Jean Dubuffet

Dubuffet, one of the artists more surprising XXe century, is the inventor par excellence of new plastic languages. It appreciated L art of joining and the assembly. Enemy of the culture and the art of the museums, anarchist, atheist, antimilitarist, antipatriotic, restive with any category (“there is no abstract art or the art is always”), it counts among these creators which modified our vision of art, even the framework of our urban life. Its work encourages to look at differently the ground, the silhouettes of the passers by, the faces where interpenetrate organically the flesh, the plant or the mineral, the hierarchy between the things and the people. Its career of dynamiter consists, of 1942 to 1985, in an extraordinary labour of fruitfulness and regularity, with the research of the release of very forced. This subversive way, far from any standard established, the conduit towards the art of childhood and the madness to which it gives again its letters of nobility (rough art). It inclines it with outrageous forms, the meanders and the expressive signs of the graffiti, with the exploration of materials - bituminizes, sand, vegetable fibres. This mixture assigns a major place to him among the artists matierists, until its great mental series of Hourloupe (1962-1974), prelude to the gestural graphics of the Test cards (1983). Inventive prolific writer of a language, the “absolute jargon”, polemist, sometimes cruel, it leaves irreplaceable testimonys on his vision of art in Prospectus to the amateurs of any kind (1946), Biographie with the step of race (1985); he devotes also many texts to rough art. Are reproduced here: “Anticulturelles Positions” (1951-1963); “Place with the antisocial behaviour” (February 1961); “Radiophonic Maintenance with George Ribemont-Dessaignes” (March 1958) and of the notes for a televised interview (1960). Jean Dubuffet was born in Le Havre in 1901, and it is there that it will pass the major part of his youth. It will make there also its first weapons of painter while entering in 1916 at the School of the Art schools of the city. Two years later it will leave Le Havre for Paris where it will attend in particular the Julian institute. Many open of Dubuffet uses the techniques of joining. They use mixed techniques of oil-base paint thickened with materials as sand, the tar and the straw, giving to its parts an exceptionally texturized surface and a rough consistency. Dubuffet works with a great freedom of the techniques and materials among most absurd. Because for him, it is the material which clearly conditions the effect produced by surface. “Art must be born from material and the tool.” Also it composes of strange landscapes of its invention (Matériologies and Texturologies, 1957-1960), celebrating the ground by strewing its fabrics with tar, of rust, triturating sand, the remains of sponges, sticking wings of butterflies or isorel on matched or ruffled papers, boards or fabrics painted with oil. It paints graffiti incised with force in the thickness of an abstract part, seeking its inspiration in the matter without nobility, being renewed constantly.