Jean Dubuffet

Dubuffet sought to replicate the immediacy of the art of the untutored. In this sheet, he incised four figures into a ground of opaque watercolor, exposing the sandpaper he used as a support. The technique shares more with graffiti and the scrawls of children than with academic drawing. The artist once remarked, “When I say draw I’m not to the slightest degree thinking of faithfully reproducing objects . . . . No, it’s a matter of something quite different: to animate the paper, to make it palpitate.”