Jean Dubuffet was a French painter and sculptor. Born in 1901 in the Havre, he studied at the Académie Julian with his contemporaries Suzanne Valadon, Fernand Léger, and Raoul Dufy in 1918 but left after only six months.
He returned to art full-time at the start of the 1940s. Matière et Mémoire is his first collection of lithographs and shows him experimenting with different textures in a series of 27 plates executed in 1944.
It was Dubuffet who founded the Compagnie de l’Art Brut with artists such as Slavko Kopek and André Breton amongst others and it was Dubuffet who was the founder of the art movement Brutalism. He was fascinated by the art made by children and he incorporated this in his own work. Dubuffet exhibited at the galerie Drouin with his first major work Les Gardes du Corps, which subsequently enabled him to exhibit in New York. Dubuffet’s work includes painting, collage, and sculpture. One of his emblematic works Coucou Bazar was presented for the first time at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1973.
In May 2019, an exhibition of Dubuffet’s works was held in Venice at the magnificent Palazzo Franchetti, curated by Sophie Webel and Frédéric Jaeger. Works such as Texturologies or Materiologies, with their tragic undertones, were exhibited in this space. To accompany them were the works from the Hourloupe cycle, which offer the artist’s personal vision of the world and the Mires that brings in a sentiment of freedom.
Dubuffet had exhibited in Venice before when he was chosen to be the official French representative at the 1984 Biennale where he presented 34 new paintings.
The artist made many donations of his work, giving 21 paintings, 7 sculptures and 132 drawings from his personal collection to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.
Dubuffet died in Paris in 1985 and the Jean Dubuffet foundation, created in 1973, continues to showcase his work.