Handwerker Gallery Newsletter

Summer/Fall 2000 – Volume 2, Number 2

From the Permanent Collection

Jean Dubuffet, original lithograph used as an announcement for an exhibition of the artist's drawing at the Galerie Berggruen, Paris, 1960, 40" x 20"

Jean Dubuffet (1901-85) was a French artist who in the 1940's coined the term "art brut" to mark the collection he made of artifacts produced by children, the naive, the "primitive," and the psychotic. This type of socially and culturally marginalized visual production was part of a movement developed in Europe in the immediate aftermath of World War II as a radical critique of a Western culture that, for all its overt embrace of higher values, had, in the last instance, failed to prevent the Holocaust. Dubuffet conceived of his own work, in good pataphysical tradition, as "brut," or raw.