Jean Dubuffet

Dubuffet is a French painter, sculptor and plastic artist, born in Le Havre in 1901. After studying drawing and having a short experience in wine trading in the family business, he turned to his pictorial work in 1942. He is the first theoretician to have given as art style, the name of Art brut, “preferred to the cultural arts” where painting "says better than words". This artist, working in series, exercises a figurative painting, on the border between “the most filthy smear and the small miracle.” His first significant exhibition took place in 1945 in “ Paris Libéré”, exhibiting at the René Drouin gallery.

From 1944 to 1951, this artist caused scandal in Paris, by composing a series of paintings in which we find primitive characters with apparent sexual organs (“Corps de dames", 1950-1951).

From 1951 to 1962, he fixed and partitioned the footprints or even used various materials to describe "the landscapes of the mind" (series of battered pastes).

His work is made up of assemblies, often wrongly described as "collages", sculptures and monuments.

In the 1960s, Dubuffet turned to sculpture and began an important series of sculptures in expanded polystyrene painted with vinyl.

He carried out numerous commissions, such as the Tour au Figures pour l'Ile Saint Germain at Issy Les Moulineaux (1988).

In 1963, a major retrospective paid tribute to him at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which was then visible in Chicago or Los Angeles.

Dubuffet is an iconoclastic artist who has produced an abundant and diverse work. Today, he is recognized as one of the most important artists of the 20th century.

He died in 1985 in Paris.