Jean Dubuffet

"Art does not lie down on the bed that is made for it; it runs away as soon as one says its name; it loves to go incognito. Its best moments are when it forgets what it is called."

"What an adventure you have thrown me into! Nothing was farther from my thoughts than doing portraits! Now its all I think about.. ..and is all your handiwork"

"Every piece of information about these statues is totally useless.. .What . import is it to us if their author was a bureaucrat or a cowherd, an old man or a young person? It is very unfounded to pay attention to these meager ircumstances. There is no difference between an old and young man. Not the least in any domain. Or if he was from Burgundy or Auvergne its the same. And if he is alive or dead for who knows how long it is the same to us. Between a contemporary and someone from the last century, or a companion of Clovis or the big prehistoric reptiles? No difference whatsoever. We are completely wrong to take interest in these details."

"..the sort of white crepe dough with which the person is thickly buttered [in the Haute Pâtes series, Dubuffet made in 1946] was, by its proximity to the tar, dyed the color of burnt bread like a used Meerschaum pipe."

"[Dubuffet marvels at the desert as a chaotic palimpsest, filled with marks and signs] ..like an immense notebook of disorganization, a notebook of improvisation.. ..an elementary school blackboard full of scribbles.."

"The eye perceives what is hard and what is soft, what is porous and what is impervious, what is warm to the touch and what is cold."

"Portrait likenesses cooked and preserved in memory, likenesses burst in the memory of Mr. Jean Dubuffet, painter."

"Our point of view on this question of the function of art is the same in all cases: theres no more an art of the insane than there is an art of dyspeptic people or the art of people with knee problems."

"For three years I studied very assiduously an Arabic dialect spoken by the Bedouins of the Sahara, and I began by writing this language phonetically in Latin characters; the very strange appearance of the grammatical forms which resulted from it caused me to see that our spoken language is as remote from written language as this Saharan dialect can be from literary Arabic, and that our language written phonetically by a foreigner in the same way as I wrote the spoken language in El Golea, presented grammatical forms as strange (and as fascinating) as my Arabic jargon. It is then that the idea came to me to try to draft a small text written phonetically. I had the feeling that by becoming accustomed to writing (and thinking) in this way, one would be compelled to discover a very interesting species of art, and I am completely passionate about this undertaking."

"The Occidental man is not so bad.. .Not bad at all, the brave Aryan [inhabitant of the Saraha].. .Im not unhappy to be living with him again.. ..one need not go outside of Europe in order to find truly "savage" individuals.. .These savage values to which I attribute more value than all others, appear to show themselves, in our worlds of Europe and America, more forcefully and tempestuously than in all other worlds.."

"In portraits you need a lot of general, very little of specific. Usually there is too much specificity, always too much.. .For a portrait to really work well for me, I need for it to be hardly a portrait. Almost for it to no longer be a portrait. It is then that it begins working at full capacity. I like things carried to the extreme limits of what is possible."

"People Are Much More Beautiful Than They Think: Long Live Their True Face."