The Art Brut Man

I booked myself a ticket to the Jean Dubuffet exhibition at the Barbican for the day after museums and galleries opened up again. It felt good to be in a dark, quiet space and to be able to look at art - in real life. As soon as I saw this smoking lady I knew I was going to like it. Dubuffet was a French artist and sculptor who, as a teenager studied painting at Académie Julian in Paris only to quit after six months, ‘believing that traditional easel painting was a sterile language unable to articulate the texture of real life’. He was greatly inspired by the work of those ‘untouched by artistic culture’ and self-taught artists in psychiatric hospitals in Switzerland and France.

Dubuffet was born into a wine merchant family and after having sold the business off when he was 41 he could dedicate himself full time to art. He also started the Art Brut movement, collecting thousands of artefacts by outsider artists, some of which were included in the exhibition, which is a separate blog post of itself.

This portrait was one of many that he made of the guests who’d attend a weekly literary salon of a wealthy American lady in Paris. He would look at the attendants carefully for hours and then go back to the studio and only work from memory. I’d love a portrait of myself in this style, wouldn’t you (ha, or maybe you wouldn't)?

In the early 1950’s he spent some time in Algeria and began creating landscapes of the Saharan desert. Some of his work reminds a me a lot of phone doodles (do you still do them? I hardly ever do them anymore; I think they happened more when we only had landlines and had loooong phone conversations. Not really 21st century, what with FaceTime and Zoom and everything) - you’ll see what I mean further down in this post.

He wasn’t afraid of using unusual materials in his work, and in this collage series he used butterfly and moth wings. He found the colours of them too subtle and added watercolour to them to make them more lustrous.

Dubuffet experimented with all sorts of materials, and would deliberately mess with them to get different effects. This painting was amazing close up.

Who makes a sculpture out of the remnants of a burnt car? Dubuffet.

Who makes a sculpture out of tin foil? Dubuffet.

But he didn’t stop there. Inspired by Jackson Pollock and looking really closely at rocks, he made large drip paintings that replicated rock surfaces, which in turn, more than a half a century later, made a certain blogger think “Hmm, I should really start looking closely at rocks again, because rocks are crazy amazing.”

Took a step back to show the whole painting.

I loved this painting, which I’ve cropped here to show his cars, which I thought were so cool. I love how seeing art like this reminds me that art doesn’t have to be ‘classic’ at all.

So, back to phone doodles. This period of Dubuffets work from the 60’s and 70’s was actually based on a phone doodle he made using one of those four-colour ballpoint pens (he skipped using green), that were all the rage many moons ago. He found the doodle fascinating and developed it further into paintings…

… and walk-through installations and architectural environments, with people wearing costumes designed by him walking around inside them. He called it Coucou Bazar, made some music to go with it, and it looked a lot like this.

I really liked these posters from that era from different galleries. I think my fave is the Pace Gallery one (middle, first row).

From Coucou Bazar he progressed to just black and white work.

I wouldn’t mind a couple of these in our house.

Quick! The gallery attendant looks really cool silhouetted like that. Click.

He painted his last series of paintings in his early 80’s, in the 1980’s, and two young artists seeing his work in a gallery in New York became hugely inspired by him: Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. You can see it, can’t you? I’m so glad this exhibition opened, as I’d never heard of Jean Dubuffet before, which is ridiculous, seeing as I went to see an Art Brut exhibition in Paris two years ago. You live and you learn my friends, you live and you learn.