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Supervielle, Large Banner Portrait

A work made of oil on canvas.
© 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

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  • A work made of oil on canvas.

Date:

1945

Artist:

Jean Dubuffet
French, 1901–1985

About this artwork

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.

Status

On View, Gallery 398

Department

Contemporary Art

Artist

Jean Dubuffet

Title

Supervielle, Large Banner Portrait

Place

France (Artist's nationality:)

Date  Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

1945

Medium

Oil on canvas

Inscriptions

No inscription

Dimensions

130.2 × 97.2 cm (51 1/4 × 38 1/4 in.)

Credit Line

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Maurice E. Culberg

Reference Number

1950.1367

Copyright

© 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Extended information about this artwork

Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge. To help improve this record, please email . Information about image downloads and licensing is available here.

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