Page 17 - Studio International - May 1966

and then produce an entirely new system of forms whose a schema of irrationality, as Dubuffet did, this does not
roots are so deeply sunk in the thought and dreams of his necessarily make the choice instinctive; and even if it
society that they change sensibility overnight. was instinctive, its articulation will be deliberate. Which
I do not know of any art movement whose origins sup- is to say no more than that artists know what they are
port this naive theory of the sudden, autonomous act painting and why they are painting it. Whatever the
with no past. 'If we were to burn all the libraries,' mused history of style will be, it is not a Fisher King which has
Hugo Ball, 'a wonderful age of innocence would begin.' to be ceremonially destroyed every five years to ensure
But if the Dadaists had burnt the libraries, they would fertility.
also have burnt the books from which they borrowed this Dubuffet's style is quite deliberate, which is why it is
idea: Nietzsche's, for instance. primitivism, not primitive art. It is the painting of a man
Art builds and feeds on other art. It also feeds on litera- who is very much aware of a modern European dream—
ture—Botticelli and Poliziano, Gauguin and Poe, the the idea that vitality, within the context of modern cul-
Surrealist painters and the Surrealist writers. To point ture, can be achieved by a return to the origins of form,
this out is not to denigrate the artist's powers. It is rather to the crude, the half-articulate, the instinctive. Un-
to give painters the credit of an intelligence which the fortunately, it seems to me, no matter how far you go
theory of endless originality denies them. Like their back, you will still finish against a wall of style. Neither
Vache au nez subtil 1954 audience, they read and they look. As they look, they Dubuffet, nor you, nor I can become as little children;
Oil assent to some of the forms they see, and reject others. we can only pretend to have done so. We do not see an
35 x 45+ in.
Museum of Modern Art, This assent, once it has become conscious, is an act of Altamira bison the way the cave-men did, because all
New York choice. The painter chooses his schema. If he has chosen the assumptions of our society are different, and the gap