Page 18 - Studio International - May 1966

Opposite is absolutely unbridgeable. All we can do is try, by `Dubuffet realized that the struggle against the sight—
Lettre a M. Royer (Desordre sur sympathetic extrapolation, to understand how that cave- final filter of our communion with the world—must begin
la table) 1953
Oil man felt about his magical effigy. When, late at night in at the beginning of this visual contact: all perceptions
32 x 40 in. a tube station, I see a poster for Thunderball with a had to be stripped from the crust of centuries-old indo-
Pierre Matisse Gallery, picture of Sean Connery to which some lonely adolescent lence, vivified, restored to their original virginity. In
New York
has appended a huge penis in Biro, I don't see that image order to shake off the yoke of socially sanctified beauty,
the way the scribbler did, it can't possibly mean the same the artist had to begin by awakening the stultified per-
to me; all I can do is form an approximate idea of what ception.' Dubuffet claimed the revival of visual idioms
stresses led him to draw it. This fundamental distance that were even more ancient' (than Hellenism) 'as they
between style and experience is expressed by Dubuffet in went back to the dawn of mankind, recorded not in
the simple fact that he doesn't draw his graffiti on walls, doubtful chronicles but in the inarticulate certainty of
where they would be direct, but on canvas, where they blood.' Both these quotes happen to be by the same
are comments on graffiti. author, Pierre Rouve, but they typify the sort of thing
The dream of getting back to absolute crudity without one is used to reading about Dubuffet. In the first, the
turning yourself into a stylist is, of course, a very attrac- naive view of history, which is, if nothing else, charming:
tive one. But the arguments for it have a mock-pastoral the eyes of the West have been blind for 'centuries', but
flavour: Marie-Antoinette's courtiers, togged up as pea- now, with the arrival of our culture-hero, we learn to see.
sants, at their levies in the grounds of the Petit Trianon. Actually, Rouve's image of virginity is more apposite
The patterns of conversation are distinctive: a keyed-up than it seems—you cannot restore virginity; all you can
Paysage au chien mort 1952
Indian ink rhetoric full of historical imperatives, both hectoring and do is simulate it, whether by plastic surgery or by the
19 1/4 x 25 1/4 in. woolly. kind of stylistic exercise in which Dubuffet is engaged.