Жан Филипп Артур Дюбюффе: Француз суретшісі мен мүсіншісі

French painter and sculptor

Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet (31 July 1901 – 12 May 1985) was a French painter and sculptor of the Ecole de Paris (School of Paris). His idealistic approach to aesthetics embraced so called "low art" and eschewed traditional standards of beauty in favor of what he believed to be a more authentic and humanistic approach to image making. He is perhaps best known for founding the art movement art brut, and for the collection of works—Collection de l'art brut—that this movement spawned. Dubuffet enjoyed a prolific art career, both in France and in America, and was featured in many exhibitions throughout his lifetime.

Dubuffet was born in Le Havre to a family of wholesale wine merchants who were part of the wealthy bourgeoisie. His childhood friends included the writers Raymond Queneau and Georges Limbour. He moved to Paris in 1918 to study painting at the Académie Julian, becoming close friends with the artists Juan Gris, André Masson, and Fernand Léger. Six months later, upon finding academic training to be distasteful, he left the Académie to study independently. During this time, Dubuffet developed many other interests, including free noise music, poetry, and the study of ancient and modern languages. His first solo show came in October 1944, at the Galerie Rene Drouin in Paris. This marked Dubuffet's third attempt to become an established artist. Due to his participation in a steady stream of art exhibitions within his first few years in New York, Dubuffet became a constant presence in the American art world. Dubuffet's association with the School of Paris provided him with a unique vehicle to reach American audiences, even though he dissociated himself from most of the ideals of the school, and reacted very strongly against the 'great traditions of painting.' Americans were intrigued by Dubuffet's simultaneous roots in the established French vanguard and his work, which was such a strong reaction against his background. Many painters of the New York school at this time were also trying to seek status within the avant garde tradition, and drew influence from Dubuffet's work. His reception in America was very closely linked to and dependent upon the New York art world's desire to create its own avant garde environment. Specific examples of American artists interested in Dubuffet’s art were Alfonso Ossorio and Joseph Glasco. At the end of 1949, while Pierre Matisse was preparing Dubuffet’s January 1950 show, Alfonso Ossorio had traveled to Paris to meet Dubuffet and buy some of his paintings. Then in 1950, at Ossorio’s urging, his young friend Joseph Glasco left New York for Paris to meet Dubuffet. Glasco credited this encounter as having had an influence on his own art, and Dubuffet frequently asked about “Pollock and Glasco” in his letters to Ossorio. This association was dedicated to the discovery, documentation and exhibition of art brut. Dubuffet later amassed his own collection of such art, including artists Aloïse Corbaz and Adolf Wölfli. This collection is now housed at the Collection de l'art brut in Lausanne, Switzerland. His art brut collection is often referred to as a "museum without walls", as it transcended national and ethnic boundaries, and effectively broke down barriers between nationalities and cultures. Influenced by Hans Prinzhorn's book Artistry of the Mentally Ill, Dubuffet coined the term art brut (meaning "raw art", often referred to as 'outsider art') for art produced by non professionals working outside aesthetic norms, such as art by psychiatric patients, prisoners, and children. Dubuffet felt that the simple life of the everyday human being contained more art and poetry than did academic art, or great painting. He found the latter 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 sought to create an art as free from intellectual concerns as Art Brut, and as a result, his work often appears primitive and childlike. His form is often compared to wall scratchings and children's art. Nonetheless, Dubuffet appeared to be quite erudite when it came to writing about his own work. According to prominent art critic Hilton Kramer, "There is only one thing wrong with the essays Dubuffet has written on his own work: their dazzling intellectual finesse makes nonsense of his claim to a free and untutored primitivism. They show us a mandarin literary personality, full of chic phrases and up to date ideas, that is quite the opposite of the naive visionary."

Dubuffet's art primarily features the resourceful exploitation of unorthodox materials. Many of Dubuffet's works are painted in oil paint using an impasto thickened by materials such as sand, tar and straw, giving the work an unusually textured surface. Dubuffet was the first artist to use this type of thickened paste, called bitumen. Additionally, in his earlier paintings, Dubuffet dismissed the concept of perspective in favor of a more direct, two dimensional presentation of space. Instead, Dubuffet created the illusion of perspective by crudely overlapping objects within the picture plane. This method most directly contributed to the cramped effect of his works. From 1962 he produced a series of works in which he limited himself to the colours red, white, black, and blue. Towards the end of the 1960s he turned increasingly to sculpture, producing works in polystyrene which he then painted with vinyl paint. Dubuffet has influenced Linda Naeff.

In late 1960–1961, Dubuffet began experimenting with music and sound and made several recordings with the Danish painter Asger Jorn, a founding member of the avant garde movement COBRA. The same period he started making sculpture, but in a very not sculptural way. As his medium he preferred to use the ordinary materials as papier mâché and for all the light medium polystyrene, in which he could model very fast and switch easily from one work to another, as sketches on paper. At the end of the 1960s he started to create his large sculpture habitations, such as 'Tour aux figures', 'Jardin d'Hiver' and 'Villa Falbala' in which people can wander, stay, and contemplate. In 1969 ensued an acquaintance between him and the French Outsider Art artist Jacques Soisson. In 1974 Dubuffet created Jardin d'émail: a very large outdoor painted sculpture designed for the Kröller Müller Museum. In 1978 Dubuffet collaborated with American composer and musician Jasun Martz to create the record album artwork for Martz's avant garde symphony entitled The Pillory. The much written about drawing has been reproduced internationally in three different editions on tens of thousands of record albums and compact discs. A detail of the drawing is also featured on Martz's second symphony (2005), The Pillory/The Battle, performed by The Intercontinental Philharmonic Orchestra and Royal Choir.

Dubuffet died from emphysema in Paris on 12 May 1985.

In June 2019, Christie's set an auction record when the artist's work Cérémonie (Ceremony) sold for $11.1 million. In April 2021, Jean Dubuffet's La féconde journée (1976), was auctioned for £3.6 million in a contemporary art auction in London.