“I have become concerned to represent not the objective world, but what it becomes in our thoughts.”
- Dubuffet
“Picasso was close to the roots of art? He was really reclining in the penthouse while Dubuffet laboured in the basement, scratching obsessively on the walls with a compass end.”
- Me, the last time I wrote about Dubuffet
Art Against Culture
Jean Dubuffet is most famous for coining the term ‘Art Brut’. Literally “raw art”, but more commonly Anglicised as Outsider art. He amassed a large collection, of over 1,200 works, which he both drew inspiration from and exhibited in its own right.
As he can’t be uncoupled from this, shows don’t tend to try. The Pallant House exhibition, now nine years ago, arranged a companion show of contemporary Outsider art, Art From the Margins. Here, the Barbican devotes two rooms to works from his collection.
And when you see them together, Dubuffet and his muse, something’s immediately obvious.
They have virtually nothing in common.
Works in the collection are hieratic, often symmetrical utilising compositional devices such as tight, neat hatching. As said of ‘Art From the Margins’ this art is “not wild and exuberant but obsessive… reproduc[ing] the world on a micro-scale, as if making a power object in the hope that will control it, the map-maker seeking to rearrange the territory by delineating it.” Its disordered minds evoking order.
This is taken to the max with Augustine Le Sarge’s ’Symbolic Composition of the Spiritual World’ (1923), a grand vision of hierarchic cosmic order, like a celestial org chart, with no trace of human presence. It evokes order to such a degree its actually pretty frightening. Outsider art was less an influence and more a foreign system to gallery art, German to the galleries’ French.
There’s no more reason to expect this type of art to be homogenous than any other, so all the above might sound like the sort of statement which should be covered in caveats. But it’s striking just how much of what’s on show here fits this description. Perhaps some of the sculpture looks more Dubuffet-like, but that’s all.
Dubuffet, a smart-dressed Parisian from a bourgeois background, found the savage in this because that’s who he was looking for. In a classic case of opposites attracting, he extolled the virtues of an art “foreign to culture” and therefore freely expressive, enthusing “millions of possibilities of expression exist outside the accepted cultural avenues”. I’ve written before how widespread and how hopeless this notion was in Modernism. Dubuffet himself, in later life, conceded he’d been over-idealistic.
Yet, as also said in the same piece, the test of these ideas isn’t in their truth but the effect they have on your art. Whatever works for you works. Duchamp had consistently and cheerfully conceded that his attempts to excise his own presence from his art was an impossibility, but one which made him embrace the exercise all the harder. Dubuffet just did that part at the end, that’s all.
He laced his oils with baser materials such as plaster and sand, sometimes even glass, like the refined oil paint couldn’t be trusted on its own and needed to be set a bad example. Which suggests he wasn’t imagining he could slip the bounds of his own culture but challenging it. As he stirs together irreconcilable ingredients, aesthetically and sometimes literally, he makes a virtue of their collision.
And besides the material influences on his art were slightly different to the tales he told. A fan of Brassai’s photos of Parisian graffiti, he went on to influence the New York graffiti artists Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. (The latter only recently gracing this gallery.) In those pre-spray-can days many of Brassai’s examples had been incised into the stone of walls, and it’s probably not surprising that the earliest works shown here are lithographs. Dubuffet took art back to its basics of mark-making.
And the other big influence, though barely mentioned in this show, is children’s art. Take ’Monsieur D’Hotel’ (1947, above). Like much child art its subject is the human figure, isolated and painted flatly. (There’s probably a more high-falutin’ art term that should be used there, ‘two-dimensionality’ or similar.) When other elements are depicted they’re often accoutrements of the figure, rather than part of an environment to set it in. Hands and gestures are emphasised, sometimes oversized to assign their importance. And note the child-art proportions, the enlarged head above the shrunken blob of a body, the arms joined to the trunk rather than the shoulders.
And what these two have in common is Georges Bataille’s theory that the essence of art is in its root, in the scribble, the child’s drive to deface and despoil pristine spaces, the mucky thumb print gleefully smeared on the pure while paper. (Think how many times you’ve been told by some small-minded moralist that graffiti is inherently childish.)
Perhaps inevitably, as much as with his materials, the images are a collision of things. Take the devouring figures of the lithograph ’The Bird Eaters’ (1944), which seems determined to compare the bird in the bush to the one on the plate. Those swallowed-whole feathered friends could be imagination or offspring being devoured, it doesn’t matter much. This really sets the tone for Dubuffet to come.
And that tone’s the grotesque. As said another time: “The grotesque is the collision of the horrific with the humorous, each simultaneously lacing and souring the other.” Its frisson is from the feeling these two things shouldn’t really be tied together, yet here they are. Dubuffet himself insisted “art should always make you laugh a little and fear a little.” And the point was to not know how much of each.
More Paintings About Landscapes, Women + Ghosts
Then next comes ’Large Black Landscape’ (1946). As the title might suggest, here landscape dominates. This format, with the thin sliver of sky occupying at most the top fifth of the painting, and with lines incised into the thick encrusted paint, will be used again and again. (Alas, you’ll pick up little of this from an internet thumbnail and will just have to trust me.) Dubuffet’s description of walls, “finding themselves in the open while living off darkness” seems to apply her.
Traditionally, landscape was an ordered backdrop to set the figures against. Even when it was made a subject in it’s own right, it would be divided into ordered zones. Contrast that to a work like ’The Roses of the Earth’ (1952, above). While Dubuffet’s working methods commonly led to an encrusted surface, this is a painting in such relief it would almost work in braille. With its brown hues, its ambiguous whether we’re looking at a stretching surface or subterranean layers, an archaeology of buried, amorphous objects. It could be read Surrealistically, the thin strip of off-white standing for consciousness, the tip that doesn’t know of its own iceberg.
In the show’s words, Dubuffet gave “the impression of a ground teeming with energy and a mind brimming with thought”. Not only are his landscapes clearly doubling as mindscapes, there’s a sense he’s not particularly distinguishing between them and his figures at all. The human body is to him is not a jar which holds our consciousness, where art’s function is to accurately label its contents, but a kind of landscape in itself.
This is demonstrated by ’Clown’s Point’ (1956, above). The figure is outlined, at points double-outlined and then colour-coded against the background. But he looks less a discrete object with integrity of form, and more an accumulation of fractured parts. He has two planted legs but no arms, his eyes are glassy and unfocused, his head could be merely another bump on that horizon line.
This is possibly shown still more clearly by his sculpture. With his series ’Little Statues of Precarious Life’ (begun 1954), the show makes much of their being made from discarded material, including the wreckage of a car. Which makes you picture something akin to Paolozzi. But while ’Coquettish Grin’ (1959 below) was made from papier mache, it looks more as if composed of solid rock.
When looking at Henry Moore’s sculpture, it was noticeable how much it felt autochthonian (or born of the earth). Dubuffet feels similar, and at the same time the very opposite. Moore’s work looked idealised, as if everything came from some ideal pure form out of which it developed particular features. Dubuffet’s look like a rough and incohate set of ingredients, the rough always coming before the smooth.
Dubuffet often worked in series, and two series involve important distinctions to what’s above. While one lacked an official name, as virtually ever work was called ’Lady’s Body’ let’s go with that. Even if our example (below) is ’The Tree of Fluids’ (1950).
Look back at ’Monsieur D’Hotel’ a moment. In a complete reversal, it’s the body which is now bulbously oversized and the head shrunk. Arms are de-emphasised by camouflage, by being placed over the body not the background, while it’s the sex organs which are foregrounded and enlarged. The show describes these works as “female bodies that appear to have collapsed into a visceral landscape of flesh”. And this looks like the flesh has been stretched like a cadaver across a dissecting table. (When Dubuffet uses ‘corps’ in his titles it’s merely the French for body, yet it can’t help but underline this association in our Anglophone minds.)
It’s also the colours which are so different - not ochres but putrid pinks, burgundies, off oranges, curdled luridness. Dubuffet combined oil paint with a putty of zinc oxide precisely because they don’t combine, like oil and water, creating those smeary rivulets of colour streaking through the work. The male body is something sealed, integral. The female body is virtually bursting with fluids and innards.
The question of misogyny came up in Dubuffet’s day. And he was insistent these should not be seen as an assault on women but on the Western art tradition of the Nude. It would be truer to say they burn away all the refinements that make that misogyny more palatable, leaving it bare. But this is not the same thing as challenging that misogyny. What this work exposes, at the same time it exemplifies. You suspect that only a misogynist, at least on some level, could have painted them. (You could compare them to de Kooning’s paintings of women at the American Abstract Expressionism show.)
For another series Dubuffet re-used his method of combining oil with an incompatible medium, this time enamel industrial paint. Figures up to now have been insistently embodied. These look so diffuse they’re like phantoms or spirit forms, inhabited ectoplasm. They look less menacing than forlorn, sometimes reaching up to us, and looking out with some mixture of hope and hopelessness. Of these the show would seem to favour ’The Extravagant One’ (1954), making that their poster image. But I preferred ’Intervention’ from the same year (above).
And there seems something lose-lose about all this, as if your only choices are to be trapped in some fleshy bag of fluids or banished outside of one. And there seems something highly Dubuffet about that. Aesthetically, he offers a promise, that we can cast off the confines of culture to create art that is wild and free. But the art that results is not just pessimistic in tone, it often seems precisely about being entrapped.
Roses of the Earth
After moving to Venice in 1957 Dubuffet embarked on a new series, Texturology. He borrowed a trick from local stonemasons, who he saw shaking paint-dripped branches over plastered walls to soften the colour. The results, as in ’The Exemplary Life of The Soil’ (1958), make an abrupt break with the figure.
Seen in another context, you wouldn’t necessarily parse these as artworks at all. (And this time there’s truly no point in my including a thumbnail. It’d just look like sandpaper.) It’s only because they’re hung in a gallery that we look… in fact study them in a way we normally don’t. Then we realise that many things in our lives - a stone lying in the ground, the ground itself, the night sky - we blithely assume to be featureless, but the more we look the more we find to see.
The elision between ground and sky, between micro and macro-scale, seems entirely deliberate. An exhibition of them was titled ’Celebration of the Soil’, and ‘soil’ or ‘earth’ recur in individual titles. But Dubuffet also said his aim was to evoke the “impression of teeming matter, alive and sparkling, which… could also evoke all kinds of indeterminate textures, and even galaxies and nebulae”.
Yet I couldn’t feel a little as I did with the Academy’s Anselm Kiefer show when he went cosmic scale. I kind of missed the figure, the human context. Luckily for me…
At Home A Stranger
In 1961 Dubuffet returned to Paris, re-united himself with his Art Brut collection (to which he was soon adding anew) and announced he’d “decided to start all over again from the beginning”. The result was the Paris Circle series. Though he’d been away only four years, and in another city, he seemed to see Paris with a stranger’s eye. Though he’d been living in Venice, perhaps he even saw the city that way in general. The result s were unarguably the highpoint of his career.
If Futurist art insisted new methods had to be devised to capture the marvel of new world we now inhabited, Dubuffet takes precisely the opposite tack. He depicts it in the oldest ways he can come up with. ’Restaurant’ for example, (1961, above), is a familiar thing shown in an unfamiliar way, partly by being on a grand and depersonalised scale. It's an accumulation of elements, structured round a grid, with no centre of attention. Faces either looking straight forward or in full profile. Writing is hand-transcribed, not formulated into logos. (Here visible in the reflected Restaurant and the Toilet sign, more apparent in other works.)
The perspective is, in the show’s words, “deliberately skewed between a frontal and an aerial view”. Some figures, including the chief waiter, seem seen through a distorting lens. (You could probably debate whether that’s a feature of child or of Folk art thing. Perhaps an interesting question in its own right, it doesn’t concern this work much. Despite the elevated perspective, what we have is a child’s eye view.)
Dubuffet commented “I want my streets to be crazy, my broad avenues, shops and buildings to join in a crazy dance.” And this could be the result of a child’s visit to a restaurant, enthralled by the bustle, trying to keep the experience alive in his or her mind by transcribing it.
Whereas ’Paris, Monparnasse’, despite being from the same year, is of quite a different hue. Literally so, with the the darker, muddier colour scheme. Traffic and pedestrians in a street scene, that should if anything offer more of an ordering device than a restaurant. Added to which, we have the central device of the big bus. But instead, what we see is a mad cacophony.
This isn’t the cliches of urban alienation, the trudging overcoated figure alone against the night and so on. But everyone look isolated, in their bubble cars, in ones and twos, even strung along the side of bus. It’s unclear whether figures are lying down, or that’s just an effect of the crazy perspective, an ambiguity which if anything adds to the effect. Everyone is alone together.
If it’s a feverish form of alienation, where the city assaults your senses in an amassed frenzy, it’s a form of alienation still. Dubuffet described this series as “looking at the most banal things to reveal their phantasmagorical side.”
Though hung on facing walls, however distinct these works are, they shouldn’t be seen as opposites but as the two poles of a spectrum. The seed of each is in the other.
… Then Things Go Bazaar
The earlier Pallant House show had focused on Dubuffet’s next series, L’Hourloupe (beginning 1965), so fortunately I was ready for what was up next. Which is his moving straight from his best era to his worst. They’re works which look Sixties in all the wrong ways, gimmicky and attention-grabbing. They initially look vibrant, but turn out to be deathly - empty surface.
However, I had noted how the works looked better when incorporated into poster design. And the same seems true for another break from painting, into… well, I’m not sure whether to call them sculptures, costumes or theatrical models. Dubuffet called them ‘theatrical props’ and from 1971 to 3 he made 175 of them. He staged the performance work ’Coucou Bazaar’ with a mixture of props, mechanised parts and actors in costume. If we only get twenty here, it’s still the absolute highlight of the l’Hourloupe section (below).
As I’ve argued before the Sixties were a troubled time for visual art, and thankfully when they were over the Dubuffet we know returned. In the Eighties, shortly before his death, he embarked on a series of ’Non-Places', works influenced by American Abstract Expressionism. They were painted in acrylic paint, creating colours so solid and vivid that they look like pure colour, in the same way as Matisse’s cut-outs.
So they lend ’Fulfilment’ (1984, above) a 3D effect, with the vibrant yellows floating above the bright blues and scarlets, moving down to the whites and finally the black background. And at the same time it doesn’t look composed but lively and impulsive, art that lives in its mark-making. In a very real sense, it still exemplifies the child’s delight in creating. Perhaps even the very youngest child and their overlaid scribble marks.
Dubuffet’s is one of those careers where it always feels like he held to things consistently, only for that sense to disappear when you look at his work from moment to moment. Yet if you were to glance back through the thumbnails above, they clearly have something in common. He was perhaps a latecomer to Modernism, yet still found ample ground to travel in the perpetual quest to pull art back down to its roots. Perhaps some struggles are perpetual…
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