[2] He moved to Paris in 1918 to study painting at the Académie Julian,[3] becoming close friends with the artists Juan Gris, André Masson, and Fernand Léger.

[4] During this time, Dubuffet developed many other interests, including free noise music,[5] poetry, and the study of ancient and modern languages.

[4] Dubuffet also traveled to Italy and Brazil, and upon returning to Le Havre in 1925, he married for the first time and went on to start a small wine business in Paris.

[4] In 1945, Dubuffet attended and was strongly impressed by a show in Paris of Jean Fautrier's paintings in which he recognized meaningful art which expressed directly and purely the depth of a person.

Emulating Fautrier, Dubuffet started to use thick oil paint mixed with materials such as mud, sand, coal dust, pebbles, pieces of glass, string, straw, plaster, gravel, cement, and tar.

His use of crude materials and the irony that he infused into many of his works incited a significant amount of backlash from critics, who accused Dubuffet of 'anarchy' and 'scraping the dustbin'.

[7] After 1946, Dubuffet started a series of portraits, with his own friends Henri Michaux, Francis Ponge, George Limbour, Jean Paulhan and Pierre Matisse serving as 'models'.

He was friendly with the French playwright, actor and theater director Antonin Artaud, he admired and supported the writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline and was strongly connected with the artistic circle around the surrealist André Masson.

In 1944 he started an important relationship with the resistance-fighter and French writer and publisher Jean Paulhan who was also strongly fighting against "intellectual terrorism", as he called it.

[citation needed] Dubuffet achieved very rapid success in the American art market, largely due to his inclusion in the Pierre Matisse exhibition in 1946.

Matisse was a very influential dealer of contemporary European Art in America, and was known for strongly supporting the School of Paris artists.

Americans were intrigued by Dubuffet's simultaneous roots in the established French vanguard and his work, which was such a strong reaction against his background.

Dubuffet was fascinated by the nomadic nature of the tribes in Algeria—he admired the ephemeral quality of their existence, in that they did not stay in any one particular area for long, and were constantly shifting.

In June 1948, Dubuffet, along with Jean Paulhan, Andre Breton, Charles Ratton, Michel Tapie, and Henri-Pierre Roche, officially established La Compagnie de l'art brut in Paris.

He found the latter to be isolating, mundane, and pretentious, and wrote in his Prospectus aux amateurs de tout genre that his aim was 'not the mere gratification of a handful of specialists, but rather the man in the street when he comes home from work....it is the man in the street whom I feel closest to, with whom I want to make friends and enter into confidence, and he is the one I want to please and enchant by means of my work.'

According to prominent art critic Hilton Kramer, "There is only one thing wrong with the essays Dubuffet has written on his own work: their dazzling intellectual finesse makes nonsense of his claim to a free and untutored primitivism.

[16][17] In late 1960–1961, Dubuffet began experimenting with music and sound and made several recordings with the Danish painter Asger Jorn, a founding member of the avant-garde movement COBRA.

At the end of the 1960s he started to create his large sculpture-habitations, such as 'Tour aux figures',[18] 'Jardin d'Hiver' and 'Villa Falbala'[19] in which people can wander, stay, and contemplate.