Stories (Récits) from the portfolio Anarchitect (L'Anarchitecte) from Phenomena (Les Phénomènes)

Jean Dubuffet

1959

A lithograph from Jean Dubuffet’s Anarchitect portfolio that reduces the city’s walls and graffiti to a dense field of grainy marks, aiming to capture the raw, unpolished textures of everyday urban life.

You first notice an all-over rectangle of stippled, scratchy black marks—like weathered concrete or rubbed charcoal—set inside a wide margin with the small title “I. Récits” beneath, so the surface reads as both monumental and intimate.

Part of Dubuffet’s challenge to conventional taste, this work helped bring Art Brut’s admiration for naive, improvised marks and urban detritus into fine art, widening how texture and everyday surfaces could be treated as subject and material.

Palette

Art Terms

Lithography Print Monochrome Abstraction Built environment Urbanization Portfolio

Exhibitions

Dubuffet: Works on Paper

1986

Dubuffet: Persons and Places

1972

The Cubist Imprint

1989

Jean Dubuffet

1962