Lili noir de fumée

This painting by Jean Dubuffet is part of the AMAM's collection of seven works (six paintings and one drawing) by the artist. Lili noir de fumée (Smoky black Lili) is a portrait of Dubuffet's wife, and was reproduced early in the artist's career (December 1948) in Life magazine in an editorial en titled "Dead End Art: A Frenchman's Mud-and-Rabble Paintings Reduce Modernism to a Joke." The joke was on the writer, however, as Dubuffet went on to become the most significant French artist in the postwar period.

Dubuffet broke ground in the use of new materials in painting, often working in extremely heavy impasto with a granular medium. Antiauthoritarian and highly intelligent, Dubuffet became a creative force not simply in painting, sculpture, and printmaking, but also through his writings and his championship and collecting of what is known (by his naming of it) as Art Brut.

Along with seventeen other works, the seven Dubuffets were a gift to the AMAM from Joseph and Enid Bissett-both good friends of the artist, as is attested by a lively correspondence in the AMAM files.