Page 21 - Studio International - May 1966

after our own verse, after the faint mixed tints of Conder,
what more is possible? After us the Savage God.
`Comedy, objectivity.' It is this flat gaze at the fallen
human animal which Dubuffet's art supplies : a refusal
to make choices between what is noble and what is
mean. There is, so to speak, nothing intrinsic in Dubuffet's
world. When he looks at a human being or a plant he is
not really concerned with what it potentially is, or what
it might become, but just with the thing itself, stripped
of its attachments, floating like anything else in an absurd
universe-without-values.
One of the most passionately-held tenets of Renaissance
thought—and therefore of Renaissance painting, and the
art which derives from the Renaissance tradition—is the
idea of a natural order within the universe, a hierarchy of
importance rising from earth and minerals through or-
ganic matter to plants, insects, animals, useful animals,
and finally man. Dubuffet's art presumes the exact
opposite. I stress the word 'presumes' : Dubuffet's philo-
sophical position is consistent, and he has worked out his
painting brilliantly in terms of it—but, for reasons which
lie outside this essay, I disagree with it. However, ob-
jectivity is the apparent keynote of his art—the Sartrean
`look' which can reduce any object to closed existence,
and from that to absurdity. This has led to the frequently-
Corps de dame 1950
Reed pen (calamus made assertion that Dubuffet is not interested in beauty.
and Indian ink) That is untrue, and Dubuffet has described 'my work to
10 5/8 x 8 1/4 in.

Olympia:
corps de dame 1950
Oil
35 x 45 3/4 in.
Formerly Larry Aldrich
collection