© Jean Dubuffet / VEGAP 

Borrowing entirely from the New York and Venice collections, the Guggenheim Museum of Bilbao will until 21 August be hosting an “ardent celebration” of the vast pictorial work of Jean Dubuffet. Devoted to his family’s wine wholesale business after a youthful loss of interest in painting, the French artist did not in earnest pick up a brush again until the 1940s, at which point he founded the art brut movement – distanced from the academy with its aesthetic decorum and intellectual preoccupations – to let loose a spontaneous and celebratory impulse, a creativity of the kind that had no fear of being dismissed as basic or banal.