Jean Dubuffet

Jean Dubuffet , 1901-85, French painter and sculptor. Dubuffet began his artistic career in 1942. He created primitive, childlike, and humorous effects savagely opposed to established taste. For many works he prepared a thick impasto of materials such as asphalt, pebbles, and glass to enrich the surface texture of his paintings. Among his later works are numerous large, white, crudely representational sculptures with heavily outlined colored edges and facets. The Museum of Modern Art, New York City, has his Cow with the Subtile Nose and Beard of Uncertain Returns.

Bibliography: See studies by P. Selz (1962) and M. Loreau (tr. 1973).

Dubuffet, Jean (1901–85) French painter and sculptor. His best-known works are assemblages of materials (such as glass, sand, rope) arranged into crude shapes, called pâtes. He collected the work of untrained artists, coining the phrase art brut.

Dubuffet, Jean (1901–85). French painter, sculptor, lithographer, and writer. He studied painting as a young man but was engaged mainly in the wine trade until 1942, when he took up art seriously again, his first exhibition coming in 1945. He preferred untrained spontaneity to professional skill and was fascinated by graffiti and by what he called Art Brut (‘raw art’), the products of psychotics or wholly untrained persons. His own work is aggressively reminiscent of such ‘popular’ art, often featuring subjects drawn from the street life of Paris (Man with a Hod, 1956, Tate, London). Frequently he incorporated materials such as sand and plaster into his paintings, and he also produced sculptures made from junk materials. His work initially provoked outrage, but then found acceptance and in some quarters reverence, and it has proved highly influential, foreshadowing many of the trends of the 1960s and beyond. He is one of the key figures in the tendency in contemporary art to depreciate traditional materials, methods, and, standards, and, as he himself said in 1957, to ‘bring all disparaged values into the limelight’.