Jean Dubuffet, 1943-1963. Paintings, Sculptures, Assemblages

In 1942 Jean Dubuffet, a Parisian wine merchant, retired from his successful business and took up another line of intoxicants. The late-blooming artist-Provocateur enjoyed immediate success, despite negative reviews and charges of vulgarity. Fiercely independent and iconoclastic, Dubuffet (1901-1985) disdained classical notions of beauty and reason in favor of visual rawness and instinct. In his work, he employed a crude pictorial style and often favored nontraditional materials such as leaves, butterfly wings, and sponges.Jean Dubuffet 1943-1963 examines paintings, sculptures, and assemblages from what many critics believe to be the most innovative period in the artist's long career. Beginning with Dubuffet's first mature works, which depict daily life and reflect elements of popular culture in Paris, the book spans his whimsical paintings, imaginary landscapes, comical cows, and portrait caricatures of well-known French writers, literary critics, and artists, including artist Jean Fautrier, diarist and theater critic Paul Leautaud, novelist Andre Dhotel, critic and publisher Rene Bertele, and poet and critic Georges Limbour, who was also a boyhood friend.The book also includes several essays on the artist and his work, and numerous quotes from Dubuffet's writings are in the catalogue section. Susan J. Cooke discusses the artist's portraits from 1946 to 1947, noting their continuing ability to startle, disturb, and amuse. Jean Planque reminisces about his long relationship with the artist, describing Dubuffet as a man of extremes - spontaneous, impatient, discreetly generous, with a love of contradiction and an extraordinary capacity for work. Peter Schjeldahl provides a succinct overview of Dubuffet's work and identifies Dubuffet's career as a long explosion that, as the artist said it would, defied the mainstream tradition of Western painting still in touch with the pictorial genres and aesthetic ideals inherited from the Renaissance. In addition to more than ninety full-page color plates of Dubuffet's works, a select bibliography and chronology are included.Jean Dubuffet 1943-1963 accompanies an exhibition of the same name at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.