Dubuffet, Jean (redirected from Jean Dubuffet)

Dubuffet, Jean (zhäN dübüfā`), 1901–85, French painter and sculptor. Dubuffet began his artistic career in 1942. He created primitive, childlike, and humorous effects savagely opposed to established taste. For many works he prepared a thick impasto of materials such as asphalt, pebbles, and glass to enrich the surface texture of his paintings. Among his later works are numerous large, white, crudely representational sculptures with heavily outlined colored edges and facets. The Museum of Modern Art, New York City, has his Cow with the Subtile Nose and Beard of Uncertain Returns.

Bibliography

See studies by P. Selz (1962) and M. Loreau (tr. 1973).

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Dubuffet, Jean (-Philippe-Arthur)

(born , July 31, 1901, Le Havre, Fr.—died May 12, 1985, Paris) French painter, sculptor, and printmaker. He studied painting in Paris, but in 1929 he began making a living as a wine merchant. When he returned to art full-time in the early 1940s, he became a leading artist in Paris and proponent of art brut. He executed crude images incised into rough impasto surfaces made of materials such as sand, plaster, tar, gravel, and ashes bound with varnish and glue, and sculptural works made of junk materials; their unfinished appearance provoked public outrage. In the 1960s he experimented with musical composition and architectural environments, and in his later years he produced large fibreglass sculptures for public spaces.