Dubuffet, Jean Philippe Arthur

Dubuffet, Jean Philippe Arthur (1901-1985), French avant-garde painter, born in Le Havre. Dubuffet took over his father's wine business in 1925, and withdrew from the art world. He stayed in the wine business until 1942, when he returned to painting, having developed a distinctive style of simple, primitive images in a heavily encrusted canvas. When his paintings were exhibited in Paris in 1944, critics described his style as art brut (“raw art”) because of its crude and often violent quality; much of it was based on his study of art created by children and by the insane. The style helped Dubuffet gain a worldwide reputation. Many of his works are assemblages (combining found objects and other elements into a three-dimensional integrated whole), as for example Door with Couch-Grass (1957, Guggenheim Museum, New York), which is composed chiefly of fragments of paintings, grass, and pebbles. During the early 1960s, Dubuffet produced a series of deft, jigsawlike paintings, such as Nunc Stans (1965, Guggenheim Museum), in which tiny, obscure, closely spaced figures and faces dominate. His later work consists of large painted polyester resin sculptures. In all of his work the violence is tempered with elements of vitality and broad humour.