Jean Dubuffet · jovial chaos
Jean Dubuffet - The Hill of Visions - La butte aux visions - 1954Jean Dubuffet - La Mesentente - 1978
From February 25 to August 21, 2022, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents "Jean Dubuffet: Ardent Celebration", an exhibition that traces the career of the French artist, one of the leading figures in post-war European art.
Images: Jean Dubuffet, "The Hill of Visions (La butte aux visions)", 23 August 1952. Oil on masonite, 150 x 194.9 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York © Jean Dubuffet, VEGAP, Bilbao, 2022 ·· Jean Dubuffet, "The Misunderstanding (La Mésentente)", March 12, 1978 Acrylic on paper, mounted on canvas 139,4 x 241,9 cm Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York © Jean Dubuffet, VEGAP, Bilbao, 2022.
“I want my street to be crazy, I want my avenues, shops and buildings, to enter into a crazy dance, and this is why I deform and distort their outlines and colours. However I always come up against the same difficulty, that if all the elements were one by one deformed and distorted excessively, if in the end nothing remained of their real outlines, I would have totally effaced the location that I intended to suggest, that I wished to transform”.Jean Dubuffet, 1967
Born in Le Havre in 1901, Jean Dubuffet was attracted to art at an early age, but did not fully dedicate himself to it until 1942, working until then in the lucrative wine business inherited from his father. After the Second World War, especially after three inspiring trips to Algeria, Dubuffet became the standard-bearer of Art Brut, challenging the canons of beauty or order in European art. For Dubuffet, Art Brut was nothing more than the recovery of the natural process of art, freed from prejudice and artifice. "I believe that only in Art Brut can we find the natural and normal processes of artistic creation in their pure and elementary state," he wrote in 1967.
The works included in "Jean Dubuffet: Ardent Celebration" come primarily from the holdings of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, supplemented by a group of works from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice. They range from the first works created by Dubuffet in the years following the Second World War (such as Miss Choléra, painted in January 1946) to his last works, painted shortly before his death, such as Donnée, painted on 20 April 1984, and the monumental Mire G 132 (Kowloon), painted in September 1983.
"Jean Dubuffet: Ardent Celebration" pays special attention to the artist's most extensive cycle of works, his Hourloupe series, painted in the 1960s and 1970s. In this series, as the museum explains in a press release, Dubuffet "established a vocabulary that enabled him to create and explore an ever expanding, fantastical universe, unified by its shared visual expression. It also allowed him to more pointedly take on phenomenological and epistemological issues". Nunc Stans (1965) and Bidon l'Esbroufe (1967), both included in the exhibition, are representative examples of this series.

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