Jean Dubuffet is one of the major figures in the art of the second half of the ^20th century, the author of a singular body of work that sets itself apart from the art of its time, like an autonomous continent. His creative approach is based on a desire to break away from institutionalized, “asphyxiating” culture, a veritable indoctrination.

Jean Dubuffet was born in Le Havre in 1901. His high school classmates were future writers Georges Limbour, Armand Salacrou and Raymond Queneau. He attended evening classes at the École des Beaux-Arts in Le Havre. After graduating, he moved to Paris with Georges Limbour to devote himself to painting. He briefly attended classes at the Académie Julian. He made friends with André Masson and Fernand Léger, and met Gris at the Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler gallery. The year 1924 marked a break. He was sceptical about the values of culture. He stopped painting for eight years. After four months in Buenos Aires, he returned to Le Havre, where he joined the family wine business. In the early 1930s, he set up his own wine business in the Bercy warehouses, which he soon put under management to devote himself once again to painting. He was looking for a new form of expression. He creates masks and puppets. He gave up painting once again to save his business from bankruptcy. When war is declared, he is drafted.

In the autumn of 1942, Dubuffet returned to painting, this time intending to devote himself entirely to it. He never left. His ideas had changed. Artistic creation no longer seemed to require the traditional skills he had been striving to acquire. If anything, it seemed more authentic and effective, imbued with a casual ease.[1]. Following in the footsteps of artists of the previous generation, he turned his attention to children’s drawings, which fully reflected his new position, in opposition to “knowledge”. In 1943, he created a series of colorful drawings on the theme of the Métro. That same year, his friend Georges Limbour introduced him to Jean Paulhan, a key figure in the publishing world and literary director of Gallimard (for whom he painted a large number of portraits between 1945 and 1947). Through him, he met many writers, poets, publishers, gallery owners and painters: Pierre Seghers, Louis Parrot, Paul Eluard, André Frénaud, Eugène Guillevic, Francis Ponge(Francis Ponge jubilation, 1947, private collection), Jean Fautrier, René de Solier, Marcel Arland and René Drouin. Dubuffet exhibits in Drouin’s gallery for the first time in October 1944. Jean Paulhan writes the preface to the catalog. His work was marked by an extreme schematism towards the expression of the archetype, breaking with the realistic concern for resemblance of his earlier works. Pierre Matisse, the painter’s son and art dealer in New York, bought several paintings from him in 1945. He became his dealer in America until 1960. During a trip to Switzerland with Jean Paulhan and writer Paul Budry, Dubuffet begins his first research into Art Brut productions. In 1946, René Drouin presented the exhibition Mirobolus, Macadam et Cie, Hautes pâtes, “triturations of thick materials such as asphalt and bitumen, plaster, etc.” in his gallery. I had decided on ephemeral works,” he wrote, “rejecting any concern for their conservation.[2] “. Stylistically extremely primary, these works illustrate the lesson of child drawing, such as Miss Choléra (The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York) and the portrait series of the following year. Dubuffet publishes Prospectus aux amateurs de tout genre, published by Gallimard.

In 1947, Pierre Matisse presented his first Jean Dubuffet exhibition in New York. The artist paints Portrait of Pierre Matisse1947 (Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne/CCI, Paris). Dubuffet discovers the Saharan desert, El Goléa . In the desert, he finds the “nothing” from which to build.[3]. In autumn 1947, the exhibition Portraits par Dubuffet was held at the Galerie René Drouin, with a series of portraits of writers and artists including Francis Ponge, Jean Paulhan, Georges Limbour, Paul Léautaud, Jean Fautrier, Henri Michaux, Antonin Artaud, André Dhôtel, Charles-Albert Cingria, Michel Tapié and others. All Dubuffet’s work is developed in series with specific titles.

The artist created the Foyer de l’Art Brut in the basement of the René Drouin gallery in 1948. Several exhibitions were held there before he moved to rue de l’Université, in a pavilion at the bottom of the garden of the Gallimard publishing house, before leaving in 1951 for the United States. Also in 1948, at the beginning of November, the CoBrA group was founded, which, like Dubuffet, positioned itself outside any aesthetic preoccupations. The newly-formed Compagnie de l’Art Brut published Dubuffet’s first text in Ler dla canpane jargon, inspired by his study of the dialect spoken in El Goléa. The artist made a second stay in the Sahara until April 1948, followed by a third the following year. On his return, he composed the Grotesque Landscapes series. The incisions he makes in thick white pastes over dark backgrounds are reminiscent of the white-painted cob walls, decorated with graffiti and scratches, found in oasis buildings.[4]. Dubuffet organizes the first exhibition of his Art Brut collection; he publishes L’Art Brut préféré aux arts culturels (Paris, René Drouin).

In 1950, he met the American painter Alfonso Ossorio, who became fascinated by his work. A new series is born Corps de damescomposed of plastic pastes mixed with gravel. In early spring of the following year, Dubuffet began a new series of earthy-colored paintings, featuring tormented reliefs of thick pastes evoking fragments of soil, tables or stones, as the case may be: Sols et terrains, Tables paysagées and Paysages du mental. The Parisian gallery Rive Gauche presents his first retrospective.

He spent six months in New York with his wife Lili (November 1951-April 1952) to study his Art Brut collections, which had been sent across the Atlantic to be installed at Ossario’s home in East Hampton on Long Island, but to no avail. They remained in New York. During his stay, Dubuffet befriends Yves Tanguy and his wife Kay Sage. He also rubbed shoulders with Marcel Duchamp. Thirty-two of his paintings are shown at the Arts Club of Chicago, where he delivers his “Anticultural Positions” address on artistic creation. Back in Paris in the spring, he continues the Sols et terrains series, followed by Lieux momentanés. He draws the Terres radieuses and composes the Pâtes battues series, in which the “mental” is always central. He created small paintings from butterfly wings(Jardin nacré, 1955, Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris). Dubuffet also devoted himself to lithography in Fernand Mourlot’s famous studio.

He creates “sculptures” from natural materials gleaned from all over the place (sponge, charcoal, clinker, etc.), such as Le Danseur (Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne/CCI, Paris). These Petites statues de la vie précaire were exhibited at Galerie Rive Gauche in October-November 1954.

The following year, with his wife Lili suffering from lung disease, the couple moved to Vence, where he had large studios and a villa built. He produced Assemblages d’empreintes à l’encre de Chine and Tableaux d’assemblage, and revived his butterfly-wing collages. From then on, Dubuffet divided his time between Vence and Paris. In 1957 and 1958, he devoted himself to a cycle of paintings entitled Célébrations du sol, with Topographies and Texturologies, which continued his research of the early 1950s with Sols et terrains. The success of Texturologies with the public ran counter to his conceptions: “Although these sales were advantageous, they were a failure in terms of my aspiration to produce works that were totally unsuitable for introduction into cultural circuits…”.[5] “. At the same time, he began the Phénomènes series in lithography (1958-1962), which consisted in the transfer of assemblages or, more simply, impressions of materials of all kinds, from floors, walls and stones to wires, crumbs and torn pieces of paper. This research mobilized him to such an extent that he set up a lithography studio in Paris, on rue de Rennes, and another in Vence. He exhibits for the first time at the Daniel Cordier gallery. Other themes emerged in 1959-1960 with the series of Barbes, such as Barbe des combats (National Gallery of Art, Washington), Éléments botaniques, composed of press-dried plants, such as Campagne nervurée (Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris) and Matériologies, begun in December 1959. Matériologies are made from the most elaborate materials (plastic paste, papier-mâché, crumpled pieces of aluminum foil, grains of crushed mica).

Galerie Cordier buys an apartment on rue de Duras to house Dubuffet’s secretariat, designed to free him from all dealings with critics, dealers and others. It was also here that Dubuffet began to build up a body of documentation on his work, culminating in the catalog raisonné compiled by Max Loreau in the form of booklets published by Jean-Jacques Pauvert – twenty-eight in all between 1962 and 1978. His work is the subject of a major retrospective at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, designed by François Mathey, featuring four hundred works.

With Asger Jorn, one of the founders of the CoBrA group, he experimented with music in 1961. The Danish artist played the violin and trumpet, Dubuffet the piano. Later, Dubuffet continued these experiments on his own. He bought other instruments without knowing how to play them, using them in his own way. These practices led to the publication of records by Milan art dealer Carlo Cardazzo. The same year saw the opening of the Paris Circus cycle, in which the artist returned to urban themes (buses, pedestrian and car parades, store windows) and bright colors, such as Rue passagère populated by a crowd of colorful characters (Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne/CCI, Paris). The following year saw the opening of a retrospective of his work at MoMA, which subsequently travelled to Chicago and Los Angeles. His Art Brut collection is repatriated from New York and installed at 137 rue de Sèvres in Paris. The collection is referenced and analyzed in the following years, and published in 9 fascicules.

In the summer of 1962, Dubuffet began his most famous cycle of paintings, L’Hourloupe, another form of mental landscape. L’Hourloupe comes from drawings made with a red and blue ballpoint pen during a telephone conversation, developed over a dozen years in painting, sculpture, architecture and beyond, with the introduction of real movement.

Its name derives from the association in Dubuffet’s mind of several assonances: “hurler”, “hululer”, “loup”, “Riquet à la Houppe” and the title of Maupassant’s book Le Horla, inspired by “égarement mental”.[6] “as the cellular language characteristic of L’Hourloupe. In 1964, a group of these works was presented at Palazzo Grassi for the Venice Biennale. In the same year, Dubuffet abandoned oil paint in favor of vinyl paint, which he replaced ten years later with acrylic paint.

In the summer of 1966, he began a long and important series of vinyl-painted expanded polystyrene sculptures. His work is acclaimed in major retrospectives in Europe, London (Tate Gallery), Amsterdam (Stedelijk Museum) and the United States (Dallas, Minneapolis). Over the winter, the Guggenheim in New York presents the exhibition L’Hourloupe, conceived by Lawrence Alloway, promoter and defender of Pop Art.

The following year, he undertook the construction of the Cabinet logologique, presented in Chicago, Basel and Paris. He makes a major donation of one hundred and eighty works to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. The first two volumes of the artist’s writings, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, are published by Gallimard (volumes III and IV appear in 1995). Jean Dubuffet’s writings are collected and presented by his friend Hubert Damisch. The following year was equally rich in publishing activity. Dubuffet published Asphyxiante culture, in which he castigated the cultural state and its values (published by Jean-Jacques Pauvert). The artist is the focus of an issue of L’Arc, “Dubuffet, Culture et subversion”. The first polystyrene Amoncellements are created. He exhibits for the first time at the Pace Gallery in New York (where he remains until his death).

In 1969, David Rockefeller, chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, patron of the arts and major collector, commissioned Giacometti to create a monumental sculpture for the square in front of the bank’s new headquarters in New York, designed by architect Gordon Bunshaft. In the same context, Alberto Giacometti designed a set of three monumental sculptures in 1960, Grande femme debout, Tête de Diego and the famous Homme qui marche, before withdrawing from the project. Dubuffet produced several models, including Groupe de 4 arbres, which was chosen for the square. He builds large studios in Périgny-sur-Yerres, near Paris, for his monumental projects. Jardin d’hiver (Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d’Art moderne/CCI, Paris) was the first major extension in 1970, followed by Groupe de 4 arbres for New York. Another gigantic creation, La Closerie Falbala in Périgny-sur-Yerres (1610 m2), was launched in 1970 (completed in 1976). At the center of the Closerie stands the Villa Falbala, designed to protect the Cabinet Logologique, which is accessed via theAntechamber. The Closerie Falbala was listed as a historic monument in 1998.

In 1971, Dubuffet produced a series of drawings for Coucou bazar, a mobile version of L’Hourloupe in the form of an animated painting. Subtitled Bal de L’Hourloupe or Bal des Leurres, Coucou Bazar consists of Praticables (movable painted cut-outs) and Costumes worn by dancers. Together, they create a series of combinations whose different planes are set in motion. The first performances accompanied the retrospective of his work at the Guggenheim in New York in 1973, which was then presented in Paris at the Grand Palais with a second version of the show. L’Homme du commun à l’ouvrage was published by Gallimard, as was La Botte à nique, edited by Albert Skira, and a Cahier de l’Herne devoted to the artist. At the end of 1974, the Fondation Dubuffet, created the previous year, was recognized as a public utility. New series appeared, such as Paysages Castillans and Sites tricolores, marking the end of theHourloupe cycle. Then, in 1975-1976, came Mondanités, Effigies incertaines, Lieux abrégés, and Théâtres de mémoire, large-scale collages of pieces taken from drawings or canvases. Dubuffet brings together scenes and motifs that have no link of continuity with one another – “a sudden convergence in the same image of scenes that are distant from one another in space and time.[7] “. The Art Brut collections and related archives are transferred to Lausanne’s Château de Beaulieu for permanent public display (having been donated to the city).

In the years that followed, he continued with the Théâtres de mémoire series, executing other series based on the same principle in drawing and painting, in other words, without resorting to the collage technique: the gouaches Brefs exercices d’école journalière (1979); the painted Partitions series, which maintains the multi-focal character of the Théâtres de mémoire (1980); the smaller Psycho-sites (1981).

To mark his eightieth birthday, the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, each devoted an exhibition to him. His last series were the Sites aléatoires in 1982, in which collages reappeared, and the Mires paintings from February 1983, which originated as “crayonnages”. The figures have disappeared. The title Mire refers to the term “in the sense of focusing the gaze on a point on an unlimited continuum”. Some thirty Mire were shown in the French pavilion at the 1984 Venice Biennale. Finally, that same year, he painted his last series, Non-lieux, most of them on a black background, which kept him busy until December. The following year, the site for the Tour aux figures was chosen on the Île Saint-Germain in Issy-les-Moulineaux.

Over the winter, in just over a month, he urgently drew and wrote his Biographie au pas de course.

Jean Dubuffet died in Paris on May 12, 1985.

Jean Dubuffet engraver

Jean Dubuffet is the author of over 550 lithographs, some 60 etchings, around 50 serigraphs and 37 illustrated books. The catalog raisonné of his prints was produced by Sophie Webel in 1991.

Jean Dubuffet’s first engravings were on wood in 1921 to illustrate poems by Roger Vitrac. In the autumn of 1944, he produced his first lithographs in Fernand Mourlot’s studio. Dubuffet was passionate about his work. The printer collected the proofs in an album and asked Francis Ponge to write a text, Matière et Mémoire ou les lithographes à l’école, published in 1945. Ponge points out that Dubuffet creates, on the perfect grained surface, accidents and effects of matter never before seen in lithography, opening up a whole range of unexpected nuances to the uniform black of lithographic ink. This new approach to lithography also heralded his burgeoning interest in mineral materials, which formed the basis of his subsequent creations from Mirobolus, Macadam & Cie to Matériologies. He focuses on the interplay of textures.

In 1948, Gravures en l’honneur de l’art brut revealed a new aspect of Jean Dubuffet’s art: 27 engravings on lino or other unlikely supports (cigar box bottoms, camembert box bottoms) printed on newsprint. Ler dla canpana, his first text written in jargon and calligraphed by the artist, is composed of this type of engraving.

The following year, he returned to lithography with the Corps de dame series. Also in 1949, he calligraphed and decorated with drawings Jean Paulhan’s La Métromanie ou les dessous de la capitale (Paris, Edmond et Jacques Desjobert), followed in 1950 by the series Incursion de la botanique dans la lithographie (27 black lithographs), and Reports d’assemblages and various plates. As early as 1953, Dubuffet printed plant elements on transfer paper, using these works to create assemblages of prints. “In the early months of 1958, an abundant cycle of lithographic works […] began in Paris. The aim was to create assemblages analogous to those in my paintings, but transferred from a single source […].[8]. ” This marked the beginning of the abundant Phénomènes series, with over four hundred lithographs in the continuity of the assemblages deferred – which are impressions of materials of all kinds, gathered in twenty-two albums such as L’Élémentaire ; La Terre et l’eau ; Théâtre du sol; Eaux, Pierres, Sable. Dubuffet produced the first lithographs in the Mourlot and Desjobert print shops, before setting up his own print shop on rue de Rennes, entirely dedicated to his project, and another in Vence with the same intention. “The idea of a painter’s career based exclusively on impressions or summary triturations of inked plates”[9]without the use of pencil or brush, appealed to him enormously. Very quickly, Dubuffet saw in this undertaking an inventory of all physical phenomena. The result was the thirteen albums of plates printed in black, like a dictionary of Texturology (I to XIII), followed by experiments with color superimpositions of the basic plates, brought together in nine color albums (I to IX). At the same time, four plates from the Les Barbes series accompany the poem composed and calligraphed by the artist , La Fleur de barbe (1960). Dubuffet completed the vast Phénomènes series in 1962. Between 1961 and 1964, he produced another small series of some twenty lithographs, reports of assemblages. In 1964, the rue de Rennes printing works ceased operations.

Jean Dubuffet has been very active in the field of artist’s books.

He illustrates texts written by others, most often calligraphing them, such as Pierre-André Benoît(Oreilles gardées, Alès, P.A.B., 1962), Kay Sage(Mordicus, Alès, P.A.B., 1962), Jean-Luc Parant(Les yeux CIII CXXV, Montpellier, Fata Morgana, 1976).

The artist also published his own calligraphic writings, accompanied by illustrations such as La Lunette farcie (Paris, 1963), Couinque (Alès, P.A.B, 1963), L’Hourloupe (Paris, Noël Arnaud, 1963), Trémolo sur l’œil (Gaston Puel, Veilhes, 1963), La botte à nique (Genève, Skira, 1973), Bonpiet beau neuille (Paris, Jeanne Bucher, 1983); Oriflammes (Marseille, Ryôan-Ji, 1984).

He composed playing cards in the cellular language of hourloupe, Hourloupe Bank (London, Alecto, 1967) and Hourloupe Algebra (Basel, Beyeler and Paris, Jeanne Bucher, 1968). Other graphic albums include Parade funèbre pour Charles Estienne (Paris, Jeanne Bucher, 1967); Présence fugace (New York, Pace, 1973), Fables (New York, Pace, 1976); Conjectures (with the author, 1983).

[1] Jean Dubuffet, Biographie au pas de course, Paris, Gallimard, Les Cahiers de la NRF, 2001, p. 47.

[2] Ibid, p. 53.

[3] Gaëtan Picon, Le Travail de Jean Dubuffet, Genève, Skira, 1973, p. 54.

[4] Jean Dubuffet, Biographie au pas de course, op. cit ., p. 59.

[5] Ibid., p. 74.

[6] Ibid., p. 83.

[7] Ibid. p. 122.

[1] Jean Dubuffet, Biographie au pas de course, Paris, Gallimard, Les Cahiers de la NRF, 2001, p. 75.

[2] Jean Dubuffet, “Notes sur les lithographies par reports d’assemblages et sur la suite des Phénomènes,” 1962 in Sophie Webel, Jean Dubuffet. Catalog raisonné of the engraved works vol. I Paris, Baudoin Lebon éditeur, 1991, p. 131.