Jacqueline B

Born in 1928 to a complicated family situation, Jacqueline B. was entrusted to her father’s housemaids at birth, then sent to a boarding school at the age of five. She came back to the family home when her father remarried and was raised by an affectionate stepmother. Skinny, nervous, rebellious even, she had many difficulties at school, such that she was sent to two religious establishments in succession. But, at the age of twenty-three, even though she was intelligent, she barely knew how to read and write, meanwhile her health was fragile and her behavior remained agitated.

She nevertheless began to draw at the beginning of the 1950s and immediately demonstrated a remarkable inventiveness. Switching with ease from watercolors to colored pencils or to ink applied using a fountain pen, she explored very varied themes and formal spaces with a very poetic grace, going from figuration to abstraction, from narration to contemplation.
Jean Dubuffet, who discovered her in the beginning of the 1960s, acquired some fifteen of her works for his collection and wrote an article about her in the Fascicule de l’art brut no. 4, published in 1965, then exhibited her work in 1967 in what would become the emblematic exhibition for Art Brut at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris, before the launch of the Lausanne collection.

For 50 years, very few of Jacqueline B.’s works were available and we are very happy to offer a very representative selection (spanning from the 1950s to the beginning of the 1970s) from this “Art Brut classic.”