As an enemy of culture and of the art of museums, Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) was also an anarchist, an atheist, anti-military and unpatriotic. He was an explosive force, a rebel who rejected labels and categories, resolute in his quest for freedom from all constraints, and not incidentally one of the most remarkable artists of the twentieth century. Over an extraordinarily productive career from 1942 to 1985, Dubuffet found himself drawn to the art of children and madmen, which he endowed with legitimacy and credibility as Art Brut. This in turn inclined him towards extreme forms and the expressive scrawls and scribbles of graffiti, and prompted him to begin experimenting with materials such as bitumen, sand and plant fibers, which made him one of the earliest and most prominent Matter artists. As a prolific writer, and sometimes a cruel polemicist, Dubuffet left a storehouse of written work that offers invaluable insight into his vision of art.
