Word: dubuffet
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...Arts Décoratifs is planning a major retrospective, and a gallery in the West German city of Hannover has just opened a display of 88 works that left visitors wavering between awe and revulsion. In Manhattan, World House Galleries was holding a Dubuffet retrospective of its own-a modest (41 works) but well-selected sampling of a strange career...
...Voyage! Like Gauguin, Jean Dubuffet (roughly pronounced Doo-boo-FAY) started out as an unlikely candidate to be anything at all in the art world. His father was a prosperous Le Havre wine merchant, and Dubuffet barely escaped being the same. He tried painting for a while, then gave it up in disgust because he decided he was only imitating his Paris friends, Suzanne Valadon, Raoul Dufy and Fernand Léger. He went back to selling wine, got "a wife, furniture, a maid, a brother-in-law, a car, kids." Then one day before World War II he started...
...next few years, Dubuffet worked the back streets of Paris, painting little bistros and corset shops, jazz combos, and a host of men and women in the misery of routine (Woman Removing Her Chemise, Gallant Woman Removing Her Panties). There were also closeups of earth and paintings resembling graffiti, the rude scribblings found on walls throughout the ages. In 1944 Dubuffet got his first Paris show. Even for a city that had just been liberated, this was almost too much freedom to bear...
Game of Ceremonies. "Dangerous jokes," huffed one critic; "I'm putting all my hope in puberty," declared another crushingly. Dubuffet's next show proved even more distressing, for by now he had begun painting with tar, sand, string, stones, glass and mud. "No doubt about it," snorted the Louvre's René Huyghe, "nothing in the head, nothing in the heart, and nothing in the hands...
...Jean Dubuffet had a great deal in his head, and because he did, his work took on a special excitement. His philosophy, such as it is, amounted to sweeping rejection of Europe's cherished art traditions. Occidental culture, he said, had become "a game of ceremonies," and he bluntly declared that "I would not go across the street to see a Renaissance painting." He blamed the Greeks for exalting the idea of beauty. At best, he insisted, beauty was a cruel ideal ("It is distressing to think about people deprived of beauty because they have not a straight nose...