JEAN DUBUFFET: THE SERIES AND STYLES TO KNOW BEFORE YOU GO

“For Dubuffet, painting was not an execution of a predetermined plan but an adventure guided by materials and surface,” writes Camille Houzé. “Rejecting the conventions of Western culture, he urged artists to begin with the raw material before them and allow the work to emerge through the process of making. ‘Look at your palette and rags,’ he instructed. ‘There you’ll find clues you’re hunting for.’”

The same spirit of discovery shaped Jean Dubuffet’s career as a whole. His engagement with Art Brut — the term he coined for work created outside established artistic culture — reinforced his rejection of received ideas about beauty and technique, while his own work remained in near-constant evolution. Across four decades, heavily encrusted surfaces gave way to desert landscapes, distorted bodies, brilliant urban scenes, graphic cellular network and, eventually, near-abstraction.

Here are eight of the series and styles through which Dubuffet continually reinvented what painting could be.
 

Marionnettes de la ville et de la campagne, 1942–45

After leaving his wine business in 1942, Dubuffet committed himself fully to painting, finding his subjects in the streets, houses, and inhabitants of Paris and the surrounding countryside. In Marionnettes de la ville et de la campagne, conventional perspective and modeling give way to flattened spaces and radically simplified figures. Graffiti was an important influence: Dubuffet encountered Brassaï’s photographs of markings on Parisian walls and explored the city with writer René de Solier, studying the anonymous images scratched into its surfaces. His interest in prehistoric art, heightened by the recent discovery of the Lascaux caves, offered another model of image-making outside the academic tradition. Increasingly, these concerns extended to the physical surface of his paintings, where figures could be scratched and incised into thick layers of paint. 

Mirobolus, Macadam & Cie., 1945–46

In the mid-1940s, Dubuffet began radically reconsidering the material possibilities of painting. Experimenting with mixtures of oil paint, emulsion, varnish, gravel, sand, coal dust, and other unconventional materials, he developed the thickly encrusted surfaces he called hautes pâtes. Forty-eight of these works were brought together in his landmark 1946 exhibition Mirobolus, Macadam & Cie. at Paris’s Galerie René Drouin, where their mud-like textures and earthen palette scandalized audiences accustomed to more traditional modes of painting. Their deliberately crude materiality reflected Dubuffet’s growing interest in Art Brut and forms of expression that operated outside established cultural conventions, establishing a material vocabulary that would remain fundamental to his work for years to come.

Roses d’Allah, Clowns du désert, 1947–49

Seeking distance from postwar Paris, Dubuffet traveled three times between 1947 and 1949 to the Algerian Sahara, then under French colonial rule. There, he immersed himself in the life around the desert oases of El Goléa, Béni-Abbès, and Timimoun, recording Bedouin tribespeople, animals, musicians, and storytellers in drawings and gouaches. The stark landscape offered another kind of liberation. Dubuffet described the Sahara as “a bath of simplicity,” an experience that profoundly shaped his work. In Roses d’Allah, Clowns du désert, figures, animals, and landscapes are rendered through increasingly elemental forms and reduced detail, while richly worked surfaces retain the textural emphasis of his earlier paintings. “Perhaps it was the time I spent in the deserts of White Africa that sharpened my taste for the little, the almost nothing,” he later reflected, “and, especially, in my art, for the landscapes where one finds only the formless.”

Corps de dames, 1950–51

In his Corps de dames, Dubuffet set his sights on one of Western art’s most enduring ideals: the female nude. Across approximately 35 works, lilliputian heads are attached to vast, distorted bodies that spread across the canvas, their richly worked surfaces often appearing less like flesh than earth or landscape. Anatomy, proportion, and conventional perspective give way to a deliberately unstable conception of the figure. “The idea that there are beautiful objects and ugly objects, people endowed with beauty and others who cannot claim it, has surely no other foundation than convention,” Dubuffet explained, “and I declare that convention unhealthy.” Informed by his broader rejection of academic tradition, the Corps de dames dismantled the conventions through which the female body had long been idealized, transforming it instead into an expansive field of texture, gesture, and material.

Paysages du mental, 1951–52

In 1951, Dubuffet pushed his longstanding fascination with landscape into increasingly ambiguous territory. In the Paysages du mental, part of a broader body of work that included Tables paysagées and Pierres philosophiques, recognizable scenery gives way to unstable terrains built from spackle, putty, coal powder, sand, and paint. Scraped, scratched, and stained, these mortar-like surfaces evoke the ridges and depressions of the earth while allowing indeterminate forms to emerge from within them. “These are brain landscapes,” Dubuffet explained. “They seek to reconstitute the immaterial world that inhabits man’s mind.” Figures, fragments, and what he called “debris of memories” appear and disappear across the surface, collapsing distinctions between external landscape and interior experience. The physical substance of the earth thus became a means of giving form to something fundamentally immaterial: the shifting terrain of thought itself.

Paris Circus, 1961–62

After six years spent largely in the countryside near Vence, Dubuffet returned to Paris in 1961 to find the postwar capital newly animated by commerce, traffic, and street life. The city had been a defining subject of his earliest mature paintings in the 1940s, but his return prompted a striking reinvention. Abandoning the earthy palette and densely worked surfaces of his late-1950s Texturologies and Matériologies, Dubuffet turned to brilliant reds, yellows, blues, and greens, filling his Paris Circus paintings with cars, pedestrians, restaurants, storefronts, and hand-painted signs. The change marked a decisive rejection of his recent preoccupation with the physical substance of the natural world. “Over and done with the mystical jubilations of the physical world,” he declared, calling instead for “aggressively unreasonable forms, colors gaudy without reason, a theater of irrealities” and opening the way, as he put it, “for the most outlandish inventions.”

L’Hourloupe, 1962–74

Dubuffet’s longest and most expansive cycle began almost by accident in the summer of 1962, with a series of doodles made with a four-color ballpoint pen while the artist spoke on the telephone. From these automatic markings emerged the distinctive vocabulary of L’Hourloupe: interlocking cellular forms outlined in black and filled with parallel stripes of red, blue, or white. Figures and everyday objects gradually appeared within this continuous network, dissolving conventional distinctions between figure and ground, object and surrounding space. Over the next 12 years, L’Hourloupe expanded from drawing and painting into sculpture, architecture, and performance, transforming the spontaneous language of those first doodles into an entire visual world. Thomas M. Messer would later describe L’Hourloupe as “arguably the most radical structural reinterpretation since Cubism.”

Théâtres de mémoire, 1975–79

Dubuffet began his Théâtres de mémoire in 1975, a series of monumental paintings assembled from individual figures, landscapes and abstract forms painted on paper, then cut out and repeatedly rearranged before being transferred to canvas. Drawing upon visual languages developed across his career, the densely layered compositions bring together disparate styles, scales and perspectives within a single pictorial field. The series was partly inspired by Frances Yates’s The Art of Memory (1966), and particularly her account of Renaissance philosopher Giulio Camillo’s imagined “theater of memory,” in which knowledge was assigned to specific locations to aid recollection. Dubuffet inverted this principle of order, instead using fragmentation and juxtaposition to evoke the shifting, associative nature of thought. Memory became an active process of assembling, transforming and continually reorganizing experience.

Partitions, 1980–81

Following the densely layered Théâtres de mémoire of the late 1970s, Dubuffet returned to painting in April 1980 after a four-month hiatus due to illness. In the Partitions, elemental figures inhabit irregular compartments, or “zones,” filled with turbulent passages of pink, red, ochre and blue. Across these fields, scale and perspective shift abruptly, bringing disparate perceptions together within a single composition. Closely related to his Sites aux figurines, Psycho-sites and Sites aléatoires, the series belonged to a broader late-career shift toward increasingly unstable pictorial space. The jigsaw-like structures familiar from Paris Circus and L’Hourloupe begin to break down: contours loosen, compartments expand into amorphous fields, and figures merge with their gestural surroundings. In this final body of work painted directly on canvas, Dubuffet was already moving toward the dissolution of recognizable form that would characterize the increasingly abstract works of his last years.