Word: dubuffets
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...lack should be filled by Moi! Self-Portraits in the 20th Century at the Musée du Luxembourg (March 31-July 25), in which 150 artists and photographers take a good look at themselves in dozens of different ways: unsparing closeup (the aging Degas); in duplicate (Dubuffet, with bowler hat); in triplicate (Norman Rockwell, Jacque Henri Lartigue); or, most popular, nude (Suzanne Valadon, Gwen John, Cindy Sherman). Some pose with palettes, others focus on the essence of their art: Henry Moore sketched his strong sculptor's hands. And James Montgomery Flagg used his own face for the famous World...
When the Nazis occupied the city, the party was over. The grim mood of the times is reflected in paintings like Jean Dubuffet's Building Fa?ades of 1946, where graffiti-like scratches are clawed into a thick black surface, and in sculpture like the Swiss Alberto Giacometti's attenuated and isolated figures. Death's heads entered Picasso's work. Playwright Antonin Artaud spent the war in mental hospitals undergoing electroshock therapy. His Self-Portrait of 1947 almost destroys its flimsy paper with savage pencil lines. It's in a private collection, so here is a rare chance to see this...
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...