Dubuffet (31st July 1901 – 12th May 1985) was born in Le Havre by a family of wholesale wine merchants. He moved to Paris in 1918 to study painting at the Académie Julian and he became close friends with the artists Juan Gris, André Masson and Fernand Léger. Six months later he left the Académie because of a distasteful academic training and decided to study independently. During this time Dubuffet developed many other interests, including music, poetry and the study of ancient and modern languages. Dubuffet travelled to Italy and Brazil. When he returned to Le Havre in 1925, he married for the first time and went on to start a small wine business in Paris. He took up painting in 1934 when he made a large series of portraits in which he emphasized the vogues in art history.
But he stopped again and continued to develop his wine business at Bercy during the German Occupation of France. In 1942 Dubuffet decided to devote himself again to art. He often chose subjects for his works from everyday life, such as people sitting in the Paris Métro or walking in the country. He painted with strong, unbroken colours, recalling the palette of Fauvism, as well as the Brucke painters, with their juxtaposing and discordant patches of colour. Many of his works featured an individual or individuals who were placed in a very cramped space characterized by a distinct psychological impact on viewers. His first solo show came in October 1944 at the Galerie Rene Drouin in Paris. In 1945, Dubuffet started to use thick oil paint mixed with materials such as mud, sand, coal dust, pebbles, and pieces of glass, string, straw, plaster, gravel, cement and tar. This allowed him to abandon the traditional method of applying oil paint to canvas with a brush; instead, Dubuffet created a paste into which he could create physical marks, such as scratches and slash marks. After 1946 he started a series of portraits, with his own friends Henri Michaux, Francis Ponge, Jean Paulhan and Pierre Matisse serving as ‘models’. He painted these portraits in the same thick materials and deliberately in an anti-psychological and anti-personal manner, as Dubuffet expressed himself. A few years later he approached the surrealist group in 1948 and the College of Pataphysique in 1954. In 1944 he started an important relationship with the resistance-fighter and French writer, publisher, Jean Paulhan who was also strongly fighting against ‘intellectual terrorism’, as he called it. Dubuffet achieved very rapid success in the American art market, largely due to his inclusion in the Pierre Matisse exhibition in 1946. In fact he had his first solo exhibition in America, in the same gallery as the Matisse’s exhibition in 1947. In June 1948 Dubuffet officially established La Compagnie de l’art brut in Paris along with Jean Paulhan, Andre Breton, Charles Ratton, Michel Tapie, and Henri-Pierre Roche. He felt that the simple life of the everyday human being contained more art and poetry than academic art or great painting did. He found the latter to be isolated, mundane and pretentious and wrote in his Prospectus aux amateurs de tout genre, whose aim was ‘not the mere gratification of a handful of specialists, but rather the man in the street when he comes home from work….it is the man in the street whom I feel closest to, with whom I want to make friends and enter into confidence, and he is the one I want to please and enchant by means of my work.’ Dubuffet began to search for an art form in which everyone could participate and by which everyone could be entertained. He sought to create an art as free from intellectual concerns as Art Brut and, as a result, his work often appeared primitive and childlike. His form is often compared to wall scratchings and children’s art. In late 1960-1961 Dubuffet began experimenting with music and sound and made several recordings with the Danish painter Asger Jorn, a founding member of the avant-garde movement COBRA. In the same period he started making sculpture, but in a very not-sculptural way. As his medium he preferred to use the ordinary materials as papier-mâché and for all the light medium polystyrene, in which he could model very fast and switched easily from one work to another as sketches on paper.