Word: dubuffets
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Brassai's graffiti pictures would be immensely influential among postwar artists like Jean Dubuffet and Antoni Tapies, who were sifting the rubble for a new imagery suited to a postapocalyptic world. Brassai would also make a considerable name for himself through his camera portraits of the artists and writers who were his friends, including Picasso, Miller, Matisse and Giacometti. But his greatest work will always be his views of nocturnal Paris. He made the night something...
...well. While billed as "explorations of form, color, shape and mass," his paintings and small assemblages convey little original thought. "Relief with Bones" is a particular disaster-- constructed of chicken bones, a shoebox lid, and canvas, this mess of gouache and watercolor artlessly melds the elemental primitivism of Jean DuBuffet with the cool detachment of pop artists. Although occasionally suggesting the powerful brushwork of a Kline, Smith's other paintings pale in comparison with the power of his sculpture...
Broadly, the catastrophe evoked two kinds of response from European artists. The first was to rebuild, to assert continuity with the past. The second was to embrace the ruins in an imagery of loss, primitivism and seeming inarticulateness, as with Jean Dubuffet's graffiti and turnip men, or the inchoate-looking lumps and scratches of French abstractionist Jean Fautrier. The older artists tended to take the first road, the younger the second...
...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...