Le Gommeux
Jean Dubuffet
French, 1901–1985
1966
An ink-on-paper drawing in which Jean Dubuffet outlines a stacked cluster of biomorphic forms in heavy black and fills them with spare red and blue hatchings and solids to produce a lively, deliberately raw image.
You’re struck by the thick, cartoonish black contour that isolates a vertical, irregular shape against a deep black border while rhythmic red and blue stripes and flat color pockets vibrate inside like a primitive diagram or a playful map.
Working within his Art Brut sensibility, Dubuffet flattens figure and ground and elevates childlike, improvised mark-making, helping to open postwar modernism to vernacular, ‘outsider’ aesthetics.
Medium
Ink on paper
Dimensions
9 3/4 x 6 3/8" (24.8 x 16.4 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Gift of Arne and Milly Glimcher
Accession
444.1986
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
