Jean dubuffet

by Abadie Daniel

Jean Dubuffet (1901-85) was a big deal to an adolescent art lover in Chicago in the '70s. His monumental black-and-white civic sculptures were the epitome of bland buoyancy, a kind of European Pop--old master gold standard. His championing of art brut and children's art, not to mention his own funky dirt-, gravel-, and cement-filled canvases, looked to be the very lodestars of the local Hairy Whos' obsessions. Chicago collectors of Picasso and Ivan Albright took to Dubuffet like one of their own, just as their forebears had embraced French Impressionism, to which Dubuffet's work provided many not-so-subtle links. That air of crusty glamour; that pneumatic, up-with-nature thing; that bold reinvention of the "ugly" female nude, the war-torn landscape, and the hydrocephalic male portrait of literary genius--all this made Dubuffet a living ancestor figure for artists and critics beginning to question the hegemony of the New York School and looking to Europe for alternatives.

460 pages, Paperback

First published June 30, 2001