Focusing on Jean Dubuffet’s activities as creative writer and book artist, Out of Line analyses the little-known but important body of ‘pièces littéraires’ and monographic text-image books and portfolios which were composed in tandem with his intensive production of paintings, prints, drawings, and sculptures and his prolific writing of aesthetic auto-commentaries, statements of principle, essays on Art Brut, and catalogue prefaces. Interdisciplinary in approach, Out of Line is the first critical and interpretative monograph devoted to Dubuffet’s literary texts and his sole-authored livres d’artiste and artist’s books. Close comparative analysis demonstrates their conceptual sophistication, linguistic intricacy, and rich intertextual and interpictorial connections and reveals them to be at once free-standing but related creative works and an integral and vital part of Dubuffet’s broader oeuvre. In constant dialogue with his visual and plastic art and his aesthetic writings, they play a pivotal role at points of transition and provide him with other—narrative, poetic, epistolary, dialogic, quasi-epic—media for the working-through of ideas, the resolution of formal problems, and the exploration of new materials and technical processes. By identifying thematic and compositional patterns that traverse these and other works, by facilitating the decoding of the most linguistically challenging texts, and by capitalising on the insights offered by extensive archival research, the study aims to increase the accessibility of Dubuffet’s literary and visual-verbal output and to foster greater understanding of and engagement with it.
