Visual arts: How to grow old rebelliously Jean Dubuffet was teasing, shocking and painting with reckless abandon into his eighties FINAL Edition

• Published in: Independent (London, England : 1986)
• Main Author: Glover, Michael
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: London (UK) Independent Digital News & Media 16.03.1999
• ISSN: 0951-9467

IT HAS often been said that adults, in learning the inhibitions thought proper to maturity, quickly shed the joyous and reckless spontaneities of childhood. To find a painter who gives the lie to this old adage, a man who was painting with the reckless abandon of a child at the age of 84, you need to visit the Waddington Galleries on Cork Street, where a dozen late paintings by Jean Dubuffet, all executed after he reached the age of 80, are on show. The French painter, sculptor and engraver Jean Dubuffet was among the most richly paradoxical and iconoclastic artistic spirits of the century. Born into a prosperous family of Le Havre wine merchants in 1894, he developed a passion for painting early on - his earliest canvases show the influences of Cezanne, Masson, Suzanne Valadon and others - but by the 1940s, he saw it as his mission to turn his back on everything that might be regarded as his own cultural inheritance, and to create a language of signs entirely his own. This language overturned almost every known rule about perspective, representation and figuration. His would be a language which would shock, puzzle, tease, disconcert and rebel with as much scratchy discordance as his hand and brain could muster between them. The great master of art brut was born.