Jean Dubuffet exhibition: Brutal Beauty at the Barbican

One of the great post-war artists, Dubuffet took ugliness and ‘fashioned it into something extraordinary’

Caught in the Act (La Main dans le sac) by Jean Dubuffet (1961)
Caught in the Act (La Main dans le sac) (1961): ‘impish’ humour

In October 1944, an exhibition opened in Paris that scandalised the newly liberated city’s art world, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. The artist responsible was Jean Dubuffet, a middle-aged provincial wine seller who had never before shown his work in public – but whose art made the ageing avant-garde movements of the time look tame.

Dubuffet (1901-1985) looked not to art galleries for inspiration, but to the city’s graffiti-strewn walls, faithfully reproducing them in scrappy collages that made no concession to prettiness. His palette – “a melange of snot greens, piss yellows and shit browns” – could hardly have been uglier. His materials were not just oil, paint and clay, but urban detritus: dirt, broken glass, discarded newspapers, even dead insects. Most shocking of all was that Dubuffet seemingly “abandoned all pretence at skill”, in effect rejecting every rule of good taste. Yet, against the odds, he would come to be regarded as one of the most influential artists of his time: his ideas are “everywhere” in the art world today. When it opens its doors on 17 May, the Barbican will host the first major Dubuffet exhibition to be held in Britain for 50 years, bringing together a broad selection of his “anti-art”, and showing how he took ugliness and “fashioned it into something extraordinary”.

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