Zitate von Jean Dubuffet

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Jean Dubuffet

Geburtstag: 31. Juli 1901
Todesdatum: 12. Mai 1985

Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet war ein französischer Maler, Bildhauer, Collage- und Aktionskünstler. Dubuffet war ein Hauptvertreter der Art brut und zählt zu den prominentesten Vertretern der französischen Nachkriegskunst.

Photo: Paolo Monti, Available in the BEIC digital library and uploaded in partnership with BEIC Foundation. The image comes from the Fondo Paolo Monti, owned by BEIC and located in the Civico Archivio Fotografico of Milan. / CC BY-SA 4.0

Zitate Jean Dubuffet

„At present [around 1960-1970] I make objects (whether a type-writer, wheelbarrow, bed or fishingboat..) very 'hourloupés' [like his painting: Courre Merlan (Whiting Chase), 1964. What I mean is that I am swimming upstream against the 'l'Hourloupe' current. I am approaching it from the opposite direction: instead of starting out with indeterminate lines that eventually give me a wheelbarrow, I start out with the idea of making a wheelbarrow and then add my indeterminate lines. In effect what I am doing is making the current run simultaneously in both directions at the same time.“

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— Jean Dubuffet

Quelle: posthumous, Jean Dubuffet, Works, writings Interviews, 2006, p. 81; Comment of Dubuffet on the occasion of his 1984 exhibition at the Venice Biennale

„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.“

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— Jean Dubuffet, buch Prospectus et tous écrits suivants

on his series 'Corps de Dame'
As quoted in Jean Dubuffet, Works, writings Interviews, ed. Valerie da Costa and Fabrice Hergott; Ediciones Polígrafa, Barcelona 2006
1960-70's, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, 1967

„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.“

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— Jean Dubuffet

Dubuffet once explained to Jacques Berne; as cited in 'Dubuffet, Lévi-Strauss, and the Idea of Art Brut', Kent Minturn, from RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 46, Polemical Objects (Autumn, 2004), pp. 247-258 http://www.columbia.edu/cu/arthistory/faculty/Minturn/Dubuffet-Levi-Strauss.pdf, p. 256
undated

„I have always directed my attempts at the figurative representation of objects by way of summary and not very descriptive brushstrokes, diverging greatly from the real objective measurements of things, and this has led many people to talk about childish drawing.... this position of seeing them [the objects] without looking at them too much, without focusing more attention on them than any ordinary man would in normal everyday life..“

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— Jean Dubuffet, buch Prospectus et tous écrits suivants

Quelle: 1960-70's, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, 1967, p. 105

„With respect to the use of this sparkling coloured material [butterfly wings, around 1955] – the constituent parts of which remain indistinguishable – with the aim of producing a very vivid effect of scintillation, I realised that, for me, this responds to needs of the same order as those that formerly led me, in many drawings and paintings, to organize my lines and patches of colour so that the objects represented would meld into everything around them, so that the result would be a sort of continuous, universal soup with an intensive flavour of life.“

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— Jean Dubuffet, buch Prospectus et tous écrits suivants

Quelle: 1960-70's, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, 1967, p. 116

„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.“

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— Jean Dubuffet, buch Prospectus et tous écrits suivants

As quoted in Jean Dubuffet, Works, writings Interviews, ed. Valerie da Costa and Fabrice Hergott; Ediciones Polígrafa, Barcelona 2006, p. 14
1960-70's, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, 1967

„Every piece of information about these statues is totally useless... What. import is it to us if their author was a bureaucrat or a cowherd, an old man or a young person? It is very unfounded to pay attention to these meager ircumstances. There is no difference between an old and young man. Not the least in any domain. Or if he was from Burgundy or Auvergne it's the same. And if he is alive or dead for who knows how long it is the same to us. Between a contemporary and someone from the last century, or a companion of Clovis or the big prehistoric reptiles? No difference whatsoever. We are completely wrong to take interest in these details.“

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— Jean Dubuffet

Quote in Dubuffet's 1947 Entry on an anonymous sculptor, associated with the Swiss collector O.J. Müller; from: Jean Dubuffet, Les Barbus Müller et Autres Pièces de la Statuaire Provinciale(1947), in Prospectus I, pp. 498-49 (transl. Kent Minturn)
remark about the publication of biographically based texts on individual art brut artists; according to Dubuffet: veritable history of art without 'names,' 'dates,' or 'histories'.
1940's

„I had given up [around 1950] any ambition of making a career as an artist... I had lost all interest in the art shown in galleries and museums, and I no longer aspired to fit in that world. I loved the paintings done by children, and my only desire was to do the same for my own pleasure.“

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— Jean Dubuffet

Quelle: posthumous, Batons rompus, 1986, pp. 7-8

„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.“

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— Jean Dubuffet

Note of 7 mai 1968, as quoted in the catalogue of the exhibition La Fiast invita all'incontro con Jean Dubuffet, Turin 1978
posthumous

„I do not see in what way the face of a man should be a less interesting landscape than any other. A man, the physical person of a man, is a little world, like any other a country, with its towns, and suburbs... As a rule what is needed in a portrait is a great deal of the general, and very little of the particular.“

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— Jean Dubuffet, buch Prospectus et tous écrits suivants

Quelle: 1960-70's, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, 1967, p. 63-73

„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.“

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— Jean Dubuffet, buch Prospectus et tous écrits suivants

Quelle: 1960-70's, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, 1967, p. 206

„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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— Jean Dubuffet

Quelle: posthumous, Batons rompus, 1986, pp. 17, 18

„.. the wind of 'art brut' blows on writing as well as on other avenues of artistic creation.“

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— Jean Dubuffet

Quote in the text of Jean Dubuffet, 'Project pour un petit texte liminaire introduisant les publications de 'L'art brut dans l'écrire', 1969 (1969), published in Le Langage de la rupture', Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1978
1960-70's

„This character of depersonalization is certainly a constant of all my personages.... The charm of my Portraits enterprise consisted exactly in undergoing a treatment of depersonalization of the effigies of the persons designated. This persistent drive to depersonalize the persons seems to me to precede the paintings (and is more or less conscious in my mind throughout their execution).... [this depersonalisation requires] imagination from the viewer to recognize and complete the portrait.“

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— Jean Dubuffet

Quote in a letter to Max Loreau, 29 June, 1963, reprinted in Prospectus II, Jean Dubuffet; Gallimard, Paris, 1967, pp. 374–375
1960-70's

„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.“

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— Jean Dubuffet

Quote of Jean Dubuffet, from 'L'auteur répond à quelques objections', (1946); as cited in Prospectus aux amateurs de tout genre, Jean Dubuffet; Paris: Gallimard, 1946, p. 115
1940's

„A work of art is only of interest, in my opinion, when it is an immediate and direct projection of what is happening in the depth of a person's being.... It is my belief that only in this Art Brut can we find the natural and normal processes of artistic creation in their pure and elementary state.“

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— Jean Dubuffet, buch Prospectus et tous écrits suivants

Quelle: 1960-70's, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, 1967, pp. 203-204

„Portrait likenesses cooked and preserved in memory, likenesses burst in the memory of Mr. Jean Dubuffet, painter.“

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— Jean Dubuffet

Two quotes, Jean Dubuffet placed on the poster announcing his painting-show 'Les gens sont plus beaux qu'ils croient, in Galerie René Drouin, Paris (October 7–31, 1947)
1940's

„Fautrier's exhibition [in Paris 1945] made an extremely strong impression on me. Art had never before appeared so fully realised in its pure state. The word 'art' had never before been so loaded with meaning for me.“

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— Jean Dubuffet

Quelle: posthumous, Jean Dubuffet, Works, writings Interviews, 2006, pp. 23,28: quote in Dubuffet's letter to Jean Paulhan (letter 108)

„There are too many cogitations on Theory.... it is the malady of the epoch... Into the fire with Levi-Strauss and Michel Foucault!“

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— Jean Dubuffet

critical quote in Dubuffet's letter to Jacques Berne, 22October 1970, p. 190; as cited in 'Dubuffet, Lévi-Strauss, and the Idea of Art Brut', Kent Minturn http://www.columbia.edu/cu/arthistory/faculty/Minturn/Dubuffet-Levi-Strauss.pdf, from RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 46, Polemical Objects (Autumn, 2004), p. 256
Dubuffet complains that Levi-Strauss had become too theoretical
1960-70's

„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.“

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— Jean Dubuffet, buch Prospectus et tous écrits suivants

Quelle: 1960-70's, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, 1967, p. 430