Page 41 - Studio International - July 1966

Dubuffet's 'Hourloupe' paintings

London commentary by David Thompson

There is a permanent illogicality about the timing of tion— the way one absorbs it over a period of time, settles
exhibitions and of the public discussion they receive. The down to it, sorts it out and finally gets it in perspective.
major picture-spreads, the background articles, the The more important the exhibition, the longer such a
broadcast interviews, the criticisms in dailies, weeklies process of mental digestion may take, and it could well be
and monthlies, all jostle each other in appearing as close that the only response to it of any real validity is that
to the exhibition's opening day as possible. It is a system which cannot be formulated until the exhibition itself is
dominated by news-value, and it perpetuates the sort of closed. But by then, of course, the subject is no longer
criticism which can at best record first impressions and at topical. Discussion of it is out of date.
worst is based on inspecting the contents of some immi- Before the three recent Dubuffet exhibitions in London
nent exhibition while they are still stacked in the studio entirely fade from journalistic memory, therefore, I would
or some dealer's small backroom without any idea of like to enter a plea for more consideration of Dubuffet's
what they will look like when hung. What is never pro- later work than has been given it. Almost all the pub-
vided for is the actual acumulative effect of an exhibi- lished comment on this unprecedented Dubuffet mani-
festation dealt with aspects of the artist we already knew
about, even if warning sounds of doubt or dissent about
them were more audible than hitherto. Hardly any
serious notice was taken of what the whole first section
at the TATE exhibition (by far the more prominently dis-
played), and the entire exhibition at ROBERT FRASER'S,
were, in fact, about—namely the Hourloupe paintings done
since 1962.
The significance of these surely merits more critical
discussion. Not only has the Hourloupe style already occu-
pied almost a fifth of Dubuffet's productive career to
date : he has indicated that it is the style he will now con-
centrate on (in other words, what had seemed a charac-
teristic switching from idiom to idiom is now apparently
over), and several aspects of the style—however much it
grows out of and continues from the earlier work—in fact
contradict the aesthetic assumptions that were previously
relevant to it. The most prominent of these assumptions
are to do with Dubuffet's flaunted faux naif manner (his
'primitivism') ; with his brilliantly opportunist way with
materials (his 'matter painting') ; and with his insistence
that both these were methods of cutting through conven-
tional responses to the image in order to present what he
called unadulterated 'facts' to the spectator. The Hour-
loupe paintings have reverted to an entirely traditional
technique, and in their restricted range of colour and
striped patterning they resist all but the simplest tempta-
tions to indulge in Parisian facture. The images may still
retain the endearing wobbliness of contour which had
hitherto been Dubuffet's way of referring to child-art,
but they function now in a totally different manner. They
don't make the image easier to grasp, but more difficult.
They elaborately complicate the reading of it by break-
ing up the larger forms into a network of smaller, internal
ones, many of which seem to register as new images in
their own right at the same time as they contribute to a
kind of perceptual, formal analysis of the whole. It is
this mysterious fracturing of the image into innumerable
autonomous parts just hinting, nevertheless, at a total

Top Vue sur la mer 1935 Gouache 19 5/8 x 26 3/8 in.
Shown in the Arts Council exhibition Dubuffet Drawings which will
be at the City Art Gallery, Leeds, from July 9-30

Bottom left Buste de femme 1964 'Marca' drawing 13 1/4 x 11 1/2 in.
In the Dubuffet Drawings exhibition
Bottom right Cafetière 2 1965 Vinyl on canvas 41 1/2 x 26 3/7 in.
Shown in the recent exhibition Ustensils utopiques at the
Robert Fraser Gallery
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