Jean Dubuffet - French (1901-1985)

Jean Philippe Arthur Vincent Dubuffet was a prolific painter and sculptor, the enfant terrible of the New School of Paris, and the darling of the Parisian avant-garde circle. A firebrand rebel against traditional aesthetics, he embraced commonplace subjects in everyday life in his authentic and humanistic approach, vehemently believing that the mundane life of mortals contained more art and poetry than did ivory towers. In repudiation of traditional painting methods, he mixed such crude materials as dust, mud, sand, tar, cement, and plaster with oil paint, concocting a paste wherewith he could create physical marks on his deliberately anti-personal and anti-psychological compositions. He was a founding father of the Outsider Art (Art Brut) movement – a term coined by himself for art produced by non-professionals working outside aesthetic norms and free of intellectual concerns – and his collection thereof was referred to as “a museum without walls”.