Word: dubuffet
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...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...
...When Dubuffet died of emphysema last week at 83, he was the most honored senior painter in France -- indeed the most important French visual artist of any kind to emerge since World War II. In the past two decades alone, his oeuvre had filled eight full-scale museum retrospectives and countless one-man shows from Chicago to Paris. Large corporations like Chase Manhattan saw him as a wild pet laden with status, and commissioned huge, dull sculptures from him for their plazas. His fiercely polemical essays, long-winded but dense with aphorism, were collected in two thick volumes. (Nobody...
...intensity and impact of Dubuffet's career were all the more vivid for its late start. Born in Le Havre in 1901, he followed his father's trade as a wine merchant and (apart from one desultory spell as an art student in his teens, and another in the 1930s) did not commit himself to painting until after his 41st birthday. Yet by the end of the war, and especially by 1947 -- when he exhibited his riotously funny and touching series of portraits of French intellectuals and writers -- Dubuffet's work was not only an object of public scandal...
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...