Jean Dubuffet: The Complete Story
Jean Dubuffet was the wine merchant who declared war on good taste. Born in Le Havre in 1901, he only committed to painting at 41, invented the idea of Art Brut in 1945, and filled the last decades of the century with red, white and blue labyrinths.
He sold wine until the middle of the war, then spent forty years arguing that culture was the enemy of art. Here is how the argument went.
Jean Dubuffet at a glance:
1901: born in Le Havre to a family of wholesale wine merchants.
1942: quits the wine trade for good at 41 and paints full time, after two earlier attempts had failed.
1945: coins the term Art Brut while hunting for works by psychiatric patients in Swiss hospitals.
1962: a ballpoint doodle made during a phone call launches the Hourloupe, a cycle that swallowed twelve years of his life.
1976: the Collection de l'Art Brut opens in Lausanne, founded on more than 4,000 works he donated.
The merchant who kept quitting
Dubuffet tried painting in his twenties, quit, ran the family wine business, quit again, and only in 1942, in occupied Paris, decided for good. The late start became his weapon: he came to art as an outsider with a businessman's nerve, and his first shows in 1944 and 1946, thick crusts of tar, sand and gravel scratched with graffiti figures, scandalised a Paris that had seen everything.
Art Brut, 1945
Touring Swiss psychiatric hospitals in 1945, he found the work of patients, prisoners and mediums, and coined a name for it: Art Brut, raw art, made outside culture entirely.
He collected it for decades, and gave the collection to Lausanne, where the Collection de l'Art Brut opened in 1976. It is his most influential creation: the whole modern field of outsider art descends from that naming.
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The myth: a charlatan who painted badly on purpose
Dubuffet's crude figures made him the century's favourite target for the my child could do that argument.
The record ruins the joke: he was a trained, fluent draughtsman and a brilliant writer whose lectures, like Asphyxiating Culture in 1968, argue the case with lawyerly precision.
The crudeness was a decision about honesty, renewed every morning for forty years by a man who could do otherwise.
The Hourloupe, born from a doodle
In 1962, doodling with a ballpoint during a phone call, he found the style of his last twenty years: interlocking cells in red, white and blue with black outlines, a world he called l'Hourloupe. It grew from drawings into paintings, then sculptures, then buildings you can walk into: the Groupe de quatre arbres raised at Chase Manhattan Plaza in New York in 1972, and the Closerie Falbala outside Paris, a walk in painting the size of a village square, finished in 1973.
Where to see Dubuffet
The Fondation Dubuffet keeps his houses in Paris and at Perigny-sur-Yerres, where the Closerie Falbala stands. Lausanne holds the Art Brut collection; MoMA and the Pompidou hold the paintings. He died in Paris in 1985, at 83, working to the end.
Tar, sand and butterfly wings
Dubuffet thickened his paint with sand, gravel, tar, coal dust and straw until the surface fought back. He called these mixtures hautes pâtes, high pastes.
At his 1946 show Mirobolus, Macadam et Cie, visitors saw mud and graffiti and said so loudly. One painting was slashed; the gallery kept selling.
In the 1950s he pressed actual butterfly wings into small assemblages. His portraits of writer friends look like scraped, scratched walls, and he claimed they held more of a person than any flattering likeness.
Coucou Bazar, the painting you could walk into
In 1973 the Guggenheim in New York staged Coucou Bazar, an animated tableau in which performers wearing Hourloupe costumes moved among painted cutouts.
They moved so slowly that visitors mistook them for scenery, then flinched when a wall took a step. Dubuffet insisted the whole thing was one painting, not a show.
He was 71 when it opened. Coucou Bazar was restaged in Paris that same year, and again decades after his death, with the original costumes by then too fragile to wear.
The war with Renault
In 1973 Renault commissioned a monumental Hourloupe environment, the Salon d'été, for its headquarters outside Paris. Dubuffet started building.
New management halted the half-built work in 1975 and wanted it gone. Dubuffet, then 74, took the car company to court.
He fought for eight years and won the principle in 1983: a commissioned work is not the owner's to destroy on a whim. The salon itself was never completed, but French moral rights for artists came out harder than before.
The Jean Dubuffet questions that keep coming up
What is he known for? Inventing Art Brut and the red, white and blue Hourloupe cycle of his last decades.
What does Art Brut mean? Raw art: work made outside culture, by patients, prisoners and the self taught.
Did he really start at 41? He committed for good in 1942, after twice abandoning art for the wine trade.
Where can I see the Hourloupe? The Closerie Falbala near Paris, and Group of Four Trees in downtown New York.
Did Dubuffet have any training? Six months at the Académie Julian in Paris at 17, then he quit and taught himself. He spent most of the next two decades selling wine instead.
What is the Group of Four Trees? A 12-meter Hourloupe sculpture installed in 1972 on Chase Manhattan Plaza in New York, commissioned by David Rockefeller. It is still one of the most walked-past artworks in Manhattan.
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The wine merchant's finest vintage
The man who called culture asphyxiating ended up donating an entire museum's worth of anti-museum art: when the Collection de l'Art Brut opened in Lausanne in 1976, its founding gift was more than 4,000 works Dubuffet had gathered. The wine merchant's finest vintage was other people's art.