Word: dubuffet
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...Many of the features in your Art section have been far out in left field, but this one about Jean Dubuffet is the limit. He is simply a gangster who expresses his antisocial character and makeup in the medium of painting. Maybe I am old-fashioned in believing that art should have an esthetic appeal...
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...
...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...
...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...