Van Gogh • Artist Biographies • Jean Dubuffet

Jean Dubuffet

Theatre de Memoire, 1977 Jean Dubuffet Buy From Art.com

Jean Dubuffet was born in Le Havre. He studied painting briefly at the Académie Julian in Paris in 1918. He had tried to divide his career between business, music, and painting, but resolved, at last, to become an artist. His first one-man show was in 1945. He was the major artist to emerge in France after the Second World War. While he shared the Surrealists' interest in illustrating the psyche, his style was more brutally primitive in contrast to the more refined canvases of the Surrealists in the 1920's and 1930's. He included sand and gravel in his paint to make gritty and highly textured surfaces. His drawing style had the clumsy naiveté of children's drawings. Thus, he hoped to uncover a primitive force unhampered by the somewhat ossified traditions of the School of Paris. Starting in the 1960's, his work became increasingly nonrepresentational, and turned, rather, toward boldly colored abstract forms that suggest organic growth.