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A Gourmet Dubuffet
| Article
# : |
11231 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1993 |
1,673 Words |
| Author
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Eric Gibson
Eric Gibson, art critic for the Washington Times, last wrote
on Henry Ossewa Tanner in the September 1991 issue of The
World & I. |
James Demetrion, director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., believes there are three giants among modern artists in Europe after World War II: Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon, and Jean Dubuffet.
Jean who?
Such is the condition of our collective historical memory nowadays that a pioneering modern artist can, in our culture, be virtually forgotten less than a decade after his death. This is what has happened to Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985), the subject of an extremely good and well-thought-through exhibition organized by Demetrion at his museum. The exhibition--Jean Dubuffet, 1943-1963: Paintings, Sculptures, Assemblages--is at the Hirshhorn through September 12.
To those who remember him, Dubuffet is best known as a champion of what he called Art Brut, or "raw art." He was an ardent admirer of the art of children and the insane; he believed their innocent, untutored outlook gave them the most direct access to their emotions, making their art more "honest." And Dubuffet sought to give his own work the character of Art Brut, taking the Modernist penchant for nontraditional materials, sources, and procedures to a new extreme. He made art using materials such as sponge, slag, and tin foil. Many of his paintings are made of a thick layer of pigment and plaster: The image is incised with the end of a brush and formed by pressing pebbles into the cake-icing surface.
In his rhetoric, recently made available in an anthology entitled Asphyxiating Culture, Dubuffet sounds like a latter-day Futurist in his ferocious denunciations of the stilling effects of history and bourgeois culture on the creative spirit. Yet like the Futurists themselves, Dubuffet remained firmly wedded to that culture throughout his life and was as dependent on purely artistic influences as anyone else. There are, as someone has observed, no virgin births in art.
It's worth taking a brief look at how Jean Dubuffet, 1943-1963 was organized to get a clear understanding of Dubuffet as an artist, and also to learn something about our museum culture and how it operates.
In spite of Dubuffet's fitful start (for years he alternated between devoting his energies to art and tending the family wine business), he had a long and prolific career--a forty-year run. At the end the artist was accorded the ultimate sign of acceptance by the bourgeois society that he and so
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