Page 22 - Studio International - May 1966

substitute another and vaster beauty, touching all objects slice of earth, with its infinity of micro-organisms and
and beings, not excluding the most despised ... I would trivial incidents of texture, is unique. It could keep going
like people to see my work as an enterprise for the re- endlessly outside the frame. It is, literally, a slice of life.
habilitation of scorned values and, in any case, make no And it is in this peculiar sense that Dubuffet is a realist
mistake, a work of ardent celebration.' painter.
To see this objectivity in action, one has only to turn to But the Texturologies and Materiologies, strictly accepted
Dubuffet's Texturologies of 1957, his Terres Radieuses of on these terms, are very boring. They are no more
1952, or his Corps des Dames of 1950. Part of the first interesting than bits of earth. But in fact, they are much
impact of the Corps des Dames was that, in them, the nude less interesting than earth : earth is alive, it is full of
had been deprived of all its traditional associations of worms and real organisms, you can pick it up and run it
uniqueness, harmony, and stability. One saw instead a through your fingers and smell it. Dubuffet's paste has no
grotesque, ballooning lump of hairy pink clay, with a pin smell; it is cold, hard, lifeless stuff—a metaphor pretend-
head, swagging umbles, and a torso that was so gouged ing to be reality. Once the very interesting idea behind
and traversed by fissures, cracks, and accidental marks the Texturologies is assimilated—for they are intellectual's
that it was on the verge of turning into a landscape. It painting of the most rarefied kind—one begins to see the
looked like a natural object, all right; but you could not surface as merely ornamental.
read it as a celebration of human form within any estab- One must grant immediately that the Texturologies are
lished context except that of child or primitive art; and an extreme case. But I am inclined to think that this
its identity as a human image was blurred both by the deficiency—art fraudulently pretending to be reality—
titling, which alluded to vegetable matter (Rose Incarnate, affects even Dubuffet's best work, and that it is not sup-
Gaudy Bunch of Flowers or Tree of Fluids), and by the mass ported by a powerful enough formal system to give it
of biological incident with which its skin, like a landscape, coherence. Can that be why so many of his pictures, in
was encrusted. For man—or woman—becomes a thing in the last ten years, have come to look like cuisine, in a
Dubuffet's paintings. The face that wears one of Dubuffet' s way which other, equally convulsive, but less primitive
celebrated beards is no more than a patch on which hair images (de Kooning's Woman series, for instance, or the
grows; it has no identity beyond this function. The pop- work of Miró or Kirchner) have not?
eyed, mottled homunculi that scurry like moles through Perhaps the problem is built so firmly into the nostalgic
Dubuffet's landscapes are no more than a coalescence, in nature of modern primitivism that it cannot be overcome,
temporary human form, of the mindless, crawling life even by a painter as generously gifted as Jean Dubuffet.
which inhabits the whole surface of the painting. They Whether humanism is dead or not (and its alleged corpse
have no more 'importance' as an image than the horizon- has been dragged out and kicked so often, like the corpses
less spread of paste that you find in the Texturologies. And at Teruel during the Spanish Civil War, that one begins
even in the Texturologies, there is no question of contain- to wonder why it won't lie down), the values of l'art brut
ment or focus. You are not made to feel that this particular are not nourishing enough to replace it.
q

Le livre de barbe 1959 René Drouin mains ouvertes 1946
Indian ink with collage of prints Oil on canvas 51 x 38 in. L'inconsistant (The insubstantial one) 1959
23 5/8 x 13 3/8 in. Pinto collection, Paris Oil 45 1/2 x 35 in. Private collection
182