by Selz, Peter; texts by Dubuffet, Jean
Illustrations/Photography by: Dubuffet, Jean

Published in 1962 by Museum of Modern Art, New York
ISBN: 0405128924
Edition: First
Binding: Paperback
Condition: Fine
Comments: At the time this exhibition catalog, “The Work of Jean Dubuffet,” was published in 1962, Dubuffet was 61 years old yet only halfway through his career. He was born in 1901 in Le Havre, France, and rejected the family wine selling business to move to Paris at age 17 to study art. He hung around with the Surrealists, painted some…and then moved back to Le Havre and sold wine for about twenty years. It wasn’t until after World War II, when both Dubuffet and the world were in their 40s, that Dubuffet moved back to Paris and devoted himself to painting full time. When he did, he created a sensation, rejecting high culture and creating a new school that came to be called “Art Brut.” It focused on untrained artists, often those who were disabled and mentally ill. “…[We] mean pieces of work executed by people untouched by artistic culture….” he wrote.” His collection of such works became the foundation of Lausanne’s Art Brut Museum, but it also became the basis for his own paintings, which focused on common people, such as subway riders, and signs and graffiti he found on the street. He it also applied to his techniques, which were always changing. He started applying thick pastes that included everything from asphalt to coal dust to pebbles to his canvases, then scratchings out forms onto the surface. Portraits became cartoons. Doodles became his primary color “Hourloupe” cycle. By the end, he was focusing on sculpture, some of which can be found in public places in New York (where he was popular almost as quickly as he was in Paris) as well as Paris and other cities. He worked up until his death in 1985. He influenced many later artists, including Keith Haring and Banksy. In his review of this book in one of the early issues of “Artforum” at the time of its publication in 1962—interestingly, not of the actual exhibition itself—Phillip Leider said, “Even in reproduction, any one of Dubuffet’s paintings brings more of the esthetic emotion welling out of one than any ten one-man shows of his lesser contemporaries together….[W]e are dealing with one of the three or four greatest painters of our century.”

Leider also went on to praise Duboffet’s textual contributions to the book, saying they were “…full of wit and insight and provide in themselves a view of a very fascinating mind at work,” and though the critic in him was not too pleased with the essays by author Peter Selz, he did admire the illustrations of Duboffet’s work: Most are full page, many of them in color, with others in black and white. (The images are not numbered, but a kind of “catalog within the catalog” has been laid in in the front. This is a fresh, clean, but bare-bones, six-page stapled brochure that includes a list of the works included in the exhibition, acknowledgements of the institutions collaborating in the exhibition, and of the individuals lending works. This possibly was handed out to those attending the exhibition, either when it originally appeared at the Museum of Modern Art in New York or when it traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago or the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It indicates 110 of the 185 works at the MOMA exhibition are in this catalog.) Though a paperback, this book has a jacket attached at the spine illustrated with an unidentified Dubuffet painting. The cover, binding, and textblock are all in overall excellent condition, still tightly bound, with no missing pages, no marks, and only slight age tanning and a bump at the bottom of the spine. It serves as an excellent reference work with an index, a list of major exhibitions of Dubuffet’s work, and an extensive bibliography that goes beyond what is mentioned in the text. Photos forthcoming or immediately on request.

Seller Inventory #: 0000494