‘I Am Convinced Art Has Much to Do with Madness’: Jean Dubuffet Paints a Picture, in 1952
Jean Dubuffet, Paysage aux argus, 1955, collage with butterfly.
©2015 PROLITTERIS, ZURICH. COLLECTION FONDATION DUBUFFET, PARIS
Much to the horror of the art-world elite in 1950s France, Jean Dubuffet’s work had a tendency to look like it was made by an amateur. His paintings, which have chunky surfaces that look either like vomit or shit, feature humans that are disproportionate, and his subjects were aesthetically unpleasing. At the time, this was risky business—and, in the end, it would become massively influential. A leader of a movement known as art brut, Dubuffet, who died in 1985 at 83, drew his inspirations from outsider art; his collection of work by the mentally ill, children, and prisoners and its impact on American art is now the subject of “Art Brut in America: The Incursion of Jean Dubuffet,” a show that closes this weekend at the American Folk Art Museum, in New York. In honor of that show and an upcoming Dubuffet retrospective at the Fondation Beyeler, in Switzerland, below is a profile of ARTnews’s May 1952 issue. The article, which charts Dubuffet’s progress as he paints Exodus (1952), follows in full below.—Alex Greenberger
“I have a great interest in madness, and I am convinced art has much to do with madness,” said Jean Dubuffet—in the surprisingly fluent English he taught himself on the ship coming over from France—to a Chicago audience this winter. A visit to the Paris apartment of this painter, whose growing reputation is one of the few to emerge from postwar Europe, would demonstrate Dubuffet’s interest and conviction, for sculptures and pictures by the insane are as apt to be hanging on the walls as his own heavy, shocking paintings. But trips to Dubuffet’s neat, whitewashed New York studio, just off the Bowery, where he worked from last fall until this spring, tend to demonstrate an even greater interest in method—in the mobile, “living” materials with which he builds his landscapes, still-lifes and figures. The materials become the picture, not only in both literal meanings of the verb, but also conceptually, and even ethically.
“I have a great interest in madness, and I am convinced art has much to do with madness,” said Jean Dubuffet—in the surprisingly fluent English he taught himself on the ship coming over from France—to a Chicago audience this winter. A visit to the Paris apartment of this painter, whose growing reputation is one of the few to emerge from postwar Europe, would demonstrate Dubuffet’s interest and conviction, for sculptures and pictures by the insane are as apt to be hanging on the walls as his own heavy, shocking paintings. But trips to Dubuffet’s neat, whitewashed New York studio, just off the Bowery, where he worked from last fall until this spring, tend to demonstrate an even greater interest in method—in the mobile, “living” materials with which he builds his landscapes, still-lifes and figures. The materials become the picture, not only in both literal meanings of the verb, but also conceptually, and even ethically.
The painting starts on the floor—one of five or six in progress strategically disposed around the small loft. Its bare surface is a masonite panel fastened to a wood frame, which reduces warping and facilitates handling. On it will be spread the base for a relief (in fact Dubuffet’s pictures not only have the look and feel of sculpture, but also the weight). In New York he has generally used one of two materials for this, “Sparkel” and “Spot Putty”, manufactured by the firm of H. Behlen & Bro. The latter is a lacquer-base (nitrous cellulose) compound mixed with inert thickening material (silex), plaster size (to reduce shrinking) and pigment (in this case, zinc oxide). Spot putty is used commercially for retouching metal or wood surfaces painted in lacquer; it has the properties of expanding slightly after application, which gives a smooth finish for the retoucher, and of rapid drying. Sparkel is used by house painters to cover and fill in cracks or other blemishes in plaster walls before starting the new coat, or as a sizing for raw board walls. The prepared dry mixture contains plaster, hide glue and zinc oxide. Along with water, spar varnish can be added to make a harder, more surely waterproof material which is less subject to shrinking when the water evaporates. The mixture of spar varnish and Sparkel is known as “Swedish putty.”
Jean Dubuffet, Corps de dame – Pièce de boucherie, 1950, oil on canvas.
©2015 PROLITTERIS, ZURICH/PHOTO: PETER SCHIBLI, BASEL. FONDATION BEYELER, RIEHEN/BASEL, BEYELER COLLECTION
These are cheap materials, vulgar in the reference of the great academies’ hand-ground ideals; they go with sand, pebbles, dust, bundles of rags, a rough day’s work then a beer at a bar. And to Dubuffet this is philosophically as well as technically appropriate—although he is no great beer drinker, but a connoisseur of French petits vins and of coffee and Scotch whisky in America. His preferred stage is the bar and the bistro, not the ballet...
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