"Landscapes of the Mind"

Jean Dubuffet was never a lover of "false" classical art, and there were times when he was not sure he wanted to be an artist. After a few months of formal training in Paris, he decided that he had "nothing to learn in schools." He became a clerk, then a wine merchant, and for a while he was happy. "I was gaining a foothold. To complicate things, I needed a wife, furniture, a maid, a brother-in-law, a car, kids . . . [Then] catastrophe, it took hold of me again. I rented a little atelier on Boulevard Saint-Michel, I locked myself in. My wife didn't like it, that's understandable; she disappeared in a trap door, melted away. Bon voyage!"

For three years, while his money held out, he painted. Then came more of "the foul jobs, the indecent proceedings, the swallowing of indignities, the anguished cavalcades through Paris." Still he managed to put aside a little cash, collect another wife and take a third crack at art. By 1944, after a brief tour of duty in the French air force, Dubuffet was ready for his first one-man show. Already his paintings were dedicated to the proposition that the Western notion of beauty is a "meager and not very ingenious invention."

Two more shows, one composed of "portraits cooked and pickled in the memory," touched off volatile French tempers. Furious art lovers tossed tomatoes in protest. Last fall, still searching for new techniques and new modes of expression, Dubuffet moved to Manhattan.

Today he "paints" with thick pastes, viscous mixtures of zinc oxide and heavy varnish. Sometimes he adds sand to make a kind of mortar, applies it with large, dull putty knives. The soft colors he uses --rose, brown, dull reds and yellow--spread erratically as his "empasto" heaves into unexpected shapes and dries.

The tortured landscapes, the cockeyed leering figures that result, were on exhibit in a Manhattan gallery last week. To most observers, the paintings looked like wild crosses between surrealist bas-relief and a mad child's mudpies. But to their creator they brought "astonishing news from the country of the formless." They contained "half-revealed facts ... in some sphinx's tongue [perhaps] the key to ... strange systems of which we have not the slightest inkling."

If his "Landscapes of the Mind" have a weird, inhuman aspect, Jean Dubuffet is not surprised. He is convinced that "art has much to do with madness." He hopes that his paintings contain many "facts" foreign to the objects he intends to represent, and he is happy "even when these facts are delirious or absurd."

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