This course will be delivered online.
This course will no longer be running as part of the Summer programme. To be added to the waiting list, please contact shortcourses@gsmd.ac.uk.
Ages 18+
Course Dates & Times
TBC
About Brutal Beauty: The Art and Life of Jean Dubuffet
This course has been programmed to coincide with the exhibition ‘Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty’ taking place at Barbican Art Gallery. Curator and Art Historian Camille Houzé, who leads this six-week course, has been leading the research for this exhibition.
This six-week online evening course, developed in collaboration with Barbican, will look at the life and work of one of the most acclaimed postwar painters and why he came to rebel against conventional ideas of beauty, in favour of capturing the everyday life in a more gritty, authentic way.
Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) was one of the most provocative artists in postwar modernism — yet today he is barely known in the UK, where he has not had a major public exhibition in over 50 years.
Who is the course for?
- Anyone aged 18 and over with a passion for art
- No previous knowledge of art history is required
What can I expect?
The course will cover a period from 1942 to 1985 and will relate the work of Jean Dubuffet to important artistic movements of the postwar period, including (but not limited to) American Abstract Expressionism, CoBrA, Art Informel, Art Brut and Street Art.
The course will be organised around the following themes stemming from the close study of Jean Dubuffet’s work:
- From Prehistory to History: Dubuffet's Early Life (1901–1942)
- Textures of the City: Graffiti, Cave Paintings and Brutal Aesthetics in Occupied Paris (1942–46)
- Art Brut: Definition, Collection and Exhibition of ‘Anticultural Art’ (1945–51)
- The Country of the Formless: Bodies, Landscapes and Galaxies (1950–59)
- Dubuffet in the US: Alfonso Ossorio, Jackson Pollock and Claes Oldenburg
- Memory, Figuration and Abstraction in Dubuffet’s Late Career (1961–1985)
You can expect:
- An overview of Jean Dubuffet’s career
- An introduction to major postwar artistic movements
- To revisit historical events and their contexts: Paris 1940s, New York 1950s and 1960s, the postwar boom in France
- An understanding of the relationship between visual arts and works of literature and philosophy (how they continuously influence one another)
- Comparative studies of paintings (how and why techniques and styles can travel between works produced in different contexts)
Course Fee
£250
Eligibility
This course will no longer be running as part of the Summer programme. To be added to the waiting list, please contact shortcourses@gsmd.ac.uk.
Online Short Courses Requirements
All sessions will take place online using Zoom. A Zoom link will be sent to you in advance of the course start date with further instructions.
To participate in online classes you will need the following:
- An email address
- A reliable internet connection
- A laptop/tablet/desktop computer with a microphone and camera (most have these included)
- Speakers/headphones (the speakers in your laptop/tablet/computer should be sufficient)
- A fully updated web browser able to use the most up to date version of Zoom, or a fully updated Zoom client
If you have any questions regarding joining one of our online courses please contact us.
About the Course Tutor
This course has been developed and is led by Camille Houzé.
Camille Houzé is a curator and art historian based in London, where he has been leading the research for Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty at Barbican Art Gallery. He was previously Associate Curator at Kunstraum, London, and has been co-directing the London gallery Nicoletti Contemporary since 2018. He is the author of The Swallow and the Dagger, a study of Jean Dubuffet’s late paintings that will be published in the exhibition catalogue Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty, in which he also wrote an extensive chronology on the artist. Houzé has an MA in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, completed under the supervision of Professor Sarah Wilson.
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