The Tillers (Les Défricheurs), state II

Jean Dubuffet

1953

Jean Dubuffet's lithograph presents rough, almost childlike figures—'tillers'—moving across a heavily textured, earth-toned ground as the artist sought to convey the raw, tactile vitality of everyday labor.

At first glance the sheet feels like a weathered, fossilized landscape: dense brown washes, smears, and stippled marks create a crusty field from which pale, scrawled human forms emerge like ghostly carvings.

Working within his Art Brut–inspired vocabulary, Dubuffet used this print to challenge polished modernist taste by bringing coarse textures, primitive figuration, and a more vernacular expressiveness into postwar printmaking.

Palette

Art Terms

Lithography Print Figurative Primitive art Gestural Avant-garde

Exhibitions

Women of the Nineties: Fin-de-Siècle Prints

1979

Symbolism, Synthesists, and the Fin-de-Siècle

1972

French Photographs: Daguerre to Atget

1945

French Paintings from the Molyneux Collection

1952