One of the most prolific and influential artists of the 20th century, Jean Dubuffet has featured in a multitude of exhibitions and catalogues. Yet he remains one of the most misunderstood-and least interrogated-postwar French artists.

Celebrating Art Brut (the art of ostensible outsiders) while posing as an outsider himself, Dubuffet mingled with many great artists, writers, and theorists, developing an elaborate and nuanced stream of conceptual resources to reconfigure painting and reframe postwar anticultural discourses. This book reexamines Dubuffet's art through the lens of these portraits (a veritable who's who of the Parisian art and intellectual scene) in tandem with his writings and the art and writings of his Surrealist sitters. Investigating Dubuffet's painting as bricolage, this book reveals his reliance upon an anticulture culture and the appropriation of motifs from Surrealism to the South Pacific to explore the themes of multivalence, performativity, and multifaceted identity in his portraits.