Jean Dubuffet
Wine merchant until forty-one, then the inventor of Art Brut and the Hourloupe.
Jean Dubuffet was born at Le Havre in 1901, ran the family wine business for most of two decades, and committed to painting for good only in 1942. He coined Art Brut for the work of psychiatric patients, prisoners and outsiders, assembled a vast collection of it now in Lausanne, and made his own paintings from tar, sand, gravel, asphalt and butterfly wings in a deliberate assault on good taste. In 1962 a ballpoint doodle taken during a telephone call produced the Hourloupe — jigsawed cells of red, white, blue and black outlined in heavy line — which occupied him for twelve years and grew into painted polyurethane architecture. He died in 1985.
The materials are the condition problem. The Texturologies, Materiologies and haute pate works of the 1940s and 1950s incorporate genuinely unstable substances and many have suffered structural loss; a proper condition report is not optional. Hourloupe works exist as paintings, as painted polyester sculpture in editions, and as prints. The Fondation Dubuffet in Paris maintains the catalogue raisonne begun by Max Loreau and issues certificates, and it is the necessary reference for anything of significance.
If you own a work by Jean Dubuffet
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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