Jean Dubuffet - Art Quotes

12 Sourced Quotes

View all Jean Dubuffet Quotes
Art should always make people laugh a little and frighten them a little. Anything but bore them. Art has no right to be boring.

Jean Dubuffet
Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Jean Dubuffet
Fautrier's exhibition [in Paris 1945] made an extremely strong impression on me. Art had never before appeared so fully realised in its pure state. The word 'art' had never before been so loaded with meaning for me.

Jean Dubuffet
There is no art without intoxication. But I mean a mad intoxication! Let reason teeter! Delirium! The highest degree of delirium! Plunged in burning dementia! Art is the most enrapturing orgy within man's reach.. Art must make you laugh a little and make you a little afraid. Anything as long as it doesn't bore.

Jean Dubuffet
It was around 1935 or 1936 that I first had the idea of compiling a history of art – not in the usual way, but considering only the fads that have succeeded one another down through the ages. For example, the infatuation in Roman times with broken pleats and heads turned in profile.... or during the epoch of Pérugin and Raphael, a certain blue that appears everywhere. I wanted to draw up an inventory of these vogues. To this end I visited museums, took notes in little notebooks, and made demonstrative sketches of paintings. For this purpose I preferred bad paintings, by which I mean those held to be mediocre by aesthetes, but in which these fads that interested me were clearly in evidence.

Jean Dubuffet
Art does not lie down on the bed that is made for it; it runs away as soon as one says its name; it loves to go incognito. Its best moments are when it forgets what it is called.

Jean Dubuffet
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
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
I had given up [around 1950] any ambition of making a career as an artist... I had lost all interest in the art shown in galleries and museums, and I no longer aspired to fit in that world. I loved the paintings done by children, and my only desire was to do the same for my own pleasure.

Jean Dubuffet
There is no such thing as abstract art, or else all art is abstract, which amounts to the same thing. Abstract art no more exists than does curved art yellow art or green art.

Jean Dubuffet
Art addresses itself to the mind, and not to the eyes. It has always been considered in this way by primitive peoples, and they are right.

Jean Dubuffet
What I expect from any work of art is that it surprises me, that it violates my customary valuations of things and offers me other, unexpected ones.

Jean Dubuffet