Jean Dubuffet – Site Avec 5 Personnages

Description

Jean Dubuffet, Site Avec 5 Personnages is an original lithograph, serigraph on Rives paper.  This print is initialed and dated in the lower right, and numbered from the edition of 90 in the lower left.  Image size is 26 x 20 inches. Webel 1267.

Jean Dubuffet, Site Avec 5 Personnages

Jean Dubuffet’s work is marked by a rebellious attitude toward prevailing notions of high culture, beauty, and good taste. He began making art in earnest at age 41, after a stint in the army and a successful career as a wine merchant.

The next four decades were tremendously prolific: he wrote poetry and theoretical texts, played jazz, experimented widely with art-making materials and techniques, and worked in many mediums, including painting, drawing, printmaking, large-scale outdoor sculpture, and what he called “animated painting”—works bridging painting, sculpture, dance, and theater, and featuring live performers.

Jean Dubuffet, Site Avec 5 Personnages

Though he was an academically trained painter from a bourgeois family, Dubuffet maintained what he called in a 1951 lecture an “anticultural position.” He advocated for “instinct, passion, mood, violence, madness” rather than analysis and reason, as well as closer proximity to nature and natural forms and the discarding of traditional notions of beauty. “Look at what lies at your feet!” he once said. “

A crack in the ground, sparkling gravel, a tuft of grass, some crushed debris offer equally worthy subjects for your applause and admiration.” Such values were embodied in what Dubuffet termed art brut (or “raw art”), produced on the margins by children, outsider and folk artists, and the mentally ill.

His own collection of this work, formed in part with the help of the Surrealist Andre Breton and writer Jean Paulhan, was donated to the city of Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1971.

Jean Dubuffet, Site Avec 5 Personnages