Dubuffet Art Quotes & Sayings

I had given up ( around 1950, fh) any ambition of making a career as an artist ... ..I had lost all interest in the art shown in galleries and museums, and I no longer aspired to fit in that world. I loved the paintings done by children, and my only desire was to do the same for my own pleasure. — Jean Dubuffet

The real function of art is to change mental patterns ... making new thought possible. — Jean Dubuffet

If I make your workplace conducive to walking at lunch, or working out at some time during the day, or I get people to use the stairs more by creating incentives to do such, then people will start doing it naturally. — Mehmet Oz

To be practical in life means to take everything seriously and nothing tragically. — Arthur Schnitzler

My table is now brightly, now dimly lighted. Its temperature varies. It may receive an ink stain. One of its legs may be broken. It may be repaired, polished, and replaced part by part. But, for me, it remains the table at which I daily write. — Ernst Mach

For a writer, mail is not just a collection of bills and letters and offers to subscribe to Sports Illustrated. It's an umbilical cord, a connection to the outside world, the giver of pleasure and pain. It shapes the day, is the moment, inexorable as the tide, toward which all the hours rise and fall. — Mameve Medwed

(Jean) Fautrier's exhibition (in Paris 1945,fh) made an extremely strong impression on me. Art had never before appeared so fully realised in its pure state. The word 'art' had never before been so loaded with meaning for me. — Jean Dubuffet

When I make a movie, I have both a specific and vague, amorphous dream idea of what the movie is going to be. Of course, I don't actually know what it's going to be, but I'm still striving to get to some place with it. — Noah Baumbach

Art must make you laugh a little and make you a little afraid. Anything as long as it doesn't bore, — Jean Dubuffet

Art should be born from the materials. — Jean Dubuffet

A work of art is only of interest, in my opinion, when it is an immediate and direct projection of what is happening in the depth of a person's being ... It is my belief that only in this Art Brut can we find the natural and normal processes of artistic creation in their pure and elementary state. — Jean Dubuffet

There is no such thing as abstract art, or else all art is abstract, which amounts tot the same thing. Abstract art no more exists than does curved art yellow art or green art. — Jean Dubuffet

Man's need for art is absolutely primordial, as strong as, and perhaps stronger than, our need for bread. Without bread, we die of hunger, but without art we die of boredom. — Jean Dubuffet

Art addresses itself to the mind, and not to the eyes. It has always been considered in this way by primitive peoples, and they are right. — Jean Dubuffet

I know of no industrial society where women are the economic equals of men. Of everything that economics measures, women get less. — Ivan Illich

To be contented - that's for the cows. — Diana Vreeland

I also came to understand that our authenticity (or lack thereof) is made evident by the fruit that our life is bearing. — Christine Caine

Art is the most frenzied orgy man is capable of. — Jean Dubuffet

Art doesn't go to sleep in the bed made for it. It would sooner run away than say its own name: what it likes is to be incognito. Its best moments are when it forgets what its own name is. — Jean Dubuffet

People have seen that I intend to sweep away everything we have been taught to consider - without question - as grace and beauty; but have overlooked my work to substitute a vaster beauty, touching all objects and beings, not excluding the most despised - and because of that, all the more exhilarating ...
I would like people to look at my work as an enterprise for the rehabilitation of scorned values, and, in any case, make no mistake, a work of ardent celebration ...
I am convinced that any table can be for each of us a landscape as inexhaustible as the whole Andes range ... I am struck by the high value, for a man, of a simple permanent fact, like the miserable vista on which the window of his room opens daily, that comes, with the passing of time, to have an important role in his life. I often think that the highest destination at which a work of art can aim is to take on that function in someone's life. — Jean Dubuffet

We have more brilliant fantasy novels than brilliant fantasy movies. Movies and TV are done by committee. But with a novel, it's really just one person running the show. That allows for a clarity and unity of vision that's pretty unique, artistically. — Patrick Rothfuss

For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. — George Eliot

How could the war have any semblance of reality when you found yourself sitting under a plane tree in a playground, in the provincial calm of an early afternoon? — Patrick Modiano

I don't normally get very star struck. However, I was just at a table read for a movie. It was an animated movie where they have all the actors come in and sit around a big table and read the whole script out loud so you can see what's working, what's not working. And this is an animated movie that Paul McCartney is doing and he's producing it. So I got to meet Paul McCartney. — Rob Huebel

What I expect from any work of art is that it surprises me, that it violates my customary valuations of things and offers me other, unexpected ones. — Jean Dubuffet

Art is a language, an instrument of knowledge, an instrument of communication. — Jean Dubuffet