Word: dubuffet
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...most natural thing in the world and not, like Francis Bacon, as a pretext for reflection on Eros' power to maim and dominate. His code for the subject in the early '60s was graffiti. Flattened scrawly figures with sticks for limbs and blobs for heads, much influenced by Jean Dubuffet, populate a whole set of images from 1960 to 1963 -- Doll Boy, The Fourth Love Painting, The Most Beautiful Boy in the World (a valentine to the pop singer Cliff Richard, on whom the artist had an unrequited crush), We Two Boys Together Clinging (a line from Walt Whitman...
...Grooms' exuberance there is no doubt. Not for nothing does he favor the rowdy epithet ruckus in collectively naming his pieces: Ruckus Manhattan, Ruckus Rodeo. His tableaux fairly burst with riotous energy. In them, Jean Dubuffet's idea of making an art raw enough to stand up to the chaos of the street comes home to roost. Every Grooms surface pullulates with caricatural figures, each impacted with manic cartoony verve, rendered as layered plywood cutouts, as silhouettes, as stuffed dolls, as shadows. The detail is never hard to read, and one does not get lost in it, because Grooms sticks...
...work brilliantly embodied the crisis of belief in finesse and cultural hierarchies that hit postwar French intellectual life. He had an unerring instinct for farce. Picasso had painted bulls, but for decades few advanced artists had painted a cow, and when Dubuffet did so it seemed to set itself against a whole tradition of animal as heroic metaphor. And for those who (understandably) yearned for a return to the French pictorial tradition of luxe, calme et volupte, the sight of Dubuffet's monstrous kippered nudes squashed flat in their beds of pigment was not only an affront, it was like...
...Dubuffet's interest in the rudimentary and the inchoate meant that conventional subjects were dissected into their most ignoble components. His excremental landscapes and turnip-men, set down in meandering lines and harrowed clods of pigment, were not ordinary -- they were frighteningly banal. "It is where the picturesque is absent," he remarked, "that I am in a state of constant amazement...
Before long, helped by a rising spate of dollars from transatlantic collectors and museums, the waters of taste closed over Dubuffet's work. His great years may be said to have wound up in the '60s, with the strips and wiggles of the Hourloupe cycle, a series of puzzle-like arrangements of such everyday objects as coffeepots and bicycles. But he remained contentious to the end, part magician, part sausage grinder. "Many artists," he said, "begin with the pig and make sausages. I begin with sausages from which I reconstitute...