Supervielle, Large Banner Portrait

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.