Word: dubuffets
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...historian Susan J. Cooke points out in an interesting catalog essay, Dubuffet's portraits of French intellectuals were something more than "literary portraits," as such things might be understood in London or New York City. They dropped, under the decidedly ambiguous title "More Handsome Than They Think," into a culture that had always put a high symbolic value on the idea of the writer as conscience of the society. And this was at a time when quite a few writers (such as Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, editor of the prestigious La Nouvelle Revue Francaise) had betrayed that idea by siding...
...Some of Dubuffet's subjects, like Jean Paulhan, had impeccable Resistance records. Others, like Paul Leautaud -- a brilliant aphorist -- decidedly did not. So when Dubuffet put a portrait of Leautaud, wrinkled like a tortoise or (as his title had it) "a red-skinned sorcerer," into the same portrait show as Paulhan or his friend the painter Jean Fautrier, what was he up to? Ironizing, certainly, on the idea of the portrait as effigy of virtue. But also -- despite his often repeated claim to reject tradition absolutely -- paying complete homage to an earlier French artist: Honore Daumier, whose tiny clay effigies...
...long. Just as some new art (not all) starts ugly and becomes beautiful, so works of art that begin their career surrounded by announcements of a new start, a radical primitivism, tend to find a level where -- surprise! -- their ancestors emerge from the closet. So it is with Dubuffet, who never ceased to insist that he was kicking free from the conventions of Western culture, starting with the idea of beauty itself. Yet his attachment to rural images from earlier French art, particularly the earthy fields of Millet, is pervasive and obvious; some of his "Texturologies" might as well...
These have sometimes been interpreted as the most radical of Dubuffet's works because they are the most apparently abstract. But Dubuffet didn't see them that way at all. No matter how small the teeming signs got, they still represented something -- a point the artist later emphasized by cutting some of them up and using them as the facial hair in his hilarious sequence of bearded heads, such as Beard of Stubborn Refusal...
...bulls. Kippered there on the canvas in their dense yet somehow airy paint, yearning, dumb and absurdly coquettish, they are among the most memorable animals in modern art. Several of them, like Cow with the Beautiful Muzzle, 1954, also contain some of the most inspired and wristy drawing of Dubuffet's career, formed by the brush -- or its handle -- dragging through the thick paint...