French Artist Jean Dubuffet's Art Style

Andre Gennie

22 November 2024

Jean Dubuffet's art is marked by a unique, raw quality; indicative of his interest in the non-traditional. Jean Dubuffet Art Brut is another influential aspect of his practice.

Typical Jean Dubuffet paintings are often textured, achievable by a mix of oil paints thickened with sand, tar, and straw impasto. He was the first artist to use the paste or bitumen in his art.

To him, the straightforward, two-dimensional depiction of space held far greater substance than the overused idea of perspective. To interject perspective, he overlapped objects inside the picture plane.

A natural extension of his two-dimensional work, every Jean Dubuffet sculpture combined his raw aesthetic and a three-dimensional form.

Monument Au Fantome by Jean Dubuffet

For example, Monument Au Fantome by Jean Dubuffet (1977) embodies Dubuffet’s bold approach to art, blending whimsy, abstraction, and weirdly enough, a sense of the surreal.