Jean Dubuffet quotes

Jean Dubuffet was a French painter and sculptor, widely recognized as the founder of the Art Brut movement. His work focused on raw, unpolished expressions of creativity, often inspired by outsider art. He challenged traditional aesthetics and influenced generations of artists worldwide. Here are 49 of his quotes:

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. (Jean Dubuffet)
Art should be born from the materials. View quote
Jean Dubuffet
Our culture is like a garment that does not fit us, or in any case no longer fits us. This culture is like a dead language that no longer has anything in common with the language of the street. It is increasingly alien to our lives. View quote
Jean Dubuffet
I want my street to be crazy, I want my avenues, shops and buildings, to enter into a crazy dance, and this is why I deform and distort their outlines and colours. However I always come up against the same difficulty, that if all the elements were one by one deformed and distorted excessively, if in the end nothing remained of their real outlines, I would have totally effaced the location that I intended to suggest, that I wished to transform. View quote
Jean Dubuffet
I took a great deal of pleasure in it, and I still feel nostalgic about it. However, I felt that it had led me to live in a parallel world of pure invention, shut inside my solitude. Naturally, it was precisely for that purpose that it was made and that was why I took pleasure in it, but I wanted to regain body and roots. View quote
Jean Dubuffet
I have always been haunted by the feeling that the painter has much to gain from making use of the forces that tend to work against his action. View quote
Jean Dubuffet
What interests me about thoughts is not the moment when it crystallizes into formal ideas but its earlier stages. View quote
Jean Dubuffet
I associated it [the word 'Hourloupe', as title of his longest series of work he made exclusively from 1962 to 1974] by assonance with 'hurler' (to shout), hululer (to howl), loup, (wolf), 'Riquet à la Houppe' and the title of Maupassant's book ‘Le Horla', inspired by mental distraction. View quote
Jean Dubuffet
What seems interesting to me is to reproduce in the figurative representation of an object the whole complex system of impressions we receive in the normal course of everyday life, the way this affects our feelings and the shape it takes in our memory; and it is to this that I have always applied myself. View quote
Jean Dubuffet
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. View quote
Jean Dubuffet
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. (Jean Dubuffet)
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. View quote
Jean Dubuffet
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. View quote
Jean Dubuffet
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. View quote
Jean Dubuffet
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. View quote
Jean Dubuffet
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. View quote
Jean Dubuffet
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.. View quote
Jean Dubuffet
What an adventure you have thrown me into! Nothing was farther from my thoughts than doing portraits! Now it's all I think about.... and i's all your handiwork. View quote
Jean Dubuffet
.. the sort of white crepe dough with which the person is thickly buttered [in the 'Haute Pâtes' series, Dubuffet made in 1946] was, by its proximity to the tar, dyed the color of burnt bread like a used Meerschaum pipe. View quote
Jean Dubuffet
.. to challenge the objective nature of being. The notion of being is presented here as relative rather than irrefutable: it is merely a projection of our minds, a whim of our thinking. The mind has the right to establish being wherever it cares to and for as long as it likes. There is no intrinsic difference between being and fantasy. View quote
Jean Dubuffet
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. (Jean Dubuffet)
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. View quote
Jean Dubuffet
.. the wind of 'art brut' blows on writing as well as on other avenues of artistic creation. View quote
Jean Dubuffet
For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity. View quote
Jean Dubuffet
Unless one says goodbye to what one loves, and unless one travels to completely new territories, one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself and an eventual extinction. View quote
Jean Dubuffet