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"I would like people to look at my work as an enterprise for the rehabilitation of scorned values" - Jean Dubffet
"The things we truly love, which form the basis of our being, we generally never look at" - Jean Dubuffet
"Art Brut has been dormant during this vacation ... but I am on the lookout" - Jean Dubuffet
Vicissitudes (1977)
Ready, Art Bruts? Jean Dubuffet appears to have been a complicated and fascinating character. Provocative in both thought and artistic practise, unconventional and rebellious in nature (with a few dubious political ideas as often seems to be the case when a life is viewed retrospectively), experimental, versatile, and protean. Dubuffet was capable of seeing beauty in the banal, magic in the mundane, and poetry in the prosaic and he was supportive of less well known, outsider, artists too - suggesting that the grouchy image he is sometimes given was more of a defence mechanism than a reality.
His work ranged from exaggerated portraiture and grainy Jackson Pollockesque abstract meditations on the patterns of life to jazzy street scenes and, in Vicissitudes, above, and other works, images that could quite happily be used as album covers for Pavement and The Fall. I knew very little of the man. As his last major London retrospective was in 1966, a full two years before my mother gave birth to me in Reading's Battle Hospital, that's not altogether surprising.
So the Barbican Art Gallery's current show, Jean Dubuffet:Brutal Beauty, was as timely, even overdue, as it was enlightening (and empty, I was one of about three punters there - possibly understandable considering we're still in a pandemic, the weather was dreadful, and England v Scotland were playing at Euro 2020 that evening). Born in Le Havre in 1901, it wasn't until his fortieth year he really got going as an artist. Even though he had studied at the prestigious Academie Julian in Paris at the age of seventeen.
He only lasted six months there, and instead turned his attentions to the ethnography, literature, and philosophy which he found more interesting and worked first in his father's wine business before starting his own. Graffiti artists, tattooists and the art works of children and incarcerated people spoke to Dubuffet more loudly than the formal styles of the Academie and when the Germans occupied Paris in World War II he made a decision to start collecting that work, as well as making his own creations inspired, directly or not, by this 'raw art' or, in French, Art Brut.
Large Black Landscape (1946)
Dubuffet was aiming for an art that captured the confused, uncertain, feeling of the time. An art that was "directly plugged into out current life". He'd long admired the photographer Brassai who had been documenting Parisian graffiti since the 1930s but he went, in a way, one step further and tried to create artworks in which he, the author, was both the graffiti artist and the photographer.
As if a knife had scratched crude imagery out on a wall in the dead of night, as if the artist had been interrupted by German troops and had had to leg it before the message could be completed. When the war ended and Dubuffet dabbled in portraiture something of the style stayed with him. He's on record as saying he enjoyed "funny noses, big mouths, crooked teeth, hairy ears" and "all that" and portraits of his friend, the intellectual and magazine editor Jean Paulhan, and others were made in a similar way.
Portrait of Jean Paulhan (1945)
Bertee the Socialite (1946)
Dhotel (1947)
Dubuffet would spend hours simply looking at his subject before returning to his studio to create an image, a 'likeness' is pushing it, from memory. As the curators at the Barbican would have it "a truth without resemblance". Dubuffet exhibited these images at the Rene Drouin gallery under the title 'People Are Much More Handsome than they Think, Long Live their True Face' and said, somewhat cryptically, that "comical ballet dances of wrinkles interest me more than Greekeries".
Er, yeah. When he said "millions of possibilities of expression exist outside the accepted cultural avenues", however, much less interpretation was required. Back in the 1920s, while Dubuffet had been working at the meteorological centre in the Eiffel Tower, he'd discovered Hans Prinzhorn's book Artistry of the Mentally Ill and that had piqued an interest in what would come to be named Art Brut that would explode in Dubuffet's head in the, and his, late forties.
He'd visit psychiatric institutions in both France and Switzerland, curate exhibitions at the Rene Drouin, and go on to co-found the Compagnie de l'Art Brut which would, in its three year lifetime, collect over 1,200 works by over one hundred artists. After a fashion, these were moved to the home of art collector Alfonso Ossorio in Long Island, New York but the Barbican have devoted a small room to a selection of works that would have been originally included in the collection.
Aloise Corbas - Abduction of the Bride of Gaule (1946-47)
Maurice Baskine - Untitled (?)
Fleury-Joseph Crepin - Composition No.32 (1939)
I don't understand it (I doubt anyone but Crepin himself could) but it's aesthetically very pleasing. Which sits at odds with some, if not all, of Dubuffet's output. Or so you'd think. When Dubuffet made art of what others might say was unattractive source material, he would dispute that. "Nothing seems to be more false, more stupid, than the way students in art class are placed in front of a completely nude woman ... and stare at her for hours" he once said.
Not, it seems, because he saw an inherent exploitation in that kind of method but because he believed the notion of beauty that Western art had inherited from the Greeks was 'specious', 'miserable', and 'most depressing'. He wanted to paint women, and their bodies, as they really were. He wanted to capture the 'invisible world of fluids circulating in bodies'. Like The Vapors, many decades later, he wanted to look at women "from inside as well".
Certainly, it's hard to look at 1950's The Tree of Fluids and conclude that this work is 'specious' or owes too high a debt on Greek notions of beauty. A harsh critic may say it looks like the offspring of John Merrick and Buster Gonad and it's unlikely the sitter would have been overly happy with it. It's not one of Dubuffet's best, and certainly not one of his most flattering, but I think what he was trying to say is that us humans are no better, or worse, than anything else on Earth. We live, we die, and we return to the dust from whence we came. Let's celebrate that.
The Tree of Fluids (1950)
The Abandoned House (1952)
The Roses of the Earth (1952)
Crystallization of the Dream (1952)
When it came to portraits of our mental landscapes, Dubuffet was equally unforgiving. As with the nude, he didn't set out to capture specifics and he most definitely wasn't interested in idyllic or romantic images. He was, as ever, drawn to extremes. Between 1947 and 1949 he took three extended trips to Algeria where he lived with Bedouin communities in the desert.
Returning to his sketches, a lustrum later, he aimed to evoke the spirit of the place rather than what it really looked like. He saw there interiors of a 'country of the formless' to represent maps of the mind as much, more, than they did maps of either France or Algeria. He saw brains, and I agree with him here, as populated by a 'disorder of images, of beginnings of images, of fading images, where they cross and mingle'. Anybody who has ever suffered a dark, hallucinatory, night of the soul (as I have many times) will feel exhilarated by the knowledge that they are not alone in this.
Clown's Point (1956)
Landscape (1953)
Coursegoules (1956)
There are, to me elements of Paul Klee in Dubuffet's style of this time. This is true, also, of the works he made inspired by the tiny botanical worlds he discovered growing at the feet of walls. Worlds he seemed to invest as much in as the actual one he lived in. It seems, for Dubuffet, that the sublime and the barely visible were both equally worthy of examination. It is not what we look at that matters, but how we look at it.
The butterfly wings (and I really hope no butterflies were harmed in the making of 1953's Landscape - but research doesn't look good) speak of nature's infinite beauty and inventiveness. Dubuffet also added shards of glass and bits of string to his work and used razor blades, butter, and sandpaper to get the coarse, yet effective, feel that he believed reflected what life truly was. Not what we wanted it to be.
Intervention (1954)
Madam I Order (1954)
Blueing Head (1954)
Dubuffet claimed to be "pleased to see life in trouble" and claimed he had always believed that "the world must be ruled by strange systems of which we have not the slightest inkling" and spoke of "bewildering worlds that exercise a kind of fascination". He was intrigued by the Abstract Expressionists across the Atlantic in the USA and saw them, partially at least, as fellow travellers and you can see this in works like Intervention and Blueing Head which are not too far removed from some of the works that Willem de Kooning and Arshile Gorky produced when they allowed themselves to flirt with figuration.
Other works, one that appears - at first viewing - as purely abstract, owe more to Pollock but unlike Pollock's jazzy, random, violent approach to art, Dubuffet's 'Texturology' paintings were inspired by the natural surroundings of Venice. Dubuffet would, like Pollock, use an element of chance in their construction. Borrowing a technique from Tyrolean stonemasons, he would shake a branch loaded with paint over fresh plaster in order to soften its colour.
But, unlike Pollock, Dubuffet' works are intended to be read figuratively. He considered the soil or the pavements we walked on to be equally as worthy as our attention as the great cathedrals of Europe or the faces of wealthy socialites. One suspects Dubuffet, in truth, felt soil and concrete to be actually MORE worthy of our appreciation and his description of these works as "gadgets of fascination, exaltation, revelation, divine services to celebrate living matter" certainly suggests so.
Texturology XLVI (with Ochre Flashes) (1958)
The Exemplary Life of the Soil (Texturology LXIII) (1958)
In many ways, this was as far as Dubuffet moved in this direction. Perhaps he felt he was heading, artistically, towards a dead end but, I like to think, it's more likely that his introduction to the American artists had also brought to his attention other aspects of American society. Its colour, its vibrant life, and, perhaps most of all, jazz.
How else to explain the next corner in his career? In the early sixties the work of Jean Dubuffet seemed to receive a quick shot of caffeine. It feels like he got out of his studio, stopped staring at pavements and earth and, after six years away, got straight into the middle of Paris to feel the beat of life. It paid off. The works he made at this time are among his best - and are certainly among the most surprising - in his entire life.
"I want my street to be crazy, my broad avenues, shops and buildings to join in a crazy dance" exclaimed Dubuffet (apparently just after he'd dropped his first E). While he'd been away, Paris had changed. The population had swollen and the austerity of the post-war years had given way to economic expansion and a consumerist society which Dubuffet, quite surprisingly to me, celebrated with no little gusto.
The 'Paris Circus' of billboards, restaurants, bars, cars, and shops may have been an entirely capitalist spectacle but Dubuffet, and millions of others, were drunk on the feeling it gave them and his paintings from this time seem drunk too. The diners in the Restaurant Rougeout are viewed as if from a painter floating high on his own supply of reveries, the street plan of Caught in the Act suggests labyrinthine alleys and secret passageways leading the flaneur into unknown and forbidden pleasures, and even the passengers on the bus in Paris-Montparnasse look as if they're more likely to burst into song or chink champagne flutes than they are to look at their phones or harumph at the vehicle's hindered progress.
Caught in the Act (1961)
Restaurant Rougeot I (1961)
Ida Kar - Dubuffet in Paris (1964)
Paris-Montparnasse (1961)
Dubuffet paints the Paris of the sixties as a carnival that never stops and as sure as his paintings further add to the gaiety, Paris of this era gave Dubuffet a much needed shot in the arm. He would never return to dour, introspective studious art again but he would continue his journey regardless of what direction the art world was moving in.
Dubuffet didn't abandon Art Brut for the bright lights and the big city. Instead he bought Art Brut to the messy metropolis and, in 1962, Alfonso Ossorio finally agreed to Dubuffet's pleas to return his Art Brut collection to Paris where they were installed in six galleries along the rue de Sevres together with new works Dubuffet had acquired after restarting his collection. They included works by the spiritualist Laurie Pigeon who had died (they were about to be thrown away), Madge Gill's calico drawings, Sylvain Lecocq's almost futurist celebration of the bicycle, and works by perhaps the most famous Art Brut outsider of them all, Adolf Wolfli.
Sylvain Lecocq - Tour de France Bocycliste - The Tour of Love (1949)
Augustin Lesage - Symbolic Composition of the Spiritual World (1923)
Adolf Wolfli - The Garden of Heaven in the East (1923)
Madge Gill - Untitled (1947)
Wolfli's work is quite proggy looking to our modern eyes, could pass as a King Crimson album cover, but his story is a fascinating one. Abused as a child, he was orphaned at the age of ten, and grew up in various foster homes before repeating the cycle of abuse of younger children and spending the rest of his life in a psychiatric institute in Bern, Switzerland where, between violent episodes, he drew images of fantastical and horrific visions as, one assumes, some kind of therapy.
Dubuffet's own sanity was, thankfully, more assured and enjoying a second wind, or comeback, he set about an epic series of 'Hourloupes' =- an invented word that plays on the French verbs 'enterloupe' (to trick), 'hurler' (to roar), 'hululer' (to hoot), and the noun 'loup' (a male wolf). Claiming to be enchanted by the unreal, Dubuffet spent twelve years making a series of paintings, sculptures, environments, and performances. He was, in essence, trying to recreate a world of his own.
An Art Brut world. One that, in the case, of Coucou Bazar, Dubuffet demanded "must not look like a theatrical production properly speaking but like a painting". Working in a former munitions factory in Vinciennes he made one hundred and seventy five three standing elements (which he called 'practicables' - theatrical props), mounted some on metal stands and had others controlled by electronic mechanisms. They would be joined by costumed dancers and a one hour spectacle accompanied by dramatic lighting and music ("brutally loud with abrupt interruptions of silence") and performed to audiences in Paris and Turin.
Dubuffet had, inadvertently it seems, revived the age of Dada and cabaret. These riots of colour, sound, and dance feel a world away from the works, less than a decade earlier, when Dubuffet stared at the pavement or some weeds near a wall. But, in a sense, they were not so different. Dubuffet was merely celebrating life in all its myriad forms. The strangeness we find in the ordinary and the ordinary feelings that can manifest them in such strange ways.
Domestic Site (Swordfish Rifle with Inca Head and Small Armchair on the Right) (1966)
Nimble Free Hand to the Rescue (1964)
Solario (1967)
Selection of 16 practicables and 4 costumes from Coucou Bazar (1971-73)
Now in his seventies, Dubuffet was on a roll and his brain was bubbling over with thoughts and images. So many that no one work could focus on just one image. When he displayed these late works in New York's Pace Gallery both Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring visited and, looking at them I think it's safe to say, made a few mental notes. The black and white drawings belonged to a series called 'Circumstancees, Records, Rememberings' and seem to reflect upon Dubuffet's own thoughts about mortality and legacy as well as a more wider meditation on humanity's emotional need to occasionally take stock of life.
Circumstance LXXXII (with Dogs) (1979)
Remembering XXII (1979)
Dubuffet's looks a messy stock take - but a fascinating one. He died in Paris in 1985, aged 84, and his final works look almost like a race against time, a bargain with the reaper, a torch shining in the darkness that comes with eternal sleep. Dubuffet did not leave the world, or the art world, quietly and he did not leave the concept of art the same as it was when he found it. He broadened the idea of what art could be and he made us think about the way we look at art too.
He went from a whisper to a scream and if his intention was, as he said, to create that enterprise for the rehabilitation of scorned values then the fact his work looks so vibrant, so alive, and so influential now shows that he succeeded in that aim. It was to the Barbican's credit that they curated a show that told this story so well and in a just world of art appreciation we won't have to wait another fifty-five years to see these works in London again.
Fulfilment (1984)
Mire G 177 (Bolero) (1983)
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