“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 a few unexpected twists and turns.
At the age of seventeen he graduated from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, but stopped painting six years later when he began to question the value of “highbrow culture.” He worked in the family wine business for years, 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 pretty much gone so he was forced to 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 remarkable mess-of-a-canvas 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.
Dubuffet felt that back-to-back world wars made Academic painting seem at best polite and at worst irrelevant. He instead drew inspiration from the childlike yet intricately organized paintings of Paul Klee.
He was also influenced by people who were “unscathed” by art history: psychiatric patients, the marginalized, and children.
The pulse of street art
In his painting Building Facades, smiling neighbors inject some 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 the picture, he used a technique many of us tried in grade school. First, he applied a variety of colors to the canvas. Then he covered them with a solid layer of coffee-colored paint. Finally, he scratched through the top layer with a palette knife and other tools to create an image that evokes 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 enthusiasm for merging paint with elements of the real world became even more pronounced when his book publisher, Pierre Bettencourt, took up 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,” explained the artist.
The natural color of butterfly wings is surprisingly subtle, so he added watercolor to enhance their luster. Despite their beauty, some critics found the collage haunting. One even remarked, “I feel like I’m looking into the depths of a grave.”
Finding solace in cozy spaces
The postwar economic surge of the 1950s and 60s inspired a series of cityscapes Dubuffet dubbed “my Paris circus.”
In Caught in the Act, he replaces the usual horizontal view dictated by the laws of linear perspective with a surprisingly archaeological view of shops, streets, and pathways—all arranged in cell-like units.
Cartoon-like characters navigate a claustrophobic Paris, where they encounter witty warnings about the city’s dark underbelly: pickpocket, scoundrel, and black market bank. This is a jarringly tight space.
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 posted to the top of the Eiffel Tower. From this perch, he surveyed figures making their way through the maze of streets below. I have to wonder: Did this bird’s-eye view serve as a blueprint for the Paris Circus series?
Beautifully messy
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 move pieces around until he was happy with the layout.
(R) Jean-Michel Basquiat, Philistines (1982) • Private Collection
Is 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 collage was inspired by The Art of Memory by historian Frances Yates. In her book, Yates analyzes 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 great detective also used this approach.
The legacy of Art Brut
Art Brut inspired a number of 20th-century painting styles, including Visionary Art, Graffiti Art, and Outsider Art. Nobody looking at MĂŞle Moments will fail to 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 philosophy was that art’s greatest moments are 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 in Paris…
Explore more of Jean Dubuffet’s work at the Fondation Dubuffet, a private mansion in the 6th arrondissement of Paris.