JEAN DUBUFFET (1901-1985)

Jean Dubuffet was a prolific French Modernist, a scion of Art Brut, and whose interest in texture and materiality led to his inclusion of sand, tar, straw, and other unorthodox materials to thicken his paints. The surfaces of the resultant canvases are thick and clotted, and appear muddy. These textures in the post-WWII period represented humanity’s failings and the hope of beginning anew, literally from the soil up. This was a highly potent theme, due to the destructions of cities such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the war. In the 1960s, Dubuffet was the scion of a new graphic style called Hourloupe, which was created from a chance doodle while on the telephone. The Hourloupe was basically a tangle of black lines that formed a cell and evoked for the artist the way that objects appear in the mind.