The French painter Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet (1901-1985) explored the possibilities of materials and surfaces in works that depict commonplace subjects. Throughout his career he reacted against conventional ideas of beauty and remained apart from artistic movements.

Jean Dubuffet was born on July 31, 1901, in Le Havre, the son of a wealthy wine merchant, whose lifestyle young Jean found bourgeois. He began attending art classes when he was 15 years old, and in 1918 he went to Paris to study painting at the Académie Julian. Six months later he left school to paint on his own.

Questioning his originality and the value of art and of culture, Dubuffet stopped painting in 1923, traveled to Italy and Brazil, but returned to Le Havre in 1925 to study commerce. He married Paulette Brey in 1927, with whom he had a daughter, but they divorced just a few years later, and remarried just a few...