Jean Dubuffet citáty
Jean Dubuffet
Datum narození: 31. červenec 1901
Datum úmrtí: 12. květen 1985
Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet byl francouzský malíř a sochař.
Jeho dílo je řazeno k informelu, tašismu či patafyzice. Kolem roku 1948 měl blízko k francouzským surrealistům, ale hnutí opustil. Ovlivněn knihou psychiatra Hanse Prinzhorna definoval tzv. art brut, k němuž se i hlásil a obrazy řazené k tomuto směru také sbíral . Své obrazy a skulptury vytvářel z polystyrénu, betonu, lávy, textilu, kůže, uschlých větví a jednou dokonce i z motýlích křídel. Psal též ceněné eseje a teoretické práce o umění, pokoušel se komponovat i hudbu.
Citáty Jean Dubuffet
„Our point of view on this question of the function of art is the same in all cases: there's no more an art of the insane than there is an art of dyspeptic people or the art of people with knee problems.“
Quote of Dubuffet on 'Art brut', in 'Art Brut Preferred to the Cultural Arts' (1949); (trans. Joachim Neugroschel), in Mildred Glimcher, Jean Dubuffet: Towards an Alternative Reality, New York: Abbeville Press, 1987, p. 104
1940's
„The Occidental man is not so bad... Not bad at all, the brave Aryan [inhabitant of the Saraha]... I'm not unhappy to be living with him again.... one need not go outside of Europe in order to find truly "savage" individuals... These savage values to which I attribute more value than all others, appear to show themselves, in our worlds of Europe and America, more forcefully and tempestuously than in all other worlds..“
Quotes in his letter to Jaque Berne, 29 April, 1949 (the day after his return to Paris); as cited in ; as cited in 'Dubuffet, Lévi-Strauss, and the Idea of Art Brut', Kent Minturn http://www.columbia.edu/cu/arthistory/faculty/Minturn/Dubuffet-Levi-Strauss.pdf, p. 250
1940's
„[Dubuffet marvels at the desert as a chaotic palimpsest, filled with marks and signs].. like an immense notebook of disorganization, a notebook of improvisation.... an elementary school blackboard full of scribbles..“
Quote of Dubuffet, in a letter to Jacques Berne mailed from Algeria, late 1940's; (Lettres à J.B., p. 35.); as cited in 'Dubuffet, Lévi-Strauss, and the Idea of Art Brut', Kent Minturn http://www.columbia.edu/cu/arthistory/faculty/Minturn/Dubuffet-Levi-Strauss.pdf, from RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 46, Polemical Objects (Autumn, 2004), pp. 247-258, p. 250
1940's
„Art should be born from the materials.“
p. 68; in Notes pour les finslettrés
posthumous
„I took a great deal of pleasure in it, and I still feel nostalgic about it. However, I felt that it had led me to live in a parallel world of pure invention, shut inside my solitude. Naturally, it was precisely for that purpose that it was made and that was why I took pleasure in it, but I wanted to regain body and roots.“
pp. 34-35
posthumous, Batons rompus, 1986
„For three years I studied very assiduously an Arabic dialect spoken by the Bedouins of the Sahara, and I began by writing this language phonetically in Latin characters; the very strange appearance of the grammatical forms which resulted from it caused me to see that our spoken language is as remote from written language as this Saharan dialect can be from literary Arabic, and that our language written phonetically by a foreigner in the same way as I wrote the spoken language in El Golea, presented grammatical forms as strange (and as fascinating) as my Arabic jargon. It is then that the idea came to me to try to draft a small text written phonetically. I had the feeling that by becoming“
Jean Dubuffet, letter to Raymond Queneau, 30 October 1950; as cited in Prospectus Vol. I, Jean Dubuffet; Gallimard, Paris, 1967, pp. 481-483
1950's
„A work of art is only of interest, in my opinion, when it is an immediate and direct projection of what is happening in the depth of a person's being.... It is my belief that only in this Art Brut can we find the natural and normal processes of artistic creation in their pure and elementary state.“
— Jean Dubuffet, kniha Prospectus et tous écrits suivants
pp. 203-204
1960-70's, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, 1967
„.. the wind of 'art brut' blows on writing as well as on other avenues of artistic creation.“
Quote in the text of Jean Dubuffet, 'Project pour un petit texte liminaire introduisant les publications de 'L'art brut dans l'écrire', 1969 (1969), published in Le Langage de la rupture', Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1978
1960-70's
„Every piece of information about these statues is totally useless... What. import is it to us if their author was a bureaucrat or a cowherd, an old man or a young person? It is very unfounded to pay attention to these meager ircumstances. There is no difference between an old and young man. Not the least in any domain. Or if he was from Burgundy or Auvergne it's the same. And if he is alive or dead for who knows how long it is the same to us. Between a contemporary and someone from the last century, or a companion of Clovis or the big prehistoric reptiles? No difference whatsoever. We are completely wrong to take interest in these details.“
Quote in Dubuffet's 1947 Entry on an anonymous sculptor, associated with the Swiss collector O.J. Müller; from: Jean Dubuffet, Les Barbus Müller et Autres Pièces de la Statuaire Provinciale(1947), in Prospectus I, pp. 498-49 (transl. Kent Minturn)
remark about the publication of biographically based texts on individual art brut artists; according to Dubuffet: veritable history of art without 'names,' 'dates,' or 'histories'.
1940's
„Man's need for art is absolutely primordial, as strong as, and perhaps stronger than, our need for bread. Without bread, we die of hunger, but without art we die of boredom.“
— Jean Dubuffet, kniha Prospectus et tous écrits suivants
As quoted in Jean Dubuffet, Works, writings Interviews, ed. Valerie da Costa and Fabrice Hergott; Ediciones Polígrafa, Barcelona 2006, p. 14
1960-70's, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, 1967
„With respect to the use of this sparkling coloured material [butterfly wings, around 1955] – the constituent parts of which remain indistinguishable – with the aim of producing a very vivid effect of scintillation, I realised that, for me, this responds to needs of the same order as those that formerly led me, in many drawings and paintings, to organize my lines and patches of colour so that the objects represented would meld into everything around them, so that the result would be a sort of continuous, universal soup with an intensive flavour of life.“
— Jean Dubuffet, kniha Prospectus et tous écrits suivants
p. 116
1960-70's, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, 1967
„It pleased me (and I think this predilection is more or less constant in all my paintings) to juxtapose brutally, in these feminine bodies, the extremely general and the extremely particular, the metaphysical and the grotesque trivial. In my view, the one is considerably reinforced by the presence of the other.“
— Jean Dubuffet, kniha Prospectus et tous écrits suivants
on his series 'Corps de Dame'
As quoted in Jean Dubuffet, Works, writings Interviews, ed. Valerie da Costa and Fabrice Hergott; Ediciones Polígrafa, Barcelona 2006
1960-70's, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, 1967
„At present [around 1960-1970] I make objects (whether a type-writer, wheelbarrow, bed or fishingboat..) very 'hourloupés' [like his painting: Courre Merlan (Whiting Chase), 1964. What I mean is that I am swimming upstream against the 'l'Hourloupe' current. I am approaching it from the opposite direction: instead of starting out with indeterminate lines that eventually give me a wheelbarrow, I start out with the idea of making a wheelbarrow and then add my indeterminate lines. In effect what I am doing is making the current run simultaneously in both directions at the same time.“
p. 81; Comment of Dubuffet on the occasion of his 1984 exhibition at the Venice Biennale
posthumous
„I associated it [the word 'Hourloupe', as title of his longest series of work he made exclusively from 1962 to 1974] by assonance with 'hurler' (to shout), hululer (to howl), loup, (wolf), 'Riquet à la Houppe' and the title of Maupassant's book ‘Le Horla’, inspired by mental distraction.“
Quote in Biographie au pas de course, in Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, Vol. IV, Jean Dubuffet, Gallimard, Paris 1995, p. 510
posthumous
„.. to challenge the objective nature of being. The notion of being is presented here as relative rather than irrefutable: it is merely a projection of our minds, a whim of our thinking. The mind has the right to establish being wherever it cares to and for as long as it likes. There is no intrinsic difference between being and fantasy.“
Quote in a letter of Dubuffet to Arnold Glimcher, as cited by Valery Oisteanu, Jean Dubuffet: The Last Two Years http://brooklynrail.org/2012/03/artseen/jean-dubuffet-the-last-two-years. The Brooklyn Rail, March 2012.
posthumous
