Page 19 - Studio International - May 1966

Note, too, the pseudo-Lawrentian touch. Documents are
not to be trusted, for we learn with our blood.
In this welter of gore, the shape of Dubuffet's achieve-
ment becomes so clotted that it becomes a mere carica-
ture of the assumptions of his own paintings : that inno-
cence is both possible and desirable. Dubuffet's art speaks
directly to everyone who feels that humanism has failed
him and who wants to abolish the humanist past—that is
to say, that area of art which insists that man is the flower
of the universe and can, by force of intellect, control it.
But is there any difference, in point of originality, be-
tween adopting the formal system of a Perugino and
using that of a child's drawing? Can Dubuffet be said
to have stripped himself of 'all rules and conventions of
representation' when, in fact, his conventions for repre-
senting objects in space can be seen in any nursery, clinic
or museum of primitive art? There are few pictures
painted in the last thirty years in which the question of
convention is more important than Dubuffet's Grand Jazz
Band (New Orleans), 1944, or that marvellous image he
painted in the same year, Childbirth. We know how to
`read' Childbirth as forms in space: the convention of
human figures seen from the side, while the table top
is rotated through 90 degrees to lie frontally on the picture
plane, is familiar from naive art; so are the scrawled,
doll-like faces, the stiffness, the carefully-crude drawing.
And so is the laconic sexuality of the image—the fact of
birth, irreducibly stated, set down with no fuss or veiling
and none of the sentimental reverence with which our
values tend to cloud it. But this isn't instinctive. It's a
brilliantly-deployed stylistic exercise—to discover how
violent an image a certain kind of convention can carry
within the context of twentieth-century painting. Dubuf-
fet's pictures depend on that context for their effect more
than you might suppose. In a genuinely primitive cul-
ture, they would sink into anonymity.
The more you reduce an image to a sign, the more im-
portant conventions—the assumed rules of how to read
and interpret the sign—become. Dubuffet is well aware
of this. 'Painting is based on accepted conventions of
transcription,' he wrote,
(many painters simply use those established by their fore-
runner; others established new ones for themselves). Many
believe that when they make one forget these conventions
as much as they can—hiding, as they say in the theatre, the
puppet strings—they will obtain a stronger effect of real life.
But I believe, on the contrary, that it is much more effective
to make these conventions constantly apparent, and even
to often change them, and put them constantly in question,
so as to prevent them from being forgotten.
The real revolutionaries, like Giotto, Masaccio, Cara-
vaggio or, in more recent times, Cezanne or the Cubists,
did much to 'invent the conventions for themselves'.
Dubuffet did not. Despite the initial surprise of his work,
despite its humour, alarm, power of imagery and fre-
quently extreme beauty of surface, he has not, except in
a very small degree, expanded our total experience of
forms. He has simply taken over forms from another

L'accouchement (Childbirth) 1944
Oil on canvas 391 x 31k in.
Courtesy Dubuffet Secretariat, Paris
179