L’outil photographique

Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985), painter, sculptor and writer, asserts himself with a freedom of inspiration and forms nourished in the sources of the art brut, of which he is considered as the emblematic figure. Anticonformist and visionary, he detaches himself from aesthetic criteria and shakes up the art world that he desacralizes. His innovative and provocative work is among those that dominated the second half of the twentieth century.

This book presents the first study of the photographic collection kept at the Fondation Dubuffet, in comparison with the artist’s artistic production (paintings, architectural models or elements of the show Coucou Bazar). From the beginning of his artistic activity in the 1940s, Jean Dubuffet invented a system of photographic referencing and, from 1959 onwards, undertook to organize a secretariat responsible, among other things, for documenting all his work.

This collection of several thousand phototypes (negatives, prints, albums) constitutes an exhaustive documentary collection of all his work, both for his work in progress and for its controlled distribution. Photography is also one of the many tools the artist uses to produce his works.

Iconographic source for certain series, its multiple character allows on the other hand the reproduction of the same elements and their use in different works.

For his exhibition “Édifices” in 1968, he presented photomontages integrating his architectural creations in the public space. The photographic projection intervenes from the 1970s as a process of enlargement for the realization of elements for his show Coucou Bazar.

Finally, the retrospective exhibition organized by Fiat in Turin in 1978 innovates, with a spectacular staging associating original works and light projections of other paintings, completed by a multi-projection dedicated to his major work, the Closerie Falbala.