There is no art without intoxication. But I mean a mad intoxication! Let reason teeter! Delirium! The highest degree of delirium! Plunged in burning dementia! Art is the most enrapturing orgy within man's reach.. Art must make you laugh a little and make you a little afraid. Anything as long as it doesn't bore.

Jean Dubuffet

Categorized in : Art Mean Men

For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.

Jean Dubuffet

creativity funny mean

Art is a language, an instrument of knowledge, an instrument of communication.

Jean Dubuffet

communication language art

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

Jean Dubuffet

patterns real art

Personally, I believe very much in values of savagery; I mean: instinct, passion, mood, violence, madness.

Jean Dubuffet

passion mean believe

Unless one says goodbye to what one loves, and unless one travels to completely new territories, one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself and an eventual extinction.

Jean Dubuffet

farewell goodbye long

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

ambition children art

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

strong men art

I want my street to be crazy, I want my avenues, shops and buildings, to enter into a crazy dance, and this is why I deform and distort their outlines and colours. However I always come up against the same difficulty, that if all the elements were one by one deformed and distorted excessively, if in the end nothing remained of their real outlines, I would have totally effaced the location that I intended to suggest, that I wished to transform.

Jean Dubuffet

elements crazy real

Dancing is the last word in life. In dancing one draws nearer to oneself.

Jean Dubuffet

lasts dancing dance

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

Jean Dubuffet

laughing long art

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

sleep running art

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

eye mind art

Normal means lack of imagination and creativity.

Jean Dubuffet

creativity imagination mean

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

normal depth art

I do not see in what way the face of a man should be a less interesting landscape than any other. A man, the physical person of a man, is a little world, like any other a country, with its towns, and suburbs.. ..As a rule what is needed in a portrait is a great deal of the general, and very little of the particular.

Jean Dubuffet

men country interesting

What culture lacks is the taste for anonymous, innumerable germination. Culture is smitten with counting and measuring; it feels out of place and uncomfortable with the innumerable; its efforts tend, on the contrary, to limit the numbers in all domains; it tries to count on its fingers.

Jean Dubuffet

effort numbers trying

Mud, rubbish and dirt are man's companions all his life; shouldn't they be precious to him, and isn't one doing man's service to remind him of their beauty?

Jean Dubuffet

dirt beauty men

When I want to draw a camel I no longer limit myself, as I once did, to looking only at camels.

Jean Dubuffet

camels limits want

Art is the most frenzied orgy man is capable of.

Jean Dubuffet

art-is men art

In the name of what - except perhaps the coefficient of rarity - does man adorn himself with necklaces of shells and not spider's webs, with fox fur and not fox innards? In the name of what I don't know. Don't dirt, trash and filth, which are man's companions during his whole lifetime, deserve to be dearer to him and isn't it serving him well to remind him of their beauty?

Jean Dubuffet

names doe men