Jean Dubuffet was born into a bourgeois family of wine merchants in the port of Le Havre in 1901. He studied painting in Paris in 1918 and met key figures in the Parisian art scene of the 1920s, such as Juan Gris and Fernand Léger. By 1924, however, Dubuffet had become disillusioned with painting, and he gave it up for eight years. After running his own wine business, he took up painting again in the mid-1930s, only to quickly abandon it once more. Only in 1942 did he finally settle into the life of an artist.
