Dubuffet at the Barbican

“Brutal Beauty” is the first major exhibition of Jean Dubuffet’s works in the UK since 1966. The French artist’s “art brut” –raw, uncultivated art– could not be more at home than in an institution that owes so much of its identity from the brutalist aesthetics of its architecture.

Under the subdued, far from “brutal” lightning of the exhibition rooms, some of Dubuffet’s paintings in the series “Texturologies”, from the late 1950s, could easily be confounded with the raw concrete walls of the Barbican itself.

Those huge rectangular surfaces in grey or ochre, sprinkled with white or yellow dots, certainly attest to Jackson Pollock’s influence on Dubuffet. Still, while Pollock’s informal expressionism sounds like a cry of rebellion in the conformist climate of 1950s America, Dubuffet’s “Texturologies” seem to point to a dead end. No doubt, it is possible to see a dance of galaxies or a feast of champagne bubbles in those myriads of tiny dots splashed over the canvas. What prevails, however, is the impression of a closed, inhuman industrial space.

Dubuffet painted his “Texturologies” in the dry, sunny environs of Vence, in southern France, where his wife Lili sought relief from a pulmonary disease in 1955. Almost three years later, when her health improved, the couple returned to Paris –and Dubuffet’s art soon would enter a new period, that of the so-called “Paris Circus” paintings.

Instead of austere slabs of grey stone and beige blocks of sand came almost maniac depictions of a metropolis full of comical, childlike characters, driving ameboid cars amid a dazzling, coloured patchwork of signs, shops and square buildings, everything melting in the heat of paint and life.

Theatre of grimaces

Radical changes, like that from the walls of “Texturologies” to the frantic streets of “Paris Circus”, are not uncommon in Dubuffet’s career.

It had all begun, in fact, with images of a wall. Dubuffet’s first works, in the 1940s, depicted graffiti and wall inscriptions, sometimes as a part of an urban landscape, other times as blurred, almost illegible samples of a common form of private or political messaging in occupied Paris.

The defeat of Nazi rule brought to Dubuffet’s work –and, indeed, to most French citizens— a feeling of exhilaration. It was not, however, without a sense of self-examination; the reckoning of collective and individual responsibilities during the Nazi rule, brilliantly expressed in Jean-Paul Sartre’s writings about the collaborateurs, cast heavy shadows over the general celebration.

Born in 1901 to a bourgeois family (he only left his wine merchant business in 1942), Dubuffet considered himself an apolitical man, and was not unsympathetic to some French intellectuals who collaborated with the Nazis. It must be said that the punishing drive against them often acquired, in those days, shocking levels of revengefulness and intolerance. Staunch adversaries of Nazism, as the catholic writer François Mauriac, soon started to ask for some spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation –only to be mocked by Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and other thinkers from the left.

Dubuffet’s works in this period consist of portraits of many of his friends, who had various political affiliations. The left-leaning poet and critic Georges Limbour is side by side with the anti-Semite and germanophile writer Paul Léautaud, and Dubuffet’s gaze does not spare either of them.

“Comical ballet dances of wrinkles and little theatres of grimaces”, says Dubuffet about those portraits. We might see them as cruel caricatures of people who –fascist or not—are all under critical examination, but this would miss the whole point. There is a wonderful sense of joy and vitality under the apparent ugliness of Dubuffet’s drawings. 

More importantly, there is also a sort of political strategy in his approach. Everything happens as if Dubuffet tried to recover a childish innocence after the tragedy of Nazi occupation; collaborateurs and résistants are the same under Dubuffet’s “outsider”, “uncultivated” way of seeing them. However, while his eyes, his hands and his style search to imitate children’s drawings, Dubuffet’s “comical dances” and “grimaces” betray the weariness, the disillusionment of an old man.

How to remain apolitical

The “wall” in Dubuffet’s art can be understood, thus, in a metaphorical sense. The adventures of Modernism, in the first decades of the 20th Century, are over. He insists, nevertheless, in rebelling against “tradition”. Which tradition, one may ask. That of the beaux-arts, or that of Picasso and Mondrian?). Was it possible to go beyond Modernism? Dubuffet’s answer is complex: neither in the left nor in the right, neither forwards nor backwards, he bets on a kind of art that is nowhere. A place that would be outside culture, near to the art of the “mentally ill”, as were called the psychiatric patients whose works he collected.

After the dark walls of 1945 and the joys of Liberation came the stony walls of “Texturologies” in 1958, and the joys of Europe’s economic recovery in the Sixties, with “Paris Circus”. Are those later works a criticism towards the new consumer society? Again, the answer is not quite clear.

In 1974, Dubuffet was commissioned by Renault to decorate the executive suites of the motorcar industry’s headquarters. As always, there is joy and restlessness in this late work; the French national colours here appear as a jigsaw puzzle, as if portraying the ultimate irrationality of a technocratic society. But Dubuffet was not an outsider anymore.

(“Brutal Beauty”, Barbican Centre, 17 May-22 Aug)

https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2021/event/jean-dubuffet-brutal-beauty