Word: aphoristic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Some of Dubuffet's subjects, like Jean Paulhan, had impeccable Resistance records. Others, like Paul Leautaud -- a brilliant aphorist -- decidedly did not. So when Dubuffet put a portrait of Leautaud, wrinkled like a tortoise or (as his title had it) "a red-skinned sorcerer," into the same portrait show as Paulhan or his friend the painter Jean Fautrier, what was he up to? Ironizing, certainly, on the idea of the portrait as effigy of virtue. But also -- despite his often repeated claim to reject tradition absolutely -- paying complete homage to an earlier French artist: Honore Daumier, whose tiny clay effigies...