Jean Dubuffet

Jean Dubuffet was a French painter and sculptor. The theoretician of Art Brut, he was one of the most important artists of the 20th century.

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Jean Dubuffet’s years of training

Jean Dubuffet was born on July 31st, 1901 at Le Havre to parents who were wine merchants. In 1908, he entered the Lycée François Ier of Le Havre. During his secondary schooling, he met the future writers Georges Limbour, Armand Salacrou and Raymond Queneau. In 1917, Jean Dubuffet registered for the evening classes at the École des beaux-arts of Le Havre. He obtained his baccalaureate the following year and went to Paris with his friend Georges Limbour. Dubuffet attended classes at the Académie Julian, but only for six months, preferring to work alone. He installed his studio at 37, rue de la Chaussée d’Antin. In Paris, he formed friendships with the painters Suzanne Valadon and Élie Lascaux, as well as with the writers Max Jacob and Charles-Albert Cingria. Jean Dubuffet also visited Raoul Dufy in his studio. In 1920, Dubuffet went to Alger with his parents. After returning to Paris he isolated himself a lot and chose to study literature, languages and music. Dubuffet sought his destiny: “I was looking for ‘the Entrance’. But it wasn’t working; I had the impression that I wasn’t suited to my human condition (…) I felt something like underlying stress that all of it didn’t mean much.” During 1922, Dubuffet spent time in André Masson’s studio. The following year, he went to Lausanne and stayed with his friend the writer Paul Budry. He also visited Italy, then did his military service. The same year, Jean Dubuffet met the painters Fernand Léger and Juan Gris as well as the art dealer Kahnweiler.

A break of several years for Jean Dubuffet

 In 1924, Jean Dubuffet stopped painting for eight years. He doubted the value of high culture, convinced that western art was smothered by academic references: “When the pompous platforms of high culture are built, then flee as fast as you can: there’ll be little hope for art”. That year, Jean Dubuffet, who decided to abandon painting for business, spent four months in Buenos Aires and then returned to Le Havre to work with his father who died in 1927. That year, Dubuffet married Paulette Bret and they had a daughter two years later (Isalmina). In 1930, Jean Dubuffet founded a wholesale wine business in the Bercy quarter of Paris. After travelling to the Netherlands in 1932, his interest in painting was revived and he rented a studio in the rue du Val-de-Grâce where he worked every afternoon. From 1934, Jean Dubuffet left the running of his business so he could concentrate on painting. He moved to a new studio at 34, rue Lhomond and experimented there with new forms of expression. He started making puppets and sculpted masks. Dubuffet and his wife separated, and he met Émilie Carlu whom he married in 1937. The painter Dubuffet had to return to managing his business to save it from bankruptcy and again abandoned painting. In 1938, he was mobilized in the ministry of the Air in Paris and was soon sent to Rochefort as punishment for lack of discipline. He took refuge in Céret where he was demobilized and then returned to his business in Paris in 1940. The art critic Gaëtan Picon wrote that Jean Dubuffet was at the time a “quasi clandestine” painter. Dubuffet decided for the third time to concentrate exclusively on painting in 1942 and never stopped after that.

The return to painting for Dubuffet and the first controversies

Jean Dubuffet moved his studio to 114 bis rue de Vaugirard and made paintings and gouache works.
His art then evolved away from the realism of his earlier works. Gaëtan Picon saw the figures in Jean Dubuffet’s paintings as “ghosts dressed at the threshold of the work to announce the spirit (…) they are high bulwarks marked with his sign”. In 1943, his friend Georges Limbour bought a work from Dubuffet and gave it to the art critic Jean Paulhan. Through this connection, Dubuffet participated in the exhibition Le Nu dans l’art contemporain at the Galerie René Drouin. Around the same time, he met the poets Pierre Seghers, Louis Parrot, Paul Éluard, André Frénaud, Eugène Guillevic, and Francis Ponge, as well as the painter Jean Fautrier and the writers René de Solier and Marcel Arland.
The exhibitions Mirobolus, Macadame et Cie and Hautes Pâtes held at the Galerie René Drouin between 1944 and 1947 provoked controversy. Dubuffet responded to his critics: “it is true that the drawing in the exhibited paintings is completely devoid of any accepted skill of the kind usually found in paintings made by professional painters, so there is no need whatsoever for any special study, or any congenital talent to make similar ones (…). It is true that the lines have not been executed with care and precision but on the contrary give the impression of negligence (…). Lastly, it’s true that many people, when they first saw these paintings, felt fear and aversion.” Jean Dubuffet in fact had a strong desire to be anti-cultural. His works are inspired by drawings made by children and the mentally ill which he collected in large numbers. Dubuffet did not seek to please or to sell, his family wealth sheltered him from need. Jean-Louis Ferrier and Yann Le Pichon wrote in L’Aventure de l’art au XXe siècle: “the first noteworthy exhibition in liberated Paris at the Galerie Drouin was of an unknown artist, Dubuffet, whose deliberate clumsiness provoked a scandal of a kind that had not been seen for a long time. The gallery received anonymous letters: the guestbook is covered with insults.”
In 1945, the New York dealer Pierre Matisse visited the painter Jean Dubuffet who was exhibiting at the time his lithographs at the Galerie André in Paris. The same year, Dubuffet met the writer Henri Michaux. In 1946, Jean Dubuffet exhibited for the second time at the Galerie René Drouin and published Prospectus aux amateurs de tout genre with Gallimard.

The birth of Art Brut

Dubuffet, driven by his anti-cultural opinion, became interested in new forms of art outside all official production. He thus travelled around France and Switzerland in search of marginal works, and the term “Art Brut” (also “raw art” or “outsider art”) first appeared at that time. Two years later, the basement of the Galerie René Drouin, place Vendôme became the Foyer de l’Art Brut. The venue hosted exhibitions of the artists Adolf Wölfli, Fleury Joseph Crépin, Aloïse Corbaz, Henri Salingardes, Auguste Forestier, Juva and Miguel Hernandez. In the autumn of 1948, the Foyer de l’Art Brut was moved to a pavilion lent by the publisher Gaston Gallimard and became the Compagnie de l’Art Brut. Its founder members were the painter Jean Dubuffet, the writers André Breton, Jean Paulhan and Michel Tapié, the art dealers Charles Ratton and Henri-Pierre Roché and the patron Edmond Bomsel. The painter Slavko Kopac was made curator of the collection. In 1947, Dubuffet was represented by the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York and exhibited his work regularly until 1959 while in 1949, the Galerie René Drouin exhibited 200 works of Art Brut by 60 different artists. Jean Dubuffet wrote the text for the exhibition catalogue entitled L’Art Brut préféré aux arts culturels and defined the notion of Art Brut: “this means works made by people untouched by high culture in which mimicry has little or no part, so their creators take everything (subjects, choice of materials, means of expression, rhythms, ways of writing, etc.) from their own selves and not from the stencils of classical art or fashionable art, contrary to what intellectuals do. We see the pure, raw creation of art, reinvented entirely in each of its phases by its maker, starting only from his or her own impulses. Art therefore where only the function of invention is shown and not those of the chameleon and of the monkey, which are constant in high art.”
The Compagnie de l’Art Brut was dissolved in 1951, and the collection sent to the painter Alfonso Ossorio in Long Island near New York. It remained there until 1962 when Jean Dubuffet bought a building at 137 rue de Sèvres (now the premises of the Fondation Dubuffet) and installed the collection there. It comprised about 1200 works by about a hundred different artists. The painter Dubuffet also added about a hundred works to this collection. Slavko Kopac was again the curator of the collection and the Compagnie de l’Art Brut was reformed. Research on Art Brut increased with the first publications appearing, and the number of works increased. In 1967, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs of Paris exhibited a selection of 700 works by 75 artists. In order to ensure a permanent status for the collection, Jean Dubuffet donated it to the city of Lausanne in 1972 which transferred it in 1975 to the château de Beaulieu that had been refurbished for this purpose. By then, the collection comprised over 4200 works by 145 different artists. Jean Dubuffet never mixed his own works with this collection: he was its founder and theoretician. Today, 30,000 works are in this collection of Art Brut.

Jean Dubuffet’s Paysages du Mental and Pâtes battues

In 1947, Jean Dubuffet exhibited portraits of his friends at the Galerie Renée Drouin: Jean Paulhan, Georges Limbour, Paul Léautaud, Jean Fautrier, Henri Michaux, Antonin Artaud, Michel Tapié and many others were included. The surrealist writer André Pieyre de Mandiargues said about this series: “Making the portrait of his friends with a form of barbaric tenderness, he slaps them up against the wall! Inscribed as if by the tip of a nail in smoky plaster, they are the best portraits of modern times.” For Dubuffet a portrait should not aim to resemble physical features, but become the effigy of the sitter.
Between 1947 and 1949, Dubuffet went to the Sahara desert three times, visiting in particular El Goléa in Algeria. There, he wanted to make a clean sweep to finalize his “deconditioning”. Dubuffet painted a lot there, especially oil landscapes and sketchbooks, some of which he donated to MoMA in New York.
In 1951, the Galerie Rive Gauche organized Dubuffet’s first retrospective. He painted his series of Paysages du Mental: “I had the impression that some of these paintings resulted in images that can strike the mind like a transposition of the mind at work (…). This is why I have called them Landscapes of the Mind. In many paintings from this group, I swing continually between concrete landscape and mental landscape, moving closer either to one or the other.”
Dubuffet spent six months in New York and became friendly with Yves Tanguy. He exhibited at the Chicago Arts Club where he gave a lecture in English titled Anticultural Positions. The following year he returned to Paris and painted his series of Pâtes Battues. He explained his method of painting these works: “The technique consisted of lightly caressing the painting after it was dry with a broad flat paintbrush, with golden, bistre colours that bonded everything. Rubbed gently in this way, the brush only catches the elements in relief, while allowing the colours of the earlier paint fuse a little. (…) It wasn’t just once that I had to sweep my broad brush on the picture, but several times (…) from of all that, the result was a thin golden powdering, as if shadowy, fed from the interior by a strange light (…).”

In 1953, René Drouin and Pierre Matisse published the book by Georges Limbour L’Art Brut de Jean Dubuffet – Tableau bon levain à vous de cuire la pâte. In 1954, Dubuffet made his first sculptures, small assemblages of varied materials, which he exhibited at the Galerie Rive-Gauche.

Initial international recognition for the painter Jean Dubuffet

The following year, Dubuffet and his wife moved to Vence in the south of France. For Dubuffet: “at the end of January 1955, doctors advocated that my wife live in Vence, and I went there with her. I had some difficulty locating a space for my work. At first, with only a small very cramped studio, I devised a project comprising assemblages of imprints in india ink.” He continued to work on assemblages of objects and in 1947, these experiments resulted in the series: Topographies, Texturologies, Matériologies, Aires et Sites. These works were also met with incomprehension from the public. The gallerist Daniel Cordier commented: “Of all of Jean Dubuffet’s experiments, the series of the Texturologies and the Matériologies provoked the most distrust and jibes. This may be because it marked the ultimate point (and perhaps the most fulfilled) of his experiments on the gaze and on things. (…) Dubuffet had at last made what he had always wanted: machines for dreaming with indistinct blankets of dust. With the Texturologies he reached the most arid of summits, but also the most poetic abstraction. On the contrary, with the Matériologies, he revealed the interrupting virtues of the elementary real.” In 1960, a major retrospective of his work was held at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs of Paris. Dubuffet was again “the only artist who still causes scandal”.
Jean Dubuffet had his first London exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1955, and then a retrospective was organized in 1958 at the Arthur Tooth Gallery. He also had a first retrospective in Germany that year, at Leverkusen. Between Vence and Paris, Dubuffet became a friend of the artist, Philippe Dereux, the gallerist Alphonse Chave and the writer Alexandre Vialatte.
In 1961, Dubuffet began a series of musical experiments first with the Cobra artist Asger Jorn, and then alone. It was also the period of his Paris Circus. His graphic work was exhibited at the Silkeborg Museum in Denmark and a catalogue raisonné was published. In 1962 Dubuffet was delighted to have his first retrospective in New York at MoMA. This exhibition travelled the following year to Chicago and Los Angeles.

Jean Dubuffet’s Hourloupe

During the summer of 1962 Jean Dubuffet created a series of drawings with red and blue ballpoint pens accompanied by texts in an imaginary jargon. These works were gathered in a small book that gave its title to the series of the Hourloupe (1962-1974), the longest cycle in Dubuffet’s oeuvre. “The word Hourloupe as the title of a small book recently published in which reproductions of drawings in red and blue ballpoint pen appeared with a text in jargon. I associated it by assonance with ‘hurler’, ‘hululer’, ‘loup’, (‘howl’, ‘hoot’, ‘wolf’, ) Riquet à la Houppe and the title of the book by Maupassant Le Horla which is inspired by mental bewilderment”, wrote Dubuffet. In this cycle, the artist created pictures that are assemblages of cut out drawings. The painter specified that these are not “collages like those of the Dada, surrealist and cubist movements that constituted juxtaposing elements put together (…) objects not made by the artists themselves and destined for a use that was anything but artistic. The intended effect resulted precisely from the absolutely non-artistic characteristic of these objects and of the surprise provoked by their use in a work of art. My assemblages come from a spirit that was very different because they are paintings made of pieces taken from paintings made earlier by myself for this purpose.” Still in the Hourloupe cycle, Dubuffet made architectural structures that are “inhabitable sculptures”. He explains: “I was struck afterwards by the desire not only to be confronted with paintings while keeping my feet on the edge of everyday life, but to abandon this edge, to enter these images, to inhabit them. Sorts of allusive and figurative buildings resulted from this, imaginary architectural structures in all, which are not real architecture but rather images incorporated into a dwelling. We see ourselves in these completely surrounded by our mental productions and we can make them our only food.” His Hourloupe cycle includes paintings, coloured ink drawings, sculptures and assemblages.
The painter Dubuffet was interested in works in volume, what he called his “peintures monumentées”. They are primarily objects: chairs, telephones, trees, chests of drawers, tables and then buildings: La Tour aux figures (a protected historic monument), the Castelet l’Hourloupe, Château Bleu and Jardin d’Hiver (now at the Centre Pompidou in Paris). In this desire to “come out of the image”, Dubuffet learned to use polystyrene, polyester, epoxy resin and shotcrete. In 1967, Dubuffet began to construct the Cabinet lologolique: the Closerie Falbala, and after it was shown in Chicago, Basel and Paris was installed at the Villa Falbala, which was built to house it at Périgny-sur-Yerres in the Île de France. The following year, Dubuffet began to create the Group of Four Trees, commissioned by David Rockefeller of New York’s Chase Manhattan Bank to decorate the Chase Manhattan Plaza. These are epoxy resin sculptures inaugurated in 1972.
Still within the Hourloupe cycle, Dubuffet created Coucou Bazar: a ballet of sculptures, paintings and costumes. This “animated painting” was performed for the first time at a retrospective of his work at the Solomon R. Guggenheim from May to July 1973, and then at the Grand Palais in Paris the same year. The score is by İlhan Mimaroğluu a Turkish composer of electronic music and the choreography by Jean McFaddin.

Jean Dubuffet’s international consecration

In 1964, Dubuffet showed his recent works at the Venice Biennale. The same year, the Catalogue intégral des travaux de Jean Dubuffet, was published. This catalogue now comprises 38 instalments, each of which presents a group of works belonging to the same cycle. The works included range from 1917 to 1985. In 1966, two retrospectives of Dubuffet were organized in the USA, in Dallas and in Minneapolis, while a retrospective was also held at the Tate Gallery in London and another at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of New York showed works from the Hourloupe cycle.
The following year, Dubuffet donated 180 works to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and Gallimard published the first two volumes of Prospectus et tous écrits suivants. The final two volumes were published in 1995. The first Canadian retrospective of Dubuffet was shown at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. The following year, two major exhibitions were organized in Basel, at the Kunstmuseum and at the Kunsthalle. In 1972, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris held a solo exhibition. The Fondation Dubuffet was created the following year. The Jardin d’émail was unveiled at the Kröller-Muller Museum in Otterlo, the Netherlands in 1974. Two years later, the Fundación Juan March in Madrid held the first Dubuffet retrospective in Spain. In 1978, FIAT organized in Turin a luminous projection of paintings, an exhibition and a third performance of Coucou Bazar. The same year, a retrospective was organized at the Musée des Beaux Arts of Le Havre and a first solo exhibition was held in Japan at the Fuji Television Gallery in Tokyo. In 1980, a travelling retrospective was held first at the Akademie der Kunst in Berlin, then at the Moderner Kunste Museum in Vienna and finally the following year at the Joseph Haubrich Kunsthalle in Cologne. For the painter Dubuffet’s 80^th birthday, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris each organized a solo exhibition of the artist’s work. Dubuffet unveiled the Manoir d’Essor for the Louisiana Museum of Humlebæk in Denmark in 1982. The same year, a retrospective was shown at the Seibu Museum of Art in Tokyo. This exhibition then travelled to Osaka to the National Museum of Art. In 1983, Dubuffet unveiled in Houston his Monument au Fantôme which he had begun in 1977 and then he unveiled the Monument à la Bête Debout in Chicago in 1984. The French pavilion of the Venice Biennale was devoted to him that year. The Fondation Dubuffet organised the first exhibition in Sweden at the Malmö Konsthall. At the end of 1984, Dubuffet decided to stop painting and wrote his Biographie au pas de course in 1985. Jean Dubuffet died on May 12, 1985 in Paris.

© Diane de Polignac Gallery / Mathilde Gubanski
Translation: Jane Mac Avock

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