Jean Dubuffet

Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet was a French painter and sculptor of the École de Paris (School of Paris). 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. He is perhaps best known for founding the art brut movement, and for the collection of works—Collection de l'art brut—that this movement spawned.From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

The life and work of Jean Dubuffet

Jean Dubuffet was born in Le Havre, the son of a wealthy wine merchant. He attended the Lycee of Le Havre then in 1918 he went to study at the Academie Julian where he remained for six months. He had doubts, however, about the value of art and abandoned his burgeoning career in 1924 not resuming until 1942. His first one-man exhibition took place in 1945.

He was fascinated with representing urban scenes, for instance, ‘Man With A Hod ‘ (1956). He called his style Art Brut (Raw Art), similar to Outsider Art in which paintings and sculptures are executed by those beyond the system such as prisoners, mental patients or recluses. He was an experimental artist in the way he found new ways of applying materials to his artwork. For example, he used sand or plaster in his paintings and incorporated items discarded on the street into his sculptures.

Dubuffet was obsessed with materials and with creating works outside any accepted understanding of what constitutes art. He was closest to the Surrealists and the spirit of the Naive Artists. In pieces such as ‘The Hourloupe’, which begins as a doodle and extends into a free-form journey into painting, sculpture and relief, he presented works which were fuelled by his subconscious and free from the burden of technical perfection.