About This Artwork
Jean Dubuffet
French, 1901–1985
Supervielle, Large Banner Portrait1945
Oil on canvas
130.2 x 97.2 cm (51 1/4 x 38 1/4 in. )
No inscription
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Maurice E. Culberg, 1950.1367
Jean Dubuffet had a vast knowledge of classical art and culture, but he sought a new path for his art based outside Western artistic conventions. He became a proponent of art brut (raw art), an anti-aesthetic inspired by the art of children, the mentally ill, prisoners, and those “unscathed by artistic culture, where mimicry plays little or no part.” In his quest for a dynamic, expressive, and authentic style, Dubuffet developed a technique of scratching into thickly impastoed paint surfaces, often mixed with materials from the earth, to produce raw, graffiti-like images. This painting of the poet Jules Supervielle comes from a series of crude portraits of Parisian writers and intellectuals that the artist made from his imagination, depersonalizing and transforming his subjects into caricatures of human types.
— Permanent collection label
Exhibition, Publication and Ownership Histories
Exhibition History
New York, Pierre Matisse Gallery, Jean Dubuffet, Paintings, Gouaches, 1946-48, November 30—December 1948, cat. 6.
New York, Pierre Matisse Gallery, Jean Dubuffet: Paintings, January 24—February 8, 1950.
The Arts Club of Chicago, School of Paris, December 15, 1951—January 15, 1952.
New York, The Museum of Modern Art, The Work of Jean Dubuffet, February 19—April 8, 1962, cat. 35, traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago, May 18—June 17, 1962, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, July 10—August 12, 1962.
Publication History
“Chicago Asks Which is Real? You answer”, Arts Digest, February 1, 1951, p. 20.
Georges Limbour, Tableau Bon Levain a vous de cuire la Pate, L’Art Brut de Jean Dubuffet, (Pierre Matisse,1953), ill. 91.
Jack Kroll, “Dubuffet in all his Existentialist glory,” Art News, 61 (April 1962), pp. 42-44, 50-52, ill. 43.
Loreau, Max, Catalog des travaux de Jean Dubuffet, Fascicule III: Plus beaux qu’ils croient (portraits), (Société française des Presses suisses, 1966), cat. 161.
The Art Institute of Chicago, Twentieth Century Painting and Sculpture, (Hudson Hills Press, 1996), p.94.
William Griswold, Pierre Matisse and His Artists, exh. cat. (Pierpoint Morgan Library, 2001), ill. 220.
Ownership History
Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, by 1948; sold to Mr. and Mrs. Maurice E. Culberg, 1950; given to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1950.