“I’m convinced the world is ruled by strange systems about which we have not the slightest inkling,” said Jean Dubuffet, a postwar French artist whose career took some unexpected twists and turns.
He graduated from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris at seventeen, but stopped painting six years later when he began to question the value of “highbrow culture.” For years, he quietly managed his family’s wine business, then joined the French Army when World War II broke out.
After completing his military service, Dubuffet, now in his early 40s, resolved to invent a new style of art. He would call it Art Brut (Raw Art).
After World War II, he had the same feeling a lot of his European compatriots had. They couldn’t just continue doing what they were doing. The old techniques hadn’t worked….not in politics or in art.
Harry Cooper, Curator of Modern Art, National Gallery of Art, 2016
When Dubuffet returned to civilian life in Paris, necessities like bread, sugar, and cooking oil were still being rationed. So was coffee, an integral part of the city’s social fabric.
Surrounded by postwar devastation
Art supply stores were virtually non-existent, forcing him to completely rethink his materials and his process. He started by mixing paint with whatever he could scrounge up: sand, string, tar, gravel, shards of glass.
His paint became so thick, it was like paste. He laid his canvases flat on a table so he could trowel the stuff on. Then he scored through it with all kinds of implements—spoons, sticks, palette knives. Let’s just say this was not the time for sable-hair brushes.
David Gariff, Senior Lecturer, National Gallery of Art, 2018
What is the subject of the artist’s remarkable mess-of-a-canvas titled The Extravagant One? Is a figure emerging from a war-torn landscape? Is this what postwar daily life feels like?
“Art should make you laugh a little and fear a little,” said Dubuffet. And that’s the closest he gets to a straight answer.
For Dubuffet, back-to-back world wars made academic painting seem at best polite and at worst irrelevant.
He drew inspiration instead from the imaginative works of Paul Klee, which were childlike yet meticulously structured. He was also attracted to people who were “unscathed” by the weight of art history: psychiatric patients, the marginalized, and the very young.
The city comes alive
In his painting Building Facades, smiling neighbors infuse a sense of joy into the postwar gloom. Retail shops on the ground floor are beginning to reopen.
The criticism Dubuffet heard most often was, “It looks like a child painted it.” And his reply was, “So what?”
To create this picture, he used a scratch-art technique many of us tried in grade school. He layered multiple colors onto the canvas, coated them in coffee-brown paint, and then scratched through the top layer with a palette knife to evoke the graffiti on blackened city walls.
It’s easy to say a child could do that, unless you’ve actually picked up a paintbrush and tried to do it. It’s really, really hard to access that freedom….to step outside the academic tradition.
Novelist and children’s author Mark Haddon, the Tate Modern interview, 2009
Life reimagined
Dubuffet’s interest in raw materials expanded from tar and gravel to the natural world when his book publisher, Pierre Bettencourt, embarked on a brief obsession with butterfly collecting.
In the collage Paysage aux argus, a sea of butterflies becomes a symbol of rebirth. “I wanted the different elements to meld into everything around them like a continuous, universal soup with an intense flavour of life,” said the artist.
The natural color of butterfly wings is subtle, so he added watercolor to enhance their luster. Some critics found this collage haunting despite its beauty: “I feel like I’m looking into the depths of a grave.”
Finding solace in enclosed spaces
The postwar economic surge of the 1950s and 60s inspired Dubuffet’s cityscapes, which he dubbed “my Paris Circus.”
In Caught in the Act, he replaced the usual horizontal view dictated by the laws of linear perspective with an almost archaeological view of shops, streets, and pathways—all compressed into cell-like units.
Cartoon-like figures navigate a surprisingly claustrophobic Paris where they encounter witty graffiti warnings about the city’s dark underbelly—words like scoundrel, pickpocket, black market bank. This visual jigsaw creates a jarringly tight environment.
I am fond of enclosed spaces. When it comes to the view out an open window, I like it to possess boundaries. I am not so keen on panoramas or on views that dissolve into the distance.
Jean Dubuffet, “Bâtons Rompus,” published posthumously in 1986
During the war, Dubuffet was assigned to the army’s meteorological division and stationed atop the Eiffel Tower. From this perch, he watched people weaving through the maze of streets below. Did this bird’s-eye view inspire the Paris Circus series?
A beautiful mess
Later in life, Dubuffet returned to the collage technique. But this time he used magnets to attach pre-painted pieces of canvas to metal sheets hanging in his studio. This allowed him to easily rearrange the fragments until he was happy with the layout.
(R) Jean-Michel Basquiat, Philistines (1982) • Private Collection
Is his collage Mêle Moments just a bunch of squiggles? Or is this what our memories become over time—bits and pieces of life remembered vaguely and in no particular order?
The composition was inspired by The Art of Memory by historian Frances Yates. In her book, Yates analyzed the mnemonic devices used by Cicero and other ancient orators to mentally store vast amounts of information.
If you watched the popular BBC series Sherlock, the famous detective used this exact technique.
The legacy of Art Brut
Art Brut inspired a number of 20th-century painting styles, including Visionary Art, Graffiti Art, and Neo-Expressionism. Anybody looking at MĂŞle Moments will immediately see Dubuffet’s influence on Jean-Michel Basquiat, the Black American artist whose expressive lines and bold colors critique power structures and racism.
At its core, Dubuffet’s view is that art is most powerful when it “forgets its own name.”
It’s true that my methods are totally aloof from the expertise generally found in professional art. No one need undergo special studies or have in-born gifts to do things like them.
But I would argue that such studies and gifts tend to suppress all spontaneity and cut all communion. The most gracious way to talk, after all, is to use the simplest words.
Jean Dubuffet, The New York Sun, 1947
Postscript: If you happen to be near Paris…
See more of Jean Dubuffet’s work at the Fondation Dubuffet, a private mansion in the 6th arrondissement of Paris.