Self Portrait II 1966

Curator: Immediately striking, isn’t it? Editor: It certainly arrests the eye. The boldness of line, the flat primary colors—it’s undeniably provocative. Curator: We’re looking at Jean Dubuffet’s “Self Portrait II” from 1966. It’s an ink drawing, an almost brutal rendering of the artist by himself. Editor: Brutal is the word! It reads almost like a caricature, pushing and pulling at the face with geometric imprecision. It is compelling, and slightly unsettling, to see how Dubuffet translates the self in such simple materials, through these visual elements of the composition. Curator: It definitely feels… raw. But the stripes are intriguing. Reminds me of prison uniforms, or perhaps early modernist patterns—a signifier of the ‘other’ filtered through a somewhat more bourgeois lens. There's something unsettling about its gaze too. It pulls at deeply ingrained anxieties about what it means to truly be ‘seen’. Editor: Yes! It certainly pushes past a simple representational portrait. Consider the weight of each of those black lines! Dubuffet uses this graphic language to flatten the image but paradoxically heighten the symbolic impact. Each band seems calculated. Curator: Right! Dubuffet’s interest in Art Brut certainly informed his mark-making. He champions art by untrained individuals, seeing in their work an untainted rawness, and he is clearly channeling that spirit here. It almost acts as a visual confession—stripping bare the conventional ideals of beauty. Editor: So, it functions then, as a gesture towards authenticity? A refusal to perform a refined self for the viewer? The semiotics here are far from settled… It demands interrogation. Curator: Exactly! It speaks to this yearning for an unvarnished truth about human identity… Editor: Which perhaps remains, eternally, elusive. Well, this was truly eye-opening. Curator: Indeed. This self-portrait really makes us reconsider what it is to depict oneself and confront the ideas, however complicated, it evokes for the culture around it.