Word: dubuffet
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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...
...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 FranÇois 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...
...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...
...love of direct action reaches the outer limits of credibility: this mud-footed golem, clumping along inside his ridged, tormented epidermis, is all gesture, assuming form in a challengingly haphazard way. De Kooning's sculptures admittedly look regressive. They evoke memories of the European Expressionism of the 1950s-Dubuffet's turnip men and the familiar postwar imagery of the human figure as disaster area. Thus Figure XII, 1970, lying with outflung arms on a bronze-cast roof tile, obscurely suggests the traditional image of crucifixion even though it could just as easily be a sunbather. De Kooning...