Jean dubuffet biography courtesy

Jean Dubuffet was born on 31 July 1901 in the city of Le Havre, France.
Dubuffet began his career as an artist in the middle of his life.
Born on July 31, 1901 in Le Havre, France, he went on to study Académie Julian in Paris.

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LONDON — In 1971, Jean Dubuffet took over a disused factory in the suburbs of Paris and set his assistants to work on fabricating the hundreds of props that make up his colossal “living painting,” “Coucou Bazar.”Two years later, the outlandish, abstracted figures, painted in red, white, and blue with thick black outlines, appeared in an hour-long performance during Dubuffet’s retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. A selection of them is now on displayin the Barbican Art Gallery’s current show, Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty — the first major exhibition on the artist in England in almost five decades.

The title of the piece — “Coucou Bazar ” — roughly translates as “Hi there, bazaar.” This could be an address to the exhibition itself: brought together, Dubuffet’s works create the atmosphere of a bustling, noisy marketplace. They teem with half-glimpsed slogans and faces, from his early lithographs featuring graffiti-like messages scrawled onto newspaper, to his late collages, made of fragments of colorful reused paintings. A mid-career series, Pa

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Dubuffet rented a studio at 114 bis rue de Vaugirard. He became friends with Jean Paulhan, who introduced him to René Drouin. In 1944 the latter organised Dubuffet’s first exhibition in his gallery in Place Vendôme, with a catalogue introduction by the writer. The critics were unsettled by these works, with their deformed shapes and bright colours. This mechanism of provocation was never to stop, and the artist explained this process nearly 25 years later in his manifesto Asphyxiante Culture (J.J. Pauvert, Paris, 1968): “There is a single climate healthy for the creation of art: that of permanent revolution.” Although Picasso defended his works, Dubuffet himself referred to them during this period as ‘unmentionables’.

May 1945 to July 1946, Mirobolus Macadam et Cie; Hautes Pâtes.

In 1946 a new exhibition was held at the Galerie Drouin entitled Mirobolus Macadam et Cie, accompanied by a book by Michel Tapié with the same title and ‘descriptive indications’ by the artist, to which was added a manifesto, Prospectus aux amateurs de tout genre (Coll. Métamorphose XXI, Gal

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Acquavella Galleries Presents

Jean Dubuffet: Anticultural Positions

On View April 15 – June 10, 2016

Open Monday - Saturday, Closed Memorial Day Weekend

New York, NY - Acquavella Galleries is pleased to present Jean Dubuffet: Anticultural Positions, the first exhibition surveying Dubuffet’s early work in painting and sculpture in over two decades. Organized by curator Mark Rosenthal, the exhibition focuses on Dubuffet’s work from 1943 to 1959, and emphasizes the artist’s “anti-cultural” approach in his depiction of subjects and his use of unorthodox materials. Several works by the French painter are on loan from private collections and museums.

During the 1940s and ‘50s, Dubuffet advocated a transgressive anti-cultural position—a nihilistic spirit in the context of a war-ravaged Europe. His fascination with Hans Prinzhorn's Artistry of the Mentally Ill deeply influenced his artistic practice, and led to his coining of t