The Sixty-Seventh A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts: Positive Barbarism: Brutal Aesthetics in the Postwar Period, Part 2: Jean Dubuffet and His Brutes

Hal Foster, Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University. In the six-part lecture series Positive Barbarism: Brutal Aesthetics in the Postwar Period, Hal Foster explores the pervasive turn, from the mid-1940s to the early 1960s, to the brut and the brutalist, the animal and the creaturely, as these are manifest in the early work of five artists. In the second lecture, “Jean Dubuffet and His Brutes,” held on April 15, 2018, Foster asks why Dubuffet invented the notion of art brut and how the artist could imagine an art “unscathed” by culture.