JEAN DUBUFFET
Le Havre, (France) 1901 – París, (France) 1985     

After training at the École des Beaux-Arts in Le Havre (1916-20), he went to live in Paris. His production of paintings, showing the influence of Dufy, Derain and Cézanne, suffered lengthy interruptions, caused by his involvement with the family vineyards. This situation continued until 1942, when he put an end to what he called his “prehistory” and started on the series Marionnettes de la ville et de la campagne, the first step in a drastic about-turn in his work, based on a questioning of the cultural and aesthetic models of the West and adoption of the artistic codes used by mental patients, children and members of primitive cultures, constituting what he called “Art Brut”, which he used as sources for his anti-cultural paintings. In a number of strictly catalogued series that overlapped in time he worked both with figuration and with matter. In the former case he used a deliberately clumsy, coarse, childlike style that aroused a vigorous controversy at his first solo exhibition, held at the Galerie Drouin in Paris in 1944. In the latter case he used collages, assemblages, frottages and lithographs to make matter the central focus of series such as Mirobolus, Macadam et Cie., 1945, Paysages du mental (Landscapes of the Mental) 1950, Texturologies, 1958, and Matériologies, 1960. An exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1947 helped his work to become known in the United States.
At the same time he undertook a systematic analysis of Art Brut based on a search for art produced in psychiatric hospitals, the foundation of stable mechanisms for exhibiting it (the Foyer de l’Art Brut, established at the Galerie Drouin in 1947, the Compagnie de l’art brut in 1948), the communication of its principles through texts (Prospectus aux amateurs de tout genre, 1946; L’Art Brut préféré aux arts culturels, 1949, among others) and talks (“Anti-cultural Positions”, 1951) and involvement with collectives (Collège de Pataphysique, 1960-65) and artists such as Asger Jorn, together with whom he made musical experiments in 1960.
In 1962, when the MoMA presented his first retrospective in the United States, he embarked on a new phase with the series L’Hourloupe, which he used to create new iconic imagery, formally based on graphic gestures and automatism. This was then transferred not only to his subsequent series of paintings but also to three dimensions, in sculpture (made with polystyrene), everyday objects, public monuments and landscape interventions. In a development that started in the early seventies, Paris and New York became the two poles for the diffusion and review of his work, with retrospectives at the Guggenheim (1973 and 1981), the Grand Palais (1973) and the Georges Pompidou (1981).