Page 20 - Studio International - May 1966

source, and run them through an agile—perhaps a little that comedy comes, in essence, from our awareness of
too agile—sensibility. But to what end? the Fall: comedy is our sense of the gap between what
man ideally could be and what, blocked and surrounded
In all Dubuffet's writing about his own work, which con- by his limited nature and his loss of grace, he is. The

stitutes one of the most intelligent and profound com- epitome of this is Alfred Jarry's grotesque figure of Ubu,
mentaries on his own art by any painter since van Gogh, King of Poland (`That is to say: Nowhere'), the lumber-
no remark is more famous than his observation that art ing incarnation of stupidity, pettiness, and greed. W. B.
should make you laugh a little and make you a little Yeats went to the first night of Ubu Roi in 1896 and,
afraid. though unable to follow the play properly, came out of
That remark has a long ancestry in French culture but the theatre with a brilliant insight:
almost none in English. It goes back to the serio-comic ... we have shouted for the play, but that night at the Hotel
Ciseaux 1966 figure of Gargantua, but it was most effectively re-made Corneille I am very sad, for comedy, objectivity, has dis-
Felt pen on paper
11+ x 8+ in. by Charles Baudelaire and Alfred Jarry. I am thinking played its growing power once more. I say, after S. Mallarmé,
Robert Fraser Gallery of Baudelaire's essay on the Comic, in which he argued after Verlaine, after G. Moreau, after Puvis de Chavannes,

Piano 1966 Jouhandeau aux lunettes (Jouhandeau in spectacles) 1946
Chalk and white gouache
Vinyl on canvas
51 1/4 x 38 7/8 in. 16 1/2 x 12 5/8 in.
Robert Fraser Gallery