Artists & Works |
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| Jean Dubuffet French (1901-85) SITUATION LXXVII (1979) black felt-tip pen and collage on paper 13.875” x 10” |
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Jean Dubuffet was a successful wine wholesaler as well as an occasional
artist when he had his first exhibition in Paris in 1944. He had
attended art school prior to this, and befriended members of the
avant garde such as Max Jacob and Fernand Leger, but then turned
to business because he was disgusted and frustrated by intellectual
life. In the forties, he again became interested in the art of the
mentally ill, which he had studied in his youth, through the writings
of Dr. Hans Prinzhorn, and convinced other artists of the value
of this work. Dubuffet’s mature attempts to strip himself of
acquired culture met with success and he began to exhibit his work
in the United States as well as France, and continued to gain worldwide
attention and praise until his death. In his work, Dubuffet attempted to channel the forces of nature and the depth of the psyche. He wanted an artistic innocence like the asylum inmates he emulated and dubbed both their work and the style of painting he was attempting “l’art brut.” He saw no distinction between beauty and ugliness and felt that through attaining a natural, precultural state, the artist could achieve universal expressiveness. The use of magic marker in this drawing is typical of Dubuffet’s belief that artists should use the tools of the people. He also liked the hard, unaccented line created by the felt tip. |
CRITICAL EXCERPTS |
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Jean Dubuffet, from Anticultural Positions (1951) |
| Robert Hughes, Time,
7/26/93 "Dubuffet came to art late. Until 1943, when he turned 41, he had been a businessman, a wine merchant. His career illustrates the energy that a late flowering can produce, both in art and in its attendant ideas. Dubuffet is, of course, widely known for his espousal of what he called Art Brut, or 'raw art,' the work of those untutored and compulsive creators now called 'outsider artists.' Was he a primitive himself? Of course not: his art is as sophisticated as his writing, and in his apparent desire to shake off the burden of French culture, he was quintessentially French. ...Moreover, somewhere near the heart of Dubuffet's idea of a poor art, a raw art, was a large and genuinely democratic tolerance. 'The persons I find beautiful,' he wrote in a catalog preface, 'are not those who are usually found beautiful . . . Funny noses, big mouths, teeth all crooked, hair in the ears -- I'm not at all against such things. Older people don't necessarily appear worse to me than younger ones.'" |
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