Wash drawing, 'Pavois d'oreilles', Jean Dubuffet, France, 1961

Line drawing of a figure, with particularly emphasized facial features, fingers and feet. A dark wash background

NB. While the term ‘mentally ill’ has been used in this record, it has since fallen from usage and is now considered offensive. The term is repeated in this record in its original historical context.

Dubuffet came to painting relatively late in life at the age of about forty. In his artistic production Dubuffet sought contact with the common man. He rejected the artifice and sophistication of the work labelled 'Art' by the establishment. An outsider himself without art school training, he developed a passionate interest in an unselfconscious art untrained by social concessions, cultural limits or taboos: the art of children, psychotics, mediums, amateurs. He sought to establish the validity of an 'individual creation without precedent', an art that was rough, raw, compulsive. These works he classified at 'Art Brut', and he adapted aspects of it to his own work, consciously exploiting its freedom and naturalism.

Pavois D'Oreilles ('Emblazoned With Ears') is a relatively late work but it demonstrates Dubuffet's continuing debt to Art Brut. The image is 'primitive' in the best sense, direct and vital: it is part of the tradition of seeking authenticity and inspiration in the primitive, the naive, the untutored, that goes back to Picasso and Gaugin. Physical realities are depicted without inhibition, and scale is distorted.

This frontally orientated vertical figure, its limbs placed symmetrically, is obviously related to the Corps des Dames of 1950-1, but the emphasis has changed. The deliberately imprecise contours of the figures in the earlier series have been replaced by a clearly defined silhouetted form, and the focus here is on head and limbs, not torso. Like a child Dubuffet emphasizes those features which have caught his eye of his imagination, and which for him, constitute the essence of his subject.

Dubuffet preferred amateur spontaneity to professional skill. He was fascinated by graffiti on walls ('the art of the ordinary man'). When he worked with oils he often incised the image into a thick layer of paint in direct imitation of graffiti.

Even here, with only wash on paper, he has managed to create a good deal of textural interest. In the background the wash is uneven, puddled and thickened; on the figure a pale grey wash has been applied and then scrubbed and scratched to create a mottled effect in which the ground shows through.

[Gill Saunders, '100 Great Paintings from the V&A']

Dubuffet was inspired by art from so-called 'primitive' cultures, as well as art by children and the mentally ill. These interests are evident here in his child-like disregard for perspective or proper proportions - the figure, with its oversized features, fills the paper. Drawn with a ragged uneven line over a surface that has been stained, scratched and abraded, it looks like graffiti.

P.9-1964