Word: dubuffet
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...wasn't bound up with the seizure and degradation of public space. It was, so to speak, more muted and pastoral: harmless scratches, small obscenities, chalk on Roman distemper. To adopt graffiti to the painted canvas was to pay homage to European art informel -- Fautrier, Wols and especially Jean Dubuffet. Their influence plays on Twombly's earliest paintings of the 1950s, with their lumpish glandular forms, the movement of the paint slowed up by mixing it with earth but then accelerated by a nervous, hairy scratching around the edges...
...capable of toughness. He can summon a carnivalesque energy, as in Ferragosto IV, 1961. He enjoys the blooming and buzzing of nature, though his responses to it in recent years -- evocations of the rural hill landscapes around his studio in Gaeta -- are formulaic and hark back to Dubuffet and, earlier, to Soutine's Ceret paintings. The phrases he writes on the canvas are place names and snatches of poetry, done in a faint cursive script that is always on the point of trailing off into illegibility; they suggest fatigue and forgetting. But the structure / of the paintings themselves, the placement...
What De Kooning found at the end of this highway, however, when he moved permanently to Long Island in 1963, was mostly suds and mayonnaise. The long $ series of pink squidgy pictures -- landscapes, nudes splayed like frogs in memory of Dubuffet, and female clam diggers -- that issued from his studio over the next 15 years was lush and trivial. The drawing is submerged in weak, declamatory, wambling brushstrokes; the color -- mostly pink -- is bright and boring. Yet you could never write De Kooning off. He came back in the late '70s with some big, rapturously congested landscape-body images with...
...survey of the radical paintings of Jean Dubuffet...
...Peter Schjeldahl points out in the catalog, Dubuffet "had the transgressor's secret love of limits, the outlaw's perverse attachment to laws," and this repeatedly shows itself in a sense of surface, texture and inflection that becomes extravagantly, almost morbidly, refined. His figures made of butterfly wings are exquisite; looking at some of his surfaces, particularly in the later collages and "Texturologies" of the 1950s, one finds oneself comparing them to the tarnished and mottled silver leaf on a Japanese screen or to richly tanned and patinated leather. Doubtless some of them present insoluble problems for the conservator...