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Jean Dubuffet citations
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Jean Dubuffet , est un peintre, sculpteur et plasticien français.

Il est le premier théoricien d'un style d'art auquel il a donné le nom d'« art brut », des productions de marginaux ou de malades mentaux : peintures, sculptures, calligraphies, dont il reconnaît s'être lui-même largement inspiré.

Le 20 octobre 1945, la première « exposition marquante » dans Paris libéré est celle de ses œuvres à la galerie René Drouin, alors qu'il n'est encore qu'un peintre inconnu, provoquant un véritable scandale. Il est aussi l’auteur de vigoureuses critiques de la culture dominante, notamment dans son essai, Asphyxiante culture , qui crée une polémique dans le monde de l'art. À l'occasion de la première exposition de sa collection d'art brut qu'il organise en 1949, il rédige un traité, L'Art brut préféré aux arts culturels.

Officiellement propulsé sur le devant de la scène artistique par une rétrospective de 400 peintures, gouaches, dessins, sculptures, qui a lieu au Musée des arts décoratifs de Paris du 16 décembre 1960 au 25 février 1961, l'artiste français le plus contesté et le plus admiré de l'après-guerre crée l'événement de ce début d'année. Il devient l'inspirateur de nombreux artistes, adeptes de « l'art autre », variante de l'art brut, parmi lesquels Antoni Tàpies, ainsi que des adeptes de la contestation artistique comme le groupe espagnol Equipo Crónica.

Son œuvre est composée de peintures, d'assemblages souvent qualifiés à tort de collages, de sculptures et de monuments dont les plus spectaculaires font partie d'un ensemble, L'Hourloupe , ainsi que des architectures : la closerie Falbala et la villa Falbala. Il a fait l'objet de rétrospectives au palais Grassi de Venise, au musée Solomon R. Guggenheim.

Sa collection personnelle, la Collection de l'art brut qui regroupait, depuis 1945, des artistes découverts dans les prisons, les asiles, des marginaux de toutes sortes, alors propriété de la Compagnie de l'art brut fondée en 1948, aurait dû rester à Paris. Mais les atermoiements de l'administration française ont poussé Dubuffet à accepter l'offre de la ville de Lausanne en Suisse, où la collection a été installée au château de Beaulieu et définitivement donnée.

Considéré comme peu amène, procédurier, atrabilaire, il se fâchait souvent avec son entourage. Avant la mort de Dubuffet, en 1985, Jean-Louis Prat a eu toutes les peines du monde à organiser la rétrospective de 150 tableaux de l'artiste, qui s'est finalement tenue du 6 juillet au 6 octobre à la fondation Maeght.

En revanche, il était généreux, comme en témoignent ses amis, Alexandre Vialatte, Alphonse Chave, Philippe Dereux, et les nombreuses donations qu'il a faites de son vivant, entre autres, un ensemble de 21 tableaux, 7 sculptures et 132 dessins au musée des arts décoratifs de Paris provenant de sa collection personnelle.

✵ 31. juillet 1901 – 12. mai 1985
Jean Dubuffet photo
Jean Dubuffet: 46   citations 0   J'aime

Jean Dubuffet: Citations en anglais

“Art should be born from the materials.”

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Jean Dubuffet

Source: posthumous, Jean Dubuffet, Works, writings Interviews, 2006, p. 68; in Notes pour les finslettrés

“I have observed that very often I gain access to a little secret that I have sought for a long time by way of a fortuitous encounter quite unrelated to the matter: for example six months I try to draw a camel in a way that satisfies me, and I make a thousand attempts without ever managing to do it. Then one day it is a drawing of a plump on the label of a pot of jam or the shadow thrown by an ink pot, or something or other equally unrelated to the matter that provides me with the solution. This kind of thing has happened so often that I have acquired the habit of always being on the outlook, and when I want to draw a camel I no longer limit myself, as I once did, to looking (only, fh) at camels..”

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Jean Dubuffet

Source: posthumous, Jean Dubuffet, Works, writings Interviews, 2006, p. 44; quote in Dubuffet's letter to Jean Paulhan (letter 123)

“[Dubuffet marvels at the desert as a chaotic palimpsest, filled with marks and signs].. like an immense notebook of disorganization, a notebook of improvisation.... an elementary school blackboard full of scribbles..”

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Jean Dubuffet

Quote of Dubuffet, in a letter to Jacques Berne mailed from Algeria, late 1940's; (Lettres à J.B., p. 35.); as cited in 'Dubuffet, Lévi-Strauss, and the Idea of Art Brut', Kent Minturn http://www.columbia.edu/cu/arthistory/faculty/Minturn/Dubuffet-Levi-Strauss.pdf, from RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 46, Polemical Objects (Autumn, 2004), pp. 247-258, p. 250
1940's

“The Occidental man is not so bad... Not bad at all, the brave Aryan [inhabitant of the Saraha]... I'm not unhappy to be living with him again.... one need not go outside of Europe in order to find truly "savage" individuals... These savage values to which I attribute more value than all others, appear to show themselves, in our worlds of Europe and America, more forcefully and tempestuously than in all other worlds..”

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Jean Dubuffet

Quotes in his letter to Jaque Berne, 29 April, 1949 (the day after his return to Paris); as cited in ; as cited in 'Dubuffet, Lévi-Strauss, and the Idea of Art Brut', Kent Minturn http://www.columbia.edu/cu/arthistory/faculty/Minturn/Dubuffet-Levi-Strauss.pdf, p. 250
1940's

“I have always been haunted by the feeling that the painter has much to gain from making use of the forces that tend to work against his action”

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Jean Dubuffet

Source: posthumous, Jean Dubuffet, Works, writings Interviews, 2006, p. 9

“Our point of view on this question of the function of art is the same in all cases: there's no more an art of the insane than there is an art of dyspeptic people or the art of people with knee problems.”

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Jean Dubuffet

Quote of Dubuffet on 'Art brut', in 'Art Brut Preferred to the Cultural Arts' (1949); (trans. Joachim Neugroschel), in Mildred Glimcher, Jean Dubuffet: Towards an Alternative Reality, New York: Abbeville Press, 1987, p. 104
1940's

“In all my works.... I have always had recourse to one never-varying method. It consists in making the delineation of the objects represented heavily dependent on a system of necessities which itself looks strange. These necessities are sometimes due to the inappropriate and awkward character of the material used, sometimes to some strange obsessive notion [frequently changed for another]. In a word, it is always a matter of giving the person who is looking at the picture a startling impression that a weird logic has directed the painting of it, a logic to which the delineation of every object is subjected, is even sacrificed, in such a peremptory way that, curiously enough, it forces the most unexpected solutions, and, in spite of the obstacles it creates, brings out the desired figuration.”

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Jean Dubuffet

Quote of Dubuffet, in Peter Selz and Jean Dubuffet: The work of Jean Dubuffet, The Museum of Modern art, New York, 1962
1960-70's

“In portraits you need a lot of general, very little of specific. Usually there is too much specificity, always too much... For a portrait to really work well for me, I need for it to be hardly a portrait. Almost for it to no longer be a portrait. It is then that it begins working at full capacity. I like things carried to the extreme limits of what is possible.”

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Jean Dubuffet

Quote in a letter to Max Loreau, 29 June, 1963, reprinted in Prospectus II, Jean Dubuffet; Gallimard, Paris, 1967, pp. 374–375
1960-70's

“I want my street to be crazy, I want my avenues, shops and buildings, to enter into a crazy dance, and this is why I deform and distort their outlines and colours. However I always come up against the same difficulty, that if all the elements were one by one deformed and distorted excessively, if in the end nothing remained of their real outlines, I would have totally effaced the location that I intended to suggest, that I wished to transform.”

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Jean Dubuffet livre Prospectus et tous écrits suivants

Source: 1960-70's, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, 1967, p. 483

“I associated it [the word 'Hourloupe', as title of his longest series of work he made exclusively from 1962 to 1974] by assonance with 'hurler' (to shout), hululer (to howl), loup, (wolf), 'Riquet à la Houppe' and the title of Maupassant's book ‘Le Horla’, inspired by mental distraction.”

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Jean Dubuffet

Quote in Biographie au pas de course, in Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, Vol. IV, Jean Dubuffet, Gallimard, Paris 1995, p. 510
posthumous

“.. I have never managed to grasp what exactly 'pataphysics' consisted of; but in short what I have always seen in it is a desire to disconnect philosophy from the discipline of logic, and to admit incoherence as a legitimate component of it. [comment on visiting frequently the Collège de 'Pataphysique']”

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Jean Dubuffet

Source: posthumous, Batons rompus, 1986, p. 19

“What seems interesting to me is to reproduce in the figurative representation of an object the whole complex system of impressions we receive in the normal course of everyday life, the way this affects our feelings and the shape it takes in our memory; and it is to this that I have always applied myself.”

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Jean Dubuffet livre Prospectus et tous écrits suivants

Source: 1960-70's, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, 1967, p. 103

“.. the sort of white crepe dough with which the person is thickly buttered [in the 'Haute Pâtes' series, Dubuffet made in 1946] was, by its proximity to the tar, dyed the color of burnt bread like a used Meerschaum pipe.”

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Jean Dubuffet

Quote of Jean Dubuffet, in Indications descriptives, in Michel Tapie, Mirobolus, Macadam & Cie. (Paris, 1946). Dubuffet, 'More Modest, (1946) trans. Joachim Neugroschel in Tracks: A Journal of Artist's Writings 1:2 (Spring 1975), p 26-29
1940's

“.. to challenge the objective nature of being. The notion of being is presented here as relative rather than irrefutable: it is merely a projection of our minds, a whim of our thinking. The mind has the right to establish being wherever it cares to and for as long as it likes. There is no intrinsic difference between being and fantasy.”

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Jean Dubuffet

Quote in a letter of Dubuffet to Arnold Glimcher, as cited by Valery Oisteanu, Jean Dubuffet: The Last Two Years http://brooklynrail.org/2012/03/artseen/jean-dubuffet-the-last-two-years. The Brooklyn Rail, March 2012.
posthumous

“From the point of view of technique, I liked there to be internal lines in objects, I mean that instead of circumscribing forms, they animate the insides of things—the inside of formless and non-delimited areas. They function as internal textures and not primarily as contours.”

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Jean Dubuffet

Quote of Dubuffet in Catalogue, p. 47; as cited by Hubert Damisch, in 'Dubuffet or the Reading of the World', in 'Art de France 2' (1962), p. 337–346 (translated by Kent Minturn and Priya Wadhera)
1960-70's

“Man Writes on Sand.”

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Jean Dubuffet

Quote from Prospectus aux amateurs de tout genre, Jean Dubuffet; Paris: Gallimard, 1946; translated in: Mildred Glimcher, ed., Jean Dubuffet: Towards an Alternative Reality; New York: Abbeville Press 1987; as cited in 'Dubuffet, Lévi-Strauss, and the Idea of Art Brut', Kent Minturn http://www.columbia.edu/cu/arthistory/faculty/Minturn/Dubuffet-Levi-Strauss.pdf, from RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 46, Polemical Objects (Autumn, 2004), p. 250
Dubuffet is describing the (contemporary) for him of the footprints of the Bedouins.
1940's

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