"Jean Dubuffet: The Last Two Years"

Suddenly it seems like galleries on the Lower East Side are awash in young painters influenced by postwar European art and such movements as the CoBrA group, Art Informel and Art Brut. As one of the leading figures of the period, Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) had either a direct or tangential relationship with all of the above, forging a style that bridged primitive figuration and expressionistic abstraction. Although American art in the 1950s and ’60s—AbEx, Pop Art, Minimalism—overshadowed much of what was going on in Europe, Dubuffet managed to establish an international reputation for himself. This show of colorful abstractions painted near the end of his life shows why.