S.D. Art Museum Buys Painting by Dubuffet

“Bonne Mine (Looking Well),” a 1961 painting by French artist Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985), has been acquired by the San Diego Museum of Art and installed in the museum’s galleries of 20th-Century art, the museum announced Tuesday.

The painting, purchased in December from a New York dealer for an undisclosed amount, but less than the $675,000 asking price, according to the museum, measures 51-by-39 inches and features a single large figure with protruding nose and distorted features.

“Scale played an important part in this,” said museum director Steven Brezzo. “We really wanted an aggressive, monumental statement.”

“Bonne Mine,” from Dubuffet’s Paris Circus series, epitomizes the artist’s desire to portray “aggressively unreasonable forms--colors gaudy without reason.” Dubuffet is best known as an avid proponent of Art Brut , the raw, immediate expressions of children, the unschooled and the insane. A smaller painting by Dubuffet, in gouache on paper, has been in the museum’s collection since 1949, but has never been on display.