Beauty Is Nowhere

"Personally," Painter Jean Dubuffet once declared, "I believe very much in values of savagery. I mean: instinct, passion, mood, violence, madness." No one can accuse Dubuffet of being false to his credo, for his paintings (see color) often seem to be the work of a savage or a madman--or a child. They have caused gasps of shock and hoots of derision; yet today a Dubuffet canvas can command as much as $30,000, and among critics it is now the thing to say that Dubuffet himself is the most important painter to come out of postwar France.

Last week the man seemed to be everywhere. There was an exhibit of his drawings in Paris, a show of lithographs in Holland. France's Musee des Arts Decoratifs is planning a major retrospective, and a gallery in the West German city of Hannover has just opened a display of 88 works that left visitors wavering between awe and revulsion. In Manhattan, World House Galleries was holding a Dubuffet retrospective of its own--a modest (41 works) but well-selected sampling of a strange career.

Bon Voyage! Like Gauguin, Jean Dubuffet (roughly pronounced Doo-boo-FAY) started out as an unlikely candidate to be anything at all in the art world. His father was a prosperous Le Havre wine merchant, and Dubuffet barely escaped being the same. He tried painting for a while, then gave it up in disgust because he decided he was only imitating his Paris friends, Suzanne Valadon, Raoul Dufy and Fernand Leger. He went back to selling wine, got "a wife, furniture, a maid, a brother-in-law, a car, kids." Then one day before World War II he started to paint again. "My wife didn't like it ... She disappeared. Bon voyage! The brother-in-law disappeared, too."

For the next few years, Dubuffet worked the back streets of Paris, painting little bistros and corset shops, jazz combos, and a host of men and women in the misery of routine (Woman Removing Her Chemise, Gallant Woman Removing Her Panties). There were also closeups of earth and paintings resembling graffiti, the rude scribblings found on walls throughout the ages. In 1944 Dubuffet got his first Paris show. Even for a city that had just been liberated, this was almost too much freedom to bear.

Game of Ceremonies. "Dangerous jokes," huffed one critic; "I'm putting all my hope in puberty," declared another crushingly. Dubuffet's next show proved even more distressing, for by now he had begun painting with tar, sand, string, stones, glass and mud. "No doubt about it," snorted the Louvre's Rene Huyghe, "nothing in the head, nothing in the heart, and nothing in the hands."

But Jean Dubuffet had a great deal in his head, and because he did, his work took on a special excitement. His philosophy, such as it is, amounted to sweeping rejection of Europe's cherished art traditions. Occidental culture, he said, had become "a game of ceremonies," and he bluntly declared that "I would not go across the street to see a Renaissance painting." He blamed the Greeks for exalting the idea of beauty. At best, he insisted, beauty was a cruel ideal ("It is distressing to think about people deprived of beauty because they have not a straight nose, or are too corpulent, or too old"). More important, it was only an illusion. "Esthetics bores me," Dubuffet cried. "I believe beauty is nowhere."

Dance & Yell. To get art back to its proper role, Dubuffet argued, it must be "stripped of all the tinsel, laurels, and buskins in which it has been decked, and must be seen naked with all the creases of its belly. Once disencumbered, it will dance and yell like a madman, which is its function." Dubuffet became the leader of the art brut (raw art) movement, which dedicated itself to the proposition that the only art worth while was "spontaneous," and that those who are the most spontaneous are savages, lunatics and children.

Esthetics was not all that Dubuffet was out to destroy. He also wanted to jolt traditional ideas of time and space. If he painted a woman, she became all women, the archetype. Often she would have the appearance of a squooshy polyp who was not only a mass of flesh and viscera but also a piece of geology--a part of history, a part of the earth. As for scale, Dubuffet would have none of it. A painting could be both a vast landscape and at the same time a tiny patch of dust seen through a microscope. Nor was the beholder ever supposed to know just what Dubuffet's images were supposed to be. "I am pleased," he said, "to see life in trouble, going insane--hesitating between certain forms that we recognize as belonging to our familiar surroundings and others that we do not, and whose voices astonish."

The Grand Disorder. In his time, Dubuffet has used everything from kitchen utensils to fingers to paint with, and his materials have ranged from broken glass to rusty nails. He has even cut up his own canvases and pasted the pieces higgledy-piggledy to make up an "assemblage." Should the pieces become unglued and move a bit, so much the better, for that showed the work had a life of its own. To Dubuffet, every painting is "a landscape of the brain"--a "disorder of images, of ... facts purely cerebral and internal--visceral perhaps."

In spite of himself, Dubuffet has at times achieved a sort of beauty--the warmth of a mellow brown-red, the haunted look of some of his globular spooks. But essentially his work cannot be judged by the eye, for he insists that he is addressing the mind. And if the mind reels, that is just the effect Dubuffet wants. "A work of art," says he, "must have a significance so profound, so universal, so numerous and diverse, that each can drink from it the liqueur that he likes. Never explained (to explain would be to exhaust), never totally deciphered."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.