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Jean Dubuffet Quotes
1901–1985 France
Jean Dubuffet (July 31, 1901 – May 12, 1985) was one of the French painters and sculptors of the second half of the 20th century. Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut for the art produced by non-professionals working outside aesthetic norms, such as art by children, mental patients, prisoners.
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There is no such thing as abstract art, or else all art is abstract, which amounts to the same thing. Abstract art no more exists than does curved art yellow art or green art.
..the wind of 'art brut' blows on writing as well as on other avenues of artistic creation.
What interests me about thoughts is not the moment when it crystallizes into formal ideas but its earlier stages.
Portrait likenesses cooked and preserved in memory, likenesses burst in the memory of Mr. Jean Dubuffet, painter.
The eye perceives what is hard and what is soft, what is porous and what is impervious, what is warm to the touch and what is cold.
I have tried to draw the human effigy (and all the other subjects dealt with in my paintings) in an immediate and effective way without any reference to the aesthetic.
The role of the artist.. ..and the poet is precisely to blur normal categories, to disrupt them, and by doing so restore to the eyes and the mind ingenuity and freshness.
There are too many cogitations on Theory.. ..it is the malady of the epoch.. .Into the fire with Levi-Strauss and Michel Foucault!
Man's need for art is absolutely primordial, as strong as, and perhaps stronger than, our need for bread. Without bread, we die of hunger, but without art we die of boredom.
Art does not lie down on the bed that is made for it; it runs away as soon as one says its name; it loves to go incognito. Its best moments are when it forgets what it is called.
Caprice, independence and rebellion, which are opposed to the social order, are essential to the good health of an ethnic group. We shall measure the good health of this group by the number of its delinquents. Nothing is more immobilizing than the spirit of deference.
Asphyxiating Culture (1968)
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.
Art should be born from the materials.
The painting will not be looked at passively, not embraced all at once by an observer's immediate gaze. But relived in its elaboration, remade by thought and if I dare say reacted.. .All the gestures made by the painter, he [the observer] feels them reproduced in him.
[children's art] is completely opposed to what interests me, because it's an effort to assimilate culture..
People Are Much More Beautiful Than They Think: Long Live Their True Face.
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
Our culture is like a garment that does not fit us, or in any case no longer fits us. This culture is like a dead language that no longer has anything in common with the language of the street. It is increasingly alien to our lives.
..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.
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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