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Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985)

Jean Dubuffet was born July 31, 1901, in Le Havre, France, the son of a wealthy wine merchant. He attended art classes in his youth and in 1918 moved to Paris to study at the Académie Julian, which he left after six months. During this time, Dubuffet met Raoul Dufy, Max Jacob, Fernand Léger, and Suzanne Valadon and became fascinated with Hans Prinzhorn's book on psychopathic art. He traveled to Italy in 1923 and South America in 1924. Then, Dubuffet gave up painting for about ten years, working as an industrial draftsman and later in the family wine business. He committed himself to becoming an artist in 1942.

Dubuffet's first solo exhibition was held at the Galerie René Drouin, Paris, in 1944. During the 1940s, he associated with André Breton, Georges Limbour, Jean Paulhan, and Charles Ratton and his work was heavily influenced by Paul Klee. Fascinated by the art of children and the insane, for which he coined the term Art Brut ("raw art"), he emulated its crude, violent energy in his own work. He was an experimental artist in the way he found new ways of applying materials to his artwork. For example, he used sand or plaster in his paintings and incorporated items discarded on the street into his sculptures.

From 1951 to 1952, Dubuffet lived in New York. He then returned to Paris, where a retrospective of his work took place at the Cercle Volney in 1954. His first museum retrospective occurred in 1957 at the Schloss Morsbroich, Leverkusen. Dubuffet exhibitions were subsequently held at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, in 1960-61; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago in 1962; Palazzo Grassi, Venice, in 1964; the Tate Gallery, London, and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in 1966; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1966-67. In 1981, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum observed the artist's 80th birthday with an exhibition. Dubuffet died May 12, 1985, in Paris.

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