Jean Dubuffet

Born in Le Havre in 1901 into a wine-merchant family, he studied briefly at the Académie Julian in Paris before abandoning formal training and spending years running a wine business. He did not commit fully to art until 1942, at age forty-one. In 1945 he coined the term Art Brut to describe work made outside cultural convention—by children, the self-taught, and psychiatric patients—and built a major collection of it. His own paintings used tar, gravel, sand, and ash bound into rough impasto surfaces. His Hourloupe series, spanning 1962 to 1974, extended this anti-aesthetic into monumental sculpture. He died in Paris in 1985.