Dubuffet: Realism As Absurdity

By ROBERT HUGHES

I would like people to see my work as a rehabilitation of scorned values and, in any case, make no mistake about it, a work of ardent celebration.

Thus Jean Dubuffet, 71, the ex-wine merchant from Le Havre, described the paintings that have earned him a reputation as France's most eminent living artist as well as its official culture scourge. The three decades of his output now displayed in an enormous retrospective at Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum resemble a strip-mining operation. With indefatigable and clamorous gusto, Dubuffet has chewed up whole tracts of land once thought to be outside culture.

This is the territory he calls art brut--"raw art." Its landscape includes the gay scribblings of children, the darker grotesqueries of madmen's art and the limitless repertory of graffiti and folk images--naive, threatening, bizarre or just plain corny--that lies between.

Dubuffet's position is odd. The products of a foe of "orthodox" beauty, his tarry clumps of mud and orange peel, highly insured, decorate half the bon bourgeois salons of Paris. The author of many eloquent tracts, he speaks in defense of incoherence and illiteracy as poetic principles. An intellectual, Cartesian to the fingertips and a close friend of such literary eminences as Raymond Queneau, Jean Paulhan and FranC,ois Ponge, he has based 30 years of work on the premise that Western culture is a grotesque irrelevancy. Dubuffet is indeed a quintessentially French figure.

Despite the ritual assurances in the Guggenheim catalogue that Dubuffet is still a subversive force, the flurry and scandals that once attended his shows have died. Whatever else he may be doing, he is not--as a New York critic claimed in 1948--"debasing and perverting the very nature of art." His crude little turnip-men and personages compounded, apparently, of excrement and butterfly wings, his animals and objects in all their quirkish black humor with (lately) their deadpan repetition of red and blue stripes within the wiggling contours, are only pictures after all. They have altogether lost their shock. Most of them are now drained of their power even to surprise. Some look ornamental to the point of sleekness. To an extent that nobody would have predicted 15 years ago, they have entered the canon of belle peinture: what tract of paint surface could be more grazeable than the richly troweled field on which Dubuffet's Cow in a Black Meadow stands mooing soulfully, the hilarious bovine essence of solitude?

The required view of Dubuffet is that of the artist as noble savage. In the words of the French critic Georges Limbour, he is driven by "a dedication to total liberty from all rules and conventions of representation" to "reject all previous knowledge--in short, to reinvent his art and his methods for every new production." Ostensibly, Dubuffet would like to escape European psychology and history. The past oppresses him. Originality means innocence. Yet his paintings are undeniably full of rules, conventions and accepted signs taken over from other art forms. The shorthand of child drawing--the wavy contours and schematic figures, the jammed and frontally flattened space--is as important to a Dubuffet like Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle as perspective space is in a Perugino. Dubuffet used these techniques deliberately to discover how ludicrous, violent or absurd an image a given set of conventions could carry within the context of modern painting. His drawing is stylish to the point of mannerism. Indeed his pictures depend on that context more than his admirers will allow. Madmen understand the art of the mad; children, child art. But when an eminently rational adult, whose career as an artist began when he was 41, proclaims that he and we can become as little children, an impressive feat of cultural legerdemain has been attempted--and nobody in the museum gets much closer to innocence.

Getting back to innocence, or to primal crudity (for Dubuffet they are the same), without becoming a stylist is one of the 20th century's dreams. It presupposes a return to the origins of form, to the half-articulate, the instinctive: uncensored desire. Me Tarzan, you Raphael. Dubuffet's art speaks directly to anyone who wants to abolish the humanist past--that area of art that insists that man is the flower of the universe and can, by force and subtlety of intellect, control it. His images assert the opposite: a nude becomes a lump of hairy pink clay with a pinhead, swagging numbles and a skin so gouged by fissures, cracks and graffiti that it is on the verge of turning into a landscape. The hierarchy of human to animal to vegetable to mineral is abolished; the popeyed homunculi who scurry like moles through his landscapes or rear up, delicately rainbow-tinted like decaying fungi, in paintings such as Extravagant Lady, 1954 (opposite), are mere coalescences in human form. They are not people but slices of life, and in this perversely microscopic sense Dubuffet is a realist painter. The flat "absurdity" of his gaze on the fallen objects of this world has led to the idea that Dubuffet is not interested in beauty. That is untrue. He claims for his art "another and vaster beauty, touching all objects and beings, not excluding the most despised."

It is the beauty of comedy, of the metaphysical pratfall. In Dubuffet's uncategorized world, objects are neither noble nor base. They simply are. Dubuffet, perhaps more than any other modern painter, has made his audience aware of the ramifications of meaning less existence. Agitated by a kind of cosmic giggle, his large energy and abundant talent have conspired to demonstrate that comedy and objectivity can be synonymous. But in proving it, he finishes--like any other primitivist modern painter--against a barrier of style. This may be why many of Dubuffet's paintings, for all their humor, power of imagery and often extreme brutality of surface, have come by slow degrees to look like august cuisine, as if a gifted French chef were performing miracles with horsemeat.

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