A lithographic album of graffiti, wall surfaces, and poetry
An Album of Lithographs and Poems
The Walls (Les Murs) is a collaborative album by Jean Dubuffet and the poet Eugène Guillevic. Dubuffet contributed lithographs made in 1945, while Guillevic supplied twelve poems. The lithographic sequence itself is a series of fifteen prints, making the work a meeting of image and verse rather than a straightforward illustrated text. It belongs to Dubuffet’s early engagement with lithography, a medium he began exploring in autumn 1944, roughly two years after he committed himself to painting.
The Defaced Wall as a Source of Meaning
The work takes the wall not as a neutral background but as a marked, used surface. Dubuffet was drawn to graffiti and admired Brassaï’s photographs of Parisian wall markings from the 1930s. What attracted both artists was the vitality of marks that are anonymous yet collectively addressed. In this view, a wall’s scratches and scribbles are not mere vandalism or trivia but evidence of human presence. Dubuffet believed that the simplest knife-scratched marks could carry more precious meaning than large, pretentious paintings, and The Walls turns that conviction into a sustained graphic project.
Lithography as a Way to Recreate the Wall
The choice of lithography was integral to the work. The medium allowed Dubuffet to work directly on the stone and to attack its surface, producing textures that resemble a defaced wall. Instead of using printmaking to reproduce a clean drawing, he used it to capture the abrasions, layers, and roughness of urban surfaces. The stone itself was made to behave like a wall under pressure, so that the album’s technique is inseparable from its subject. The images are not distant records of walls; their making is part of the wall-like effect.
Everyday Life Under Occupation
The Walls is also a wartime work. Alongside related lithographic series, it gives an impression of everyday life enduring through the Occupation. Its concern with ordinary marks and shared surfaces turns attention away from heroic or official subjects and toward the persistent, anonymous life of the street. By pairing such images with Guillevic’s poems, the album frames the wall as a place where private mark-making and public space meet. The result is a quiet but insistent record of continuity amid hardship.
A Key Series in Dubuffet’s Printmaking
The album is described as a key series of Dubuffet’s lithographs, and it stands near the beginning of his printmaking. Made in the mid-1940s, it shows him developing the graphic equivalent of his broader interest in rough, unpolished surfaces and in art that values the ordinary mark over pretentious painting. Within his career, The Walls marks an early and concentrated attempt to make the physical texture of a surface carry the meaning of the work.
The album was published in 1950. A lot description for a plate from the album identifies it as Plate 4 and gives an image size of 15 by 11 inches and an overall framed size of 22 by 18 inches. It also states that the original album was pencil numbered, while this piece was numbered later for reference purposes only.
A Companion Series and Its Texts
In an exhibition context, The Walls was presented alongside another series, Matter and Memory. The two were accompanied by a text by Francis Ponge and a poem by Eugène Guillevic, respectively; The Walls is the one linked to Guillevic’s poem. Guillevic’s dates are given as 1907–1997. A catalogue titled Jean Dubuffet or the Language of Walls is described as revolving around The Walls; its curator, Sophie Webel, notes Dubuffet’s passion for printmaking and, more specifically, lithography.
Graffiti-Inspired Newspaper Works
In June 1944, days after American troops landed in Normandy, Dubuffet created a series in which he wrote graffiti-inspired messages onto French and German newspaper. The hand-written notes included phrases such as “The key is under the shutter” and “I’ve been thinking of you”; their intimacy contrasts with the formality of the typed news beneath. These fragile works reflect the swell of conflicting information at the time and the secret modes of communication that Resistance fighters were forced to adopt to avoid persecution.
