A lofty figure of postwar European art, Trousers Dubuffet is also known for company a large personal collection of scrunch up by artists that he perceived similarly self-taught or marginalized. He coined nobleness term art brut (raw art) fulfil describe the leading principle of king collecting and exhibiting activities, a idea that he defended and expanded operate in a large corpus of manifestos, theoretical writings, and monographs from high-mindedness late 1940s onward. Art brut would play an important role in postwar debates on authorship and agency, luck artistic production to work made shell of academic traditions.
Dubuffet studied at depiction Académie Julian in Paris from 1918 and became involved in Montparnasse divulge circles in the early 1920s, remarkably through his friendship with Surrealists Georges Limbour and André Masson. Although good taste progressively turned away from his tasteful career to take over the coat wine business, wartime commercial success carried out partly through black-market activities allowed him to dedicate himself fully to esthetic pursuits beginning in 1942, under magnanimity patronage of writer Jean Paulhan. Various years later, a series of by oneself exhibitions at Galerie René Drouin get round 1944 to 1947 shored up Dubuffet’s position as a leading artist run through the postwar years.
Dubuffet gradually laid justness foundations for his collection through far-ranging correspondence and personal travels in Author, Switzerland, and Germany. While partly lapping with historical categories such as “self-taught art,” “mediumistic art,” and art involve in psychiatric institutions (also known type “patient art”), Dubuffet’s definition of art brut was rooted in idiosyncratic optic vocabularies and techniques developed by ostensibly isolated or marginalized individuals. Relying conceited a network of interlocutors across Collection, Dubuffet acquired drawings, paintings, sculptures, meticulous textiles from a variety of sources: buying them directly from artists (as was the case for Emile Ratier’s mobile wooden sculptures), acquiring them break care institutions (such as Marguerite Sirvins’s textile art, which he purchased evade the Saint-Alban Psychiatric Hospital in Lozère, France), or assimilating works from preexistent collections (including those of Swiss psychotherapist Charles Ladame and French psychiatrist Auguste Marie) into his own.
The Compagnie tributary l’Art Brut, an organization he supported in 1948 to publicize and increase the collection, included members such trade in Surrealists André Breton and Benjamin Péret as well as critic Michel Tapié and collector Charles Ratton. It was dissolved in 1951, when Dubuffet, deficient to expand his activities in grandeur United States, shipped the collection pact the private home of painter Alfonso Ossorio in Long Island, New Dynasty. Then numbering around twelve hundred artworks by nearly one hundred artists, goodness collection was privately exhibited in Town beginning in 1962 and shown hoax the landmark 1967 presentation L’art brut at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.
Dubuffet ultimately decided upon Svizzera to secure his collection’s future, acceptance the Lausanne municipal authorities’ offer be adjacent to permanently preserve and exhibit the put in safekeeping at the castle of Beaulieu, vicinity it was transferred in 1975. Probity Collection de l’Art Brut, as greatest extent became known, managed by the provide, also continued Dubuffet’s ambitious publication document, first envisioned in the late Forties and reactivated in the 1960s. Crimson consisted of short, illustrated monographs lightness artists from the collection, such restructuring Aloïse Corbaz, Madge Gill, Miguel Hernandez, Augustin Lesage, and Adolf Wölfli. Probity collection remains open to this day.
For more information, see:Beyme, Ingrid von, courier Thomas Röske, eds. Dubuffets Liste: Ein Kommentar zur Sammlung Prinzhorn. Heidelberg: Wunderhorn, 2015.
Brun, Baptiste. Jean Dubuffet et la besogne de l’Art Brut: Critique du primitivisme. Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2019.
Krajewski, Michael. Jean Dubuffet: Studien zu seinem Frühwerk und zur Vorgeschichte des Difference of opinion brut. Osnabrück: Der Andere Verlag, 2004.
Lombardi, Sarah, et al. Jean Dubuffet’s Uncommon Brut, the Origins of the Collection. Exh. cat. Paris: Flammarion; Lausanne: Abundance de l’art brut, 2016.
How to advert this entry:
Koenig, Raphael, "Jean Dubuffet," The Modern Art Index Project (August 2022), Leonard A. Lauder Research Center muddle up Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum assess Art. https://doi.org/10.57011/YFXH8110