Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985)
ART SANS BOUNDARIES
“For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.” —Jean Dubuffet
If ever an artist was deemed anti-establishment, it was Jean Dubuffet. The French painter, hailed as one of the most influential of the late 20th century, shunned what he felt was rigid academic art training and the social codes he believed hampered the essence of creativity.
Close up of Jean Dubuffet’s Group of Four Trees, c. 1972, which graces 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza in NYC.
But Dubuffet wasn’t always so assured in his convictions.
Born in La Havre, Dubuffet moved to Paris in 1918 to study painting at the Académie Julian, but he dropped out after six months to pursue art on his own. Within a few years, the discouraged painter abandoned art completely to work in his family’s wine merchant business. He began painting again in the mid-1930s, only to take another hiatus a short time later. Finally, in 1942, Dubuffet returned to art for good with renewed vigor.
An avid people watcher, Dubuffet was a keen observer of the everyday world-at-large. He was particularly intrigued by the art of so-called non-artists, including children and the mentally ill, which he subsequently termed art brut, or “raw art.” He wrote a treatise on the subject and even formed a small society after accruing a number of works rendered by “those unscathed by artistic culture, in which, the mimesis has little role in the way that the artist draws everything...from their own depths and, unlike intellectuals, not from the conventions of classical or fashionable art.” (L’art Brut Prefere Aux Arts Culturels, 1949)
Thus, Dubuffet’s own art was also pure and lacking in pretension. Many of his subjects—though often rendered crudely and flatly—also personified a charming innocence and gentle naïveté. —RJR
Notable works: Apartment Houses, Paris, 1946; Smiling Face, 1948; The Cow with a Subtile Nose, 1954.