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We know Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) as a representative of the French ‘art brut’-movement. Dubuffet himself coined the term ‘art brut’ for art created by non-professionals working outside conventional aesthetic norms, such as psychiatric patients, prisoners, and children. Essentially the same sources of inspiration as the painters of the Cobra movement used.
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Jean Dubuffet, Campagne heureuse, 1944
Oil on canvas, 130.5 x 89 cm
Collection Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
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Man in the street
Dubuffet dissociated himself from the academic art, from ‘great painting’. He regarded academic art to be isolating, mundane and pretentious, and wrote in his ‘Prospectus aux amateurs de tout genre’ that his aim was ‘not the mere gratification of a handful of specialists, but rather the man in the street when he comes home from work. [...] It is the man in the street whom I feel closest to, with whom I want to make friends and enter into confidence. And he is the one I want to please and enchant by means of my work.’ To that end, Dubuffet began to search for an art form in which everyone could participate and by which everyone could be entertained.
He wanted to create an art, totally free from intellectual concerns. As a result, his work often appears primitive and childlike. It is often compared to wall scratchings and children’s art.
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Jean Dubuffet, Mur au moustachu, 1945
Lithograph, 38 × 28.5 cm
Collection Olla Art
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Dubuffet and Cobra
In the work of Cobra artists such as Jorn, Appel, Alechinsky and Lucebert, the influence of Dubuffet and his ‘art brut’ is clearly visible. Around 1947 members of the Cobra group became acquainted with Dubuffet’s work in Paris, and there was certainly personal contact between Dubuffet and a number of Cobra painters. They did not hide their admiration for Dubuffet’s work. Pierre Alechinsky, for example, indicated in a conversation with Cobra expert Willemijn Stokvis that he had been strongly influenced by Dubuffet. Asger Jorn and Anton Rooskens also indicated that they were ‘deeply impressed’ by his work.
Lucebert is also known to have greatly admired Dubuffet. In terms of art, they had in common their critical attitude towards ‘high art’. Dubuffet’s influence on Lucebert is particularly visible in the drawings and paintings he made in the early 1960s.
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Lucebert, Little man with moon,1960
Ink on paper, 26.9 x 20.9 cm
Collection Olla Art
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Dubuffet and the Cobra group shared their interest in children’s drawing and the work of the mentally disturbed and primitives. Moreover, they shared their ambition to make art for the man in the street and not for a cultural elite. Dubuffet, however, did not accept invitations to participate in Cobra.
Sources of inspiration
The interest in children’s drawings, the work of the mentally disturbed and primitives, which Dubuffet and the Cobra members shared, was, by the way, not new. Paul Klee in particular was already involved with children’s drawings much earlier. And the Danish representatives within Cobra, with Asger Jorn and Carl-Henning Pedersen as the most important exponents, have been involved with these kinds of sources of inspiration since the late 1930s. Jorn did extensive research into the art of the mentally disturbed. It is known that Jorn actually visited institutions for the mentally disturbed.
Asger Jorn met Dubuffet only in the late 1950s, collaborated in the curation of his art brut collection (which was later housed in the Art Brut museum in Lausanne) and, together with Dubuffet, performed sound and music experiments, in which they played various musical instruments.
Jorn collected graphic work by Dubuffet, which he later donated to the museum in Silkeborg, dedicated to himself.
Hourloupe
In the early 1960s, a new style element emerges in Dubuffet’s work, which he himself called the ‘hourloupe’. This style element arose from the doodles he drew while on the telephone. He was inspired by the flowing lines that demarcate surfaces and suggest movement. For his hourloupe-style works, Dubuffet mainly used the colours blue and red, in addition to black and white.
Dubuffet believed that the hourloupe style reflected how images arise in the mind – a physical representation of a mental process. In 1972 he stated: ‘With my works in the hourloupe style, I try to create an alternative reality, a parallel world.’
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Jean Dubuffet, Festival d’Automne à Paris, 1973
Lithograph, 69 x 52.5 cm
Collection Olla Art
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Festival d’Automne
The hourloupe style is clearly recognizable in the lithograph made by Dubuffet on the occasion of the second edition of the Festival d'Automne, held from September 28 to December 20, 1973 in the Grand Palais in Paris.
The 1973 festival featured a retrospective of Dubuffet’s work and a ‘spectacle’ by Dubuffet, entitled Coucou Bazar.
The retrospective had already run at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, from April to July 1973. The ‘spectacle’ was a choreographic animation in the form of a series of tableaux vivants, conceived by Jean Dubuffet and performed by the American theatre group Liquid Theatre. The tableaux vivants were accompanied by electronic music by Ilhan Miraroğlu and lighting effects by Bruce Bassman. Especially for Coucou Bazar, Dubuffet had created so-called ‘practicables’, paintings on wheels.
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Jean Dubuffet, Jardin d’émail, 1973
Painted reinforced concrete plus glass fiber reinforced epoxy resin, approx. 600 m2
Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo (Netherlands)
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Edifices
Dubuffet worked in the hourloupe style from 1962 to the middle of the seventies. Around 1966 he switched from canvases to three-dimensional versions in this style. He did this to give his work more scope. Later he called them monumental paintings.
In 1967 he started his architectural projects, which he called ‘édifices’ and which initially were designed as a scale model. A large-scale realization of one of these models can be found in the garden of the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo (the Netherlands) – the recently restored Jardin d’émail.
The last years
From the mid-seventies, Dubuffet somewhat lets go of the strict style procedure of the hourloupe. He starts to work more freely, sometimes more sketchy. The tight contours of the hourloupe are no longer always present. Dubuffet’s colour spectrum widens. The canvases and sheets are generally fully drawn and often contain different ‘encapsulated’ figures. Yet the hourloupe remains visible until his last work.
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Jean Dubuffet, Site avec 5 personnages, 1982
Lithograph and silkscreen, 67 x 50 cm
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Dubuffet dies in Paris on May 12, 1985, from the effects of lung emphysema. He is 83 years old then.
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