawing became the cover of the album of the symphony “The Pillory” by the American composer Jasun Martz.

In all he made about 10,000 works, which most often form series: “Women’s Bodies” (1950), “Little Pictures from Butterfly Wings” (1953), “Little Statues of Precarious Life” (1954), “Phenomena” (1958). One of his last works was “Monument with Standing Beast” (1984). Dubuffet died on 12 May 1985 in Paris.