Jean Dubuffet and the work of Art Brut - Critique of primitivism

Twisting the neck of primitivism: this is one of the challenges of Jean's work Dubuffet (1901-1985). The reader may find the statement paradoxical as the artist seems to be the paragon of artistic primitivism in the second half of the 20th century. Yet everything in his work contributes to rejecting the existence of a supposedly "primitive" art, the touchstone of a conception European and racist art, withdrawn into itself and shaken at the end of World War II. By pushing the codes of primitivism to excess his time, the painter lucidly reveals its springs and presuppositions. Considering together Dubuffet's three activities – painting, writing and the prospecting he carries out for his Art Brut company – this book seeks to better understand this critical activism initiated at the beginning of the professional recognition of the artist. Month after month, year after year, the author traces the intellectual journey and the manic practice of the one who will defend and promote the invention artistic in all its states. Along the way, a portrait of art emerges post-war Parisian at the time of the institutionalization of the avant-garde: that of a vast redistribution of roles which affects the worlds of art, literature, criticism, but also ethnology and psychiatry. Celebrating the artistic operation starting from the formless, Dubuffet then seeks to thwart the categorization processes that are rife in the field of creation, just as in that of the human and social sciences. There is the tip of Jean Dubuffet's criticism, there is the work of Art Brut.