Born in Le Havre in 1901, Dubuffet moved to Paris in 1918 to attend the Academie Julian. He left after six dissatisfying months, eventually abandoning painting for a decade to work as an industrial draftsman and in his family wine business. He did not commit himself entirely to an artistic career until 1942. His first one-man exhibition followed in 1944 at the Galerie Rene Drouin in Paris.

Throughout his career, Dubuffet maintained a distance from established art movements. His work, such as the raw figure Le Métafisyx, utilized symbolic coding and blunt, scratched surfaces to achieve an archaically brutal force. He spent time living in New York between 1951 and 1952, and his work was later the subject of retrospectives at the Cercle Volney and the Schloss Morsbroich.