Jean Dubuffet

French painter, sculptor, and writer Jean Dubuffet is known for his longstanding opposition to authority and his rebellious attitude towards fine art, exemplified by his vocal admiration of and support for “low art” that eschewed traditional beauty in favor of truth and authenticity. 

In 1918, at the age of 17, Dubuffet moved to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian, where he became friends with artists Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, and André Masson. He was not committed to becoming an artist and had a stop-and-start career, ceasing painting altogether and working in the wine trade from 1924 to 1933. In 1942, Dubuffet came back to painting, depicting subjects from everyday Parisian life and “primitive” female nudes. A 1945 show of paintings by Jean Fautrier was hugely influential on the young artist and lead him to imitate Fautrier’s technique of mixing thick paint with gravel and sand in order to texturally model paint as skin. Dubuffet had adopted this strategy by 1945, showing the Hautes Pâtes series at Galérie René Drouin the following year and painting portraits of many artist friends the same way.

In the late ’40s, he became more ideologically invested in “low art,” influenced largely by Hanz Prinzhorn’s book Artistry of the Mentally Ill. In 1949, Dubuffet published the essay L’art Brut préferé aux ArtsCulturels, in which he expounded on this fascination with art produced by non-fine art professionals, including children, prisoners, and psychiatric patients, an understudied branch of art deemed "outsider art," of which Dubuffet also built a significant personal collection. 

From 1962 on, Dubuffet limited his palette to red, white, black, and blue and worked increasingly on sculptures, particularly in painted polystyrene. He embarked upon an ongoing body of work, the Hourloupe series, which includes paintings as well as sculptural polyster resin and epoxy works. At the end of the ‘60s, Dubuffet’s sculptural explorations lead him to create large-scale environments that viewers could enter and stand inside. Dubuffet died in Paris in 1985.