DREI FRAGEN with Jean Dubuffet

Artist Jean Dubuffet shares his artistic wisdom.

SLART

Jun 25, 2025

Each Wednesday, I ask a different artist the same three questions.

This week's featured artist, my Outsider Art hero, Art Brut protagonist, Jean Dubuffet.

1. What first sparked your interest in creating art?

It was not love that pulled me into art. It was revolt. I said once—and I say again now—“It was not from a love of painting that I turned to it. It was rather out of a conviction that painting had to be torn from its hoary traditions and made to begin again.” I saw no sense in the cultured rituals of brush and canvas, in the pious genuflections before galleries and gurus. My spark was rage. A barber’s banter held more life than all the salons of Paris. I fed on the banal, the everyday. I was not born to it—I had to gouge my way in.

2. What are your regrets?

Regret? I spit on regret. But if I must admit to one, it is this: that my art, meant to be a rupture, was too often mistaken for refinement. “I have always endeavoured to oppose art that is well done,” I once confessed, and yet they praised it, collected it, hung it reverently on pristine white walls. That was never the point. I wanted to scrape away the façade, not paint it anew. “Art must make you laugh a little and make you a little afraid. Anything but bore.” When it did neither, I failed.

3. What wisdom would you offer to someone just starting out in their art career, or to anyone exploring art for the first time at any stage of life?

Burn your maps. Smash your rulers. “I believe that art must not stem from scholarly study and that culture should not shape it. I want an art that arises from raw impulse, from the ordinary man.” If you're setting out to "become an artist," you're already lost. Forget technique. Forget acclaim. Paint with grime, with fury, with confusion. “The more banal a thing may be, the better it suits me.” Let your work be a wound, not a performance. What I offer is not advice—it is a provocation. Begin there.