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JEAN DUBUFFET
French, 1901-1985
Smiling Face (La Bouche en croissant), 1948
Oil and sand on canvas. 36 x 28 1/2 in. (91 x 72 cm)
Gift of David M. Solinger, Class of 1926. 55.30
After training for seven years as a painter, Dubuffet gave up art and
worked for twenty-two years as a wine merchant.He believed that the fine
art he saw around him paled in comparison with the humble activities of
the average person. He resumed painting in 1942, by which time European
cultural traditions had become so discredited by the upheaval and atrocities
of World War II that he was drawn to forms created outside the tradition
of fine art, particularly urban graffiti, tribal art, and the creations
of children and the insane. Dubuffet wrote, "In my paintings, I wish
to recover the vision of an average and ordinary man without using techniques
beyond the grasp of an ordinary man." Dubuffet created clotted surfaces
by mixing oil paint with grit and urban detritus. By subverting the viewer's
expectations of beauty and by elevating the mundane, Dubuffet called into
question many of the assumptions on which art had traditionally been based.
La Bouche en Croissant is such a painting. Not "beautiful"
in the expected way, the painting confronts the viewer with a new manner
of portraiture, simplified and direct. In both the application of the paint
and the addition of sand in that paint, La Bouche en Croissant literally
enters the viewer's space to be encountered and interacted with.
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