Mirage of the Imagination

The Cleveland Museum of Art is delighted to acquire a painting by Jean Dubuffet, a highly influential artist working in postwar Paris. Throughout his career, Dubuffet was a subversive provocateur within the cultural landscape of the mid-20th century, rebelling against prevailing notions of high culture and beauty. Born in Le Havre into a family of wine merchants, he moved to Paris when he was 17 years old to study at the Académie Julien. He found academic training so distasteful that he left after only six months. 

In 1942, when he was 41 years old, he decided to devote himself to art after years of working in the wine business. Some critics objected to his use of crude materials, unrefined technique, and rough surfaces, calling him an “anarchist,” but others recognized his originality and significance. In 1946, the American art critic Clement Greenberg identified Dubuffet as “the brightest new hope of the School of Paris since Joan Miró.” 

In the mid-1940s, Dubuffet began to collect and study Art Brut (French for “Raw Art”), a term coined by the artist to describe art made by incarcerated people, psychiatric patients, and clairvoyants. He believed Art Brut more effectively conveyed the creator’s unfiltered emotions than art made for the market by those formally trained. The term came to refer to the art that Dubuffet collected as well as the work he made himself. 

After the end of World War II, artists perceived the world around them—and artistic traditions—as reduced to rubble. Dubuffet responded to this time of turmoil with a desire to create an entirely new kind of art. He began to do so in works such as Landscape with a Walker Greeting the Public, the first painting by the artist to enter the museum’s collection.

Landscape with a Walker Greeting the Public belongs to a series of 32 paintings titled Les Paysages grotesques (Grotesque Landscapes), made between May 1949 and January 1950, in which Dubuffet described an arid, otherworldly landscape, 
figures, and buildings in a tangled mass of lines and shapes. In these paintings, Dubuffet aimed to depict not external scenes but mirages of the imagination. He commented on these paintings, “They are not descriptive of external sites, . . . they are landscapes of the brain, they aim to show the immaterial world that dwells in the mind of man: disorder of images, of beginnings of images, of fading images, where they cross and mingle, in turmoil, tatters borrowed from memories of the outside world and facts purely cerebral and internal.”

In Landscape with a Walker Greeting the Public, Dubuffet used a palette knife to apply oil paint in an impasto manner to coarse, unprimed burlap. Into the resulting areas of thick paint, he inscribed a composition characterized by an agitated linearity that made his physical and mental energy palpable. In this stunningly original, technically accomplished, and psychologically complex work, Dubuffet addresses the question, “Where is art going after World War II?”