Jean Dubuffet famous quotes

Art must make you laugh a little and make you a little afraid. Anything as long as it doesn't bore,
-- Jean Dubuffet

#Art #Long #Laughing

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

#Art #Mean #Men

For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.
-- Jean Dubuffet

#Creativity #Mean #Imagination

Dancing is the last word in life. In dancing one draws nearer to oneself.
-- Jean Dubuffet

#Dance #Dancing #Lasts

Personally, I believe very much in values of savagery; I mean: instinct, passion, mood, violence, madness.
-- Jean Dubuffet

#Believe #Passion #Mean

Art is a language, an instrument of knowledge, an instrument of communication.
-- Jean Dubuffet

#Art #Communication #Language

Unless one says goodbye to what one loves, and unless one travels to completely new territories, one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself and an eventual extinction.
-- Jean Dubuffet

#Goodbye #Long #Territory

Art is the most frenzied orgy man is capable of.
-- Jean Dubuffet

#Art #Men #Art Is

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

#Art #Strong #Men

Painting is... a richer language than words... Painting operates through signs which are not abstract and incorporeal like words. The signs of painting are much closer to the objects themselves.
-- Jean Dubuffet

#Painting #Language #Abstract

I would like people to see my work as a rehabilitation of scorned values and, in any case, make no mistake about it, a work of ardent celebration.
-- Jean Dubuffet

#Mistake #People #Rehabilitation

I have always been haunted by the feeling that the painter has much to gain from making use of the forces that tend to work against his action
-- Jean Dubuffet

#Feelings #Use #Gains

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

#Art #Depth #Normal

(Jean) Fautrier's exhibition (in Paris 1945,fh) 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

#Art #Strong #Paris

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

#Art #Yellow #Doe

Our culture is like a garment that does not fit us, or in any case no longer fits us. This culture is like a dead language that no longer has anything in common with the language of the street. It is increasingly alien to our lives.
-- Jean Dubuffet

#Doe #Culture #Common

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

#Art #Eye #Mind

Mud, rubbish and dirt are man's companions all his life; shouldn't they be precious to him, and isn't one doing man's service to remind him of their beauty?
-- Jean Dubuffet

#Beauty #Men #Dirt

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

#Art #Unexpected #Surprise

The things we truly love, the things forming the basis and roots of our being, are generally things we never look at. A huge piece of carpeting, empty and naked plains, silent and uninterrupted stretches with nothing to alter the homogeneity of their continuity. I love wide, homogenous worlds, unstaked, unlimited like the sea, like high snows, deserts, and steppes.
-- Jean Dubuffet

#Sea #Roots #Snow

Art doesn't go to sleep in the bed made for it. It would sooner run away than say its own name: what it likes is to be incognito. Its best moments are when it forgets what its own name is.
-- Jean Dubuffet

#Running #Art #Sleep

In the name of what - except perhaps the coefficient of rarity - does man adorn himself with necklaces of shells and not spider's webs, with fox fur and not fox innards? In the name of what I don't know. Don't dirt, trash and filth, which are man's companions during his whole lifetime, deserve to be dearer to him and isn't it serving him well to remind him of their beauty?
-- Jean Dubuffet

#Men #Names #Doe

I had given up ( around 1950, fh) 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

#Art #Children #Ambition

What culture lacks is the taste for anonymous, innumerable germination. Culture is smitten with counting and measuring; it feels out of place and uncomfortable with the innumerable; its efforts tend, on the contrary, to limit the numbers in all domains; it tries to count on its fingers.
-- Jean Dubuffet

#Numbers #Effort #Trying

The State has but one face for me: that of the police. To my eyes, all of the State's ministries have this single face, and I cannot imagine the ministry of culture other than as the police of culture, with its prefect and commissioners.
-- Jean Dubuffet

#Eye #Police #Ministry

Caprice, independence and rebellion, which are opposed to the social order, are essential to the good health of an ethnic group. We shall measure the good health of this group by the number of its delinquents. Nothing is more immobilizing than the spirit of deference.
-- Jean Dubuffet

#Order #Numbers #Independence

What interests me about thoughts is not the moment when it crystallises into formal ideas but its earlier stages.
-- Jean Dubuffet

#Ideas #Moments #Stage

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.
-- Jean Dubuffet

#Roots #Solitude #Purpose

I associated it (the word 'Hourloupe', as title of his longest series of work he made exclusively from 1962 to 1974, fh) 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.
-- Jean Dubuffet

#Book #Titles #Inspired

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

#Crazy #Real #Elements

Art should be born from the materials.
-- Jean Dubuffet

#Art #Born #Should

With respect to the use of this sparkling coloured material (butterfly wings around 1955, fh) - 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

#Butterfly #Order #Wings

I have tried to draw the human effigy (and all the other subjects dealt with in my paintings) in an immediate and effective way without any reference to the aesthetic.
-- Jean Dubuffet

#Way #Painting #Aesthetic

When I want to draw a camel I no longer limit myself, as I once did, to looking only at camels.
-- Jean Dubuffet

#Camels #Want #Limits

What seems interesting to me is to reproduce in the figurative representation of an object the whole complex system of impressions we receive in the normal course of everyday life, the way this affects our feelings and the shape it takes in our memory; and it is to this that I have always applied myself.
-- Jean Dubuffet

#Memories #Interesting #Feelings

I have always directed my attempts at the figurative representation of objects by way of summary and not very descriptive brushstrokes, diverging greatly from the real objective measurements of things, and this has led many people to talk about childish drawing.. ..this position of seeing them (the objects, fh) without looking at them too much, without focussing more attention on them than any ordinary man would in normal everyday life..
-- Jean Dubuffet

#Real #Men #Drawing

I do not see in what way the face of a man should be a less interesting landscape than any other. A man, the physical person of a man, is a little world, like any other a country, with its towns, and suburbs.. ..As a rule what is needed in a portrait is a great deal of the general, and very little of the particular.
-- Jean Dubuffet

#Country #Men #Interesting