Jean Dubuffet, Bricoleur: Portraits, Pastiche, Performativity

Description

One of the most prolific and influential artists of the 20th century, Jean Dubuffet has featured in a multitude of exhibitions and catalogues. Yet he remains one of the most misunderstood-and least interrogated-postwar French artists. Celebrating Art Brut (the art of ostensible outsiders) while posing as an outsider himself, Dubuffet mingled with many great artists, writers, and theorists, developing an elaborate and nuanced stream of conceptual resources to reconfigure painting and reframe postwar anticultural discourses. This book reexamines Dubuffet's art through the lens of these portraits (a veritable who's who of the Parisian art and intellectual scene) in tandem with his writings and the art and writings of his Surrealist sitters. Investigating Dubuffet's painting as bricolage, this book reveals his reliance upon an anticulture culture and the appropriation of motifs from Surrealism to the South Pacific to explore the themes of multivalence, performativity, and multifaceted identity in his portraits.

Stephanie Chadwick is Associate Professor of Art History at Lamar University, USA.

This groundbreaking study forms a necessary and timely reevaluation of Jean Dubuffet's forays into the genre of portraiture, in which Chadwick deftly employs the concepts of bricolage, pastiche, and performativity to shed new light on Dubuffet's important relationships with leading cultural figures of his time, including Michel Tapie, Jean Paulhan, Antonin Artaud, and Henri Michaux. * Kent Minturn, Core Lecturer for Art Humanities, Columbia University, USA * With this new volume, Chadwick offers fresh interpretations of Dubuffet's mark-making, especially connecting his radical practice to Surrealist ideas in deeply intertextual readings. By focusing on a tightly constructed group of works, Chadwick expands previous understandings of Dubuffet's portraits in the rich context of post-war French intellectual thought. * Sandra Zalman, author of Consuming Surrealism in American Culture: Dissident Modernism (2015) *