The nearly 200 works by Jean Dubuffet shown at the Los Angeles County Museum through mid-August constitute the largest and most comprehensive examination of the painter’s art ever undertaken. This important exhibition was organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, and will be seen only in Chicago and Los Angeles. Dubuffet is a controversial and fascinating artist with a major European reputation. It is unfortunate that other western cities will not be favored by a visit from this definitive study. An exhaustive catalog with writings by the artist and Mr. Peter Selz, the show’s organizer, accompanies the exhibition with a photo record and 20 colored plates.
Dubuffet’s art is a unique manifestation of post World War II esthetic activity. He has focused attention on unschooled artists and has publicly questioned the importance of “cultural arts” and the art of the museums. His celebration of the arts of children, the mentally ill, primitive folk art, the graffiti of latrines and barracks walls has caused esthetes, connoisseurs and curators to re-examine the elements of art in our time. Peter Selz quotes the artist as saying, “My art is an attempt to bring all disparaged values into the limelight.” At another place he has said, in talking of this so-called “raw art” (L’art Brut), that the professional artist loses all of his spontaneity and ingenuity and that a charm is broken as with a professional sweetheart. Dubuffet rid himself of the bonds of “cultural art” by making himself paint like a de-cerebrated human who had to create and therefore had also to create a means to do so.
Born in 1901 in Le Havre, Dubuffet studied painting at the Academie Julian in 1918. He left school after six months to work on his own. After meeting Utrillo’s mother, Suzanne Valadon, he was influenced by her strong drawing line for a time. He became interested in vanguard poetry, took up a number of musical instruments, studied ancient and modern languages and encountered the art of psychopathic patients through Hans Prinzhorn’s book. A tour in the army was followed by travel to Italy and Brazil. In 1930 he opened a small wholesale wine business. In 1934 he gave it up to pursue art but after three years returned to wine, doubting his own talents. In 1939 he was drafted but by 1942 he was again caught up in painting and has continued so ever since. His first one-man show was held in Paris in 1944. Since the late Fifties he has been a considerable figure on the world art scene.
The earliest work (1943–45) is concerned with common people and every day occurrences. People crowd into subways like cattle. Color is handled in a hallucinatory, confused way, with discordant patches of intense color juxtaposed in seemingly irrational patterns. Childbirth is celebrated with a colored diagram of the birthbed, mother and child and, on the same flat plane as one looks down from the ceiling, the father and nurse flank the bed. There is no perspective. A farm is viewed from directly overhead and yet the farmers, houses, trees and aimless bicyclists are seen parallel to the ground plane. The work is characterized by a childlike ideogram and uncertain high color. The Grand Jazz Band, 1944, lines up its performers on one crowded plane with their instruments tipped, squeezed and crammed into the picture space. It is astonishing that a man can so convincingly adopt a naive manner and continue it so authentically.
In these early works there is little reason to believe that the artist cares for his materials. Brushwork is self-consciously banal. The paint material is unadorned, flat color, applied in a tasteless, direct manner. Only two mysterious “Messages” of 1944 suggest that more sophisticated possibilities may reveal themselves in the artist’s later work. With The Dancing Partner With Diamonds, 1946, the artist’s new interests become apparent. First there is a social commentary implicit in the work that was either non-existent or veiled in earlier works. The artist is revealing ugliness and bestiality that goes far beyond the “Metro” series. His expressive means are more forceful, drawing is firmer and more savage. This is related, secondly, to a new interest in materials. While the colors are muted, nearly monochrome, the paint is applied thickly in more than one coat so that the incised drawing cuts through levels of color.
Two paintings of the same period, The Coffee Grinder and Will Power, embody the new interest in heavy impasto. They also employ additives such as sand, gravel, glass for the delineation of the ground, the figures’ body hair and teeth, and eyes, respectively. This interest in materials grows swiftly in the artist’s work so that the material becomes the content of his art and very often the subject matter as well. This is not to say that Dubuffet utilizes only this material interest, for he fluctuates between his heavy impastos and relatively light materials which often give the impression of his high reliefs. The materials do not dilute the emotional loading of his works. Will Power and Tree of Fluids are two of the most memorable and savage images of man and woman ever seen. The impasto is fairly modelled and the power of the imagery is as forceful as sculpture.
In some works of the period one senses a tenderness beneath the toughness of Dubuffet’s work. Ancient Combatant is an old soldier that we would rather be without, but Dubuffet tolerates him. Lady Walking With An Umbrella is a foolish, pretentious woman but Dubuffet accepts her. Business Lunch pictures a group of French businessmen in the same gray flannel moustaches, and bow ties, eating their conformist meal. Dubuffet is only mildly amused and hardly bitter at all. With this tenderness the artist seems to turn toward more painterly interest. Charcoal Landscape transforms his childlike manner into real painting. From 1946 onward the “Art Brutiste” finds it necessary to walk a fairly careful tightrope as he finds himself far closer to “Belle Peinture” and the international style than his intellectual statements would admit.
View of Paris—Apartment Houses, 1946, shows an old Parisian apartment building with the ground floor let out to a bar, two perfumers, a publisher, a hair dresser and a fashion house. Identical people look out of identical windows behind identical grilles in the apartments above. With Limbour, Chicken Droppings, 1946, we encounter a dear friend portrayed in the color and perhaps the material described. As a portrait it is unimportant but as a painting it is a dramatic work comparable to Will Power (translated as Libido by James Fitzsimmons). Straw, gravel and the waste can have been emptied into the working surface. The title is precise. The grafitto drawing, color and materials make this a triumph of “Art Brut” savagery.
Lili In Metallic Black, 1946, is an outstanding work. A sphinx woman in black on a light colored canvas, the painting has all of the hieratic dignity and presence of Cleopatra or Nefertiti. The work of the succeeding year comes from the artist’s African trip and his first Saharan visit. The work is unimportant and is only included as documentation. Some of the pieces are vaguely Klee-like in their space. The artist worked in a number of new directions and with some new materials. Perhaps he was preparing himself for the work of the early Fifties.
The “Ladies Bodies” is a series of naked female figures which become progressively less clearly defined and more “a general concept in a state of immateriality”. It is difficult to view these works without finding them disturbing. These women are palpable physical presences, unbeautiful but compelling: caricatures of Olympia and Venus. Yet this is idiot womankind in her vast, physical IS-ness. The only figures in art history that can be compared to the Dubuffet “Corps de Dame” series is that other scandalous series by de Kooning which set New York spinning in 1953. Rose Incarnate is a perfect example. Colored a faint rose, she is tattooed with rose symbols and of course her name is a cliché of a professional sweetheart’s name. Only Gaudy Bunch of Flowers, another charming lady, can transcend the cheapness and vulgarity of old Rose. This is surely Dubuffet’s final statement on adorable womankind.
The Geologist, 1950, prefigures a number of developments in the painter’s art. First it is a tiny man in the upper left hand corner of a 38“ x 51” canvas. All of the rest of the canvas is devoted to scarred, metallic earth, seen straight on, like the earliest farm scenes. The man is not the center of this world. The work is without a center. This 1950 painting is related ideologically to the “all over” paintings of Jackson Pollock, Mark Tobey and Bradley Tomlin. There is an endlessness to these landscapes which is explored further in the Table Series, in the Beards, Texturologies, “Voices of the Soil” series, and the ultimate nonfigurative statements to date—Life Without Man III, The Internal Life of Minerals, and Brow of Earth, all of 1960. Dubuffet admits that he is concerned with the ambiguity implicit in these non-images. He likes to think of them as sections of earth magnified or as whole worlds seen from a distance. All of the world AS a grain of sand or IN a grain of sand is an attractive paradox for the painter.
Tables which metamorphose into landscapes or magic stones, geological cross sections, or magnified nothings are at the center of one major notion in Dubuffet’s art. Endless, scaleless, repetitions of textures without figurative reference have become a trademark. In the latest manifestation—“The Internal Life Of Minerals, etc.”—the artist affects a papier mache and plastic paste, sometimes with the addition of metal foils and other additives in a relief painting that transcends abstraction. These works are most like the God-like creation of a new earth. They are also more ART and less BRUT, and they may be worrying the painter for he has now returned to a more childlike BRUTISME in the last two years.
The word “assemblage” was coined by Dubuffet to distinguish his process of cutting up his own works and reworking them from more orthodox collage. The idea differs from the classic collage only in that it favored pre-fabricated, non-art materials for its paste-up. Dubuffet’s assemblages are made up of interchangeable parts from discarded and unsuccessful works. Man With A Raincoat, 1954, is a classic of post-war collage—made of newspapers, this man is a veritable sum of what he is supposed to be and to think. If he is somewhat chaotically conceived and executed, he is the more understandable to our time. It is a minor masterpiece of ironic double meanings.
Dubuffet continues to swing back and forth between light and heavy pigment, figuration and its exclusion, high arbitrary color and the near monochrome of things-as-they-really-are. At one point he will select a cruel expressionism that is common to such northern painters as Jorn, Schumacher, Appel, and then he will swing back to papier mache paste non-figuration. The falseness of “The Busy Life” is suggested by the pointlessness of the running and churning, but the color is acid and the brushwork and exposures of underpainting are harsh, grating, brutal. Rooted in paradox, Dubuffet can then turn about and show compassion for “The Sententious One,” “the Attentive One” and the “Beards.” How the face reveals the soul! The beards are memorable works: at once human, passionate, opinionated and also endless textures, boundless dimensions, authoritarian family likenesses from the Mesopotamian cradle. The face can be so definitively Dubuffet with all of its doubly-edged ironies and the expansive beards so reassuring. Dubuffet has maintained his feeling that art is a delinquency—a moment stolen from more official and respectable pursuits. His beards remind us of freedom even as the piercing eyes of their faces tell us to beware.
The artist’s sculptures are so characteristic of his painted “Oeuvre” that one can hardly believe that each work is found in a different material. Sponges, metal foil, charcoal, driftwood, papier mache, each find their way to realization in forms which seem as much a part of the artist as his twinkling eyes. Regardless of the material, each sculpture seems to have been worked by natural processes in unlikely ways to have become typically Dubuffet in gnarled attitude, worn texture and grimace. These facts of found-object life are such that they underline the painter’s intention to work within the processes of nature in achieving his vigorous, understandable, spontaneous and ingenious creativity.
In his most recent works Dubuffet pendulums back to forms and colors familiar at the very outset of his career. He says that he feels that the Materiologies avoided specific human motivations. He indicates a need to fill his work with personages. He feels he must create works which lift one out of context, provoking surprise and shock. He has said, “It is always a matter of giving the person who is looking at a picture a startling impression that a weird logic has directed the painting of it, a logic to which the delineation of every object is subjected, is even sacrificed . . . The world of objects thus subjected . . . appears in an entirely new and unexpected light, so that one sees it with new eyes.”
Jean Dubuffet is certainly an extraordinary artist. Some feel able to say that he is the most remarkable and original artist in Europe since the second war if not indeed since the generation of Picasso. He is a powerful creator who is working within the primary problems of contemporary art. His concern for materials and his willingness to deal with his honest feelings wherever they take him, have created a brilliant, savage new art for all of the high cultures to try to synthesize. Despite the desperate swings of the Dubuffet pendulum, there is a pervading sense of unity in this twenty year review that is surprising, satisfying and convincing.
––Gerald Nordland
