It was around 1935 or 1936 that I first had the idea of compiling a history of art – not in the usual way, but considering only the fads that have su… - Jean Dubuffet

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It was around 1935 or 1936 that I first had the idea of compiling a history of art – not in the usual way, but considering only the fads that have succeeded one another down through the ages. For example, the infatuation in Roman times with broken pleats and heads turned in profile.. ..or during the epoch of Pérugin and Raphael, a certain blue that appears everywhere. I wanted to draw up an inventory of these vogues. To this end I visited museums, took notes in little notebooks, and made demonstrative sketches of paintings. For this purpose I preferred bad paintings, by which I mean those held to be mediocre by aesthetes, but in which these fads that interested me were clearly in evidence.

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About Jean Dubuffet

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. The material in Art Brut is essential. Dubuffet's art is representational, in which he strives for the general and the popular meaning.

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Louis-Léon Forget Jandu Bufe Jean-Philippe-Arthur Dubuffet Louis-Leon Forget Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet
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Additional quotes by Jean Dubuffet

Starting from a drawing, a pure creation of the mind, I expand it in space by giving it three dimensions, by giving it a material body [in polystyrene] and then enlarge it to the proportions of a site where it can evolve. In this way, instead of having only the drawing before you while remaining anchored in the everyday world, you can finally leave the world and penetrate into drawing, and thus inhabit the creation of the mind instead of merely looking at it prudently in a frame on the wall. The experience consists, therefore, in abstracting yourself totally from the natural everyday world in order to feed your eyes solely on your own mental elaborations.

It pleased me (and I think this predilection is more or less constant in all my paintings) to juxtapose brutally, in these feminine bodies, the extremely general and the extremely particular, the metaphysical and the grotesque trivial. In my view, the one is considerably reinforced by the presence of the other. [on his series 'Corps de Dame']

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