Jean Dubuffet

Radieux meteore, 1952

In 1952 Dubuffet returned to Paris and continued the Sols Et Terrains and Lieux Momentanes. In 1953 Dubuffet drew the Terres Radieuses and the Pates Battues series and also stayed in Chaillol with Pierre Bettencourt. Dubuffet also works on lithography with Mourlot in1953. In 1954 Dubuffet attended and participated in a retrospective organised by René Drouin in the Cercle Volney, Paris. Dubuffet also completes the Petites Statues De La Vie Precaire and travels between Paris and Auvergne where Lili (his wife) stays for health reasons. By the end of 1954 Dubuffet also completes the Vaches series. In 1955 Dubuffet moves to Vence where he builds a large studio and a villa. He also completes Assemblages D'empreintes and Tableaux D'assemblage series. Dubuffet also has his
first exhibition in London (Institute of Contemporary Arts) in 1955. (http://www.dubuffetfondation.com/bio_set_ang.htm)

Jean Dubuffet

Lever De Lune aux Fantomes 1951

In 1951 Dubuffet had his first retrospective in Paris at the Galerie Rive Gauche. Then he completed the Sols Et Terrains, Tables Paysagees, Paysages Du Mental series. In November he left for New York with Lili where he stays for six months and developed a Friendship with Yves Tanguy. Also in 1951 the Exhibition at the Arts Club, Chicago also took place, where he delivered his discourse, Anticultural Positions, in english. (http://www.dubuffetfondation.com/bio_set_ang.htm)

Loiseau Bleu 1949

     In 1949 Dubuffet had his third stay in the Sahara. When Dubuffet returned he completed the Paysages Grotesques series. in 1949 Dubuffet also Published L'art Brut Prefere Aux Arts Culturels. Then in 1950 Dubuffet meets Alfonso Ossorio and completes the  Corps De Dames series. Then the publication of Anvouaiaje Par in Ninbesil Avec de Zimaje and Labonfam Abeber Par Inbo Nom also occurred in 1950. (http://www.dubuffetfondation.com/bio_set_ang.htm) 

Jean Dubuffet

Leautaud Sorcier Peau-rouge, December 1946
Museum of Modern Art, New York

       "In 1947 Dubuffet's first exhibition was in New York at the Pierre Matisse Gallery. Then in 1948 Dubuffet had his first stay in the Sahara desert, in El Goléa. Then there was the portraits exhibition at the Galerie René Drouin. Next was the creation of the Foyer de l'Art Brut in the basement of the Galerie Drouin, where many exhibitions were held, before its move to Gallimard and then to the USA in 1951. Then finally thee was the publication of his first text in jargon LER DLA CANPANE. Second stay in the Sahara until April 1948." (http://www.dubuffetfondation.com/bio_set_ang.htm)

Jean Dubuffet

Autoportrait II, 1966

    "Time to look over past work: " In all my work there are two different winds that blow, one carrying me to exaggerate the marks of intervention, and the other, the opposite, which leads me to eliminate all human presence... and to drink from the source of this absence. " The Matériologies cycle reached completion... Time to return, with Paris Circus again, installed in 137 rue de Sèvres, after being in the United States for more than 10 years." (http://www.dubuffetfondation.com/hourloupe_ang.htm)

Biography of Jean Dubuffet continued...

Monument With Standing Beast (1984)

"In 1978 Dubuffet collaborated with American composer and musician Jasun Martz to create the record album artwork for Martz’s avant-garde symphony titled The Pillory. The much written about drawing has been reproduced internationally in three different editions on tens-of-thousands of record albums and compact discs. A detail of the drawing is also featured on Martz’s second symphony (2005), The Pillory/The Battle, performed by The Intercontinental Philharmonic Orchestra and Royal Choir.
One of Dubuffet's later works was Monument With Standing Beast (1984). Dubuffet died in Paris in 1985. The Fondation Jean Dubuffet collects and exhibits his work. The Dubuffet Foundation is represented by The Pace Gallery, New York. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Dubuffet)"

Biography of Jean Dubuffet continued...

Monument With Standing Beast (1984)
Chicago Illinois

        "In late 1960-1961, Dubuffet began experimenting with music and sound and made several recordings with the Danish painter Asger Jorn, a founding member of the avant-garde movement COBRA. The same period he started making sculpture, but in a very not-sculptural way. As his medium he preferred to use the ordinary materials as papier machier and for all the light medium polystyrene, in which he could model very fast and switch easily from one work to another, as sketches on paper. At the end of the sixties he started to create his large sculpture-habitations, such as 'Tour aux figures','Jardin d'Hiver' and 'Villa Falbala' in which people can wander, stay, contemplate etc. In 1969 ensued an acquaintance between him and the French Outsider Art artist Jacques Soisson. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Dubuffet)"

Biography of Jean Dubuffet continued...

La Vie de famille, 1936 (World Gallery)

        Dubuffet was influenced by Hans Prinzhorn's book Artistry of the Mentally III to create the term "Art Brut" which meant raw art and usually referring to an outsider art. "The term was produced by non-professionals working outside aesthetic norms, such as art by psychiatric patients, prisoners, and children. He gathered his own collection of such art, including artists such as Aloïse Corbaz and Adolf Wölfli. The collection is now housed at the Musée de l'Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland. Dubuffet tried to create an art as free from intellectual concerns as Art Brut, and his work often appears primitive and child-like. Many of 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. From 1962 he produced a series of works in which he limited himself to the colours red, white, black, and blue. Towards the end of the 1960s he turned increasingly to sculpture, producing works in polystyrene which he then painted with vinyl paint" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Dubuffet)

Biography of Jean Dubuffet continued...

Woman Trying a Hat, 1943 (http://im-akermariano.blogspot.com/2011/06/jean-dubuffet.html)

        In 1945 Dubuffet  recognized meaningful art that expressed directly and purely the depth of a person after attending a show in Paris of Jean Fautrier's paintings. Fautrier used thick oil paint to create his art work and so Dubuffet began to use this same technique, but mixed with sand and gravel, so that he could model the paint as a skin of the painting. "This resulted in the series 'Hautes Pâtes', he exhibited in 1946 at the Galérie René Drouin. After 1946 he started a series of portraits, with as 'model' partly his own friends Henri Michaux, Francis Ponge, Jean Paulhan and Pierre Matisse. He painted these portraits in the same thick materials, and 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 befriended with the French playwright, actor and theater director Antonin Artaud, he admired and supported the writer Celine and was strongly connected with the artistic circle around the surrealist André Masson. In 1944 Dubuffet started an important relation with the resistance-fighter and French writer, publisher, Jean Paulhan who was also strongly fighting against 'intellectual terrorism', as he called it" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Dubuffet)

   Jean Dubuffet was a French painter and sculptor who was born in Le Havre,  France on July 31, 1901. 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 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Dubuffet). Throughout Dubuffet's life he painted on and off for many years. Dubuffet moved to paris at age 17 (in 1918) to study painting at academie Julian but only stayed there for a short six months before leaving to study independently. Dubuffet gave up painting for six years (1924) and began selling wine for his fathers business, then in the 1930's made a large series of portraits in which he emphasized the vogues in art history but stopped painting once again shortly after.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Dubuffet). Dubuffet began painting for good in 1942 when he began to paint figures of nude women in an impersonal and primitive way using strong colors. Dubuffet also enjoys painting people in everyday ordinary life.