Jean Dubuffet in the rough

By Jonathan Griffin

Drawings are always better than paintings, Jean Dubuffet once wrote, because in order to arrive at a good one, you make 50 that you discard. To do that with paintings would take weeks or months. It is this speed and immediacy that makes drawing superior.

The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles has just opened an exhibition of approximately 100 drawings by the French artist. These works were made between 1935 and 1962, the formative period of his career which culminated in a triumphant retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “Drawing” is understood here in its broadest sense, and is informally defined as a preparatory study – usually done on paper, in wet or dry media – for the larger paintings and sculptures for which Dubuffet is best known. In Dubuffet’s case, however, the term stretches to include the cut-up ink-drawing technique that the artist developed in the 1950s, which was akin to collage and which influenced many later paintings.