An Outlaw Who Loved Laws

By ROBERT HUGHES

The show of paintings and sculpture by Jean Dubuffet, now at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, is not exactly a retrospective. It covers only 20 years of the artist's working life, from 1943 to 1963. And the 100 or so works in it represent only about 1% of his enormous output. But Dubuffet was so visually loquacious that a full retrospective would be indigestible -- he repeated himself endlessly, especially in his later years. And by the same token, most of his best work was done in those first two decades, before he got down to filling the world's collections with the wiggly-jigsaw-style images that he derived from his "Hourloupe" series of 1963 and that, seen in any quantity, are such a repetitious drag.

In its effort to present Dubuffet as one of the four truly important figures of postwar European art -- along with Giacometti, Bacon and Beuys -- the Hirshhorn has taken the right tack, for it's the early work that justifies the claim. Dubuffet came to art late. Until 1943, when he turned 41, he had been a businessman, a wine merchant. His career illustrates the energy that a late flowering can produce, both in art and in its attendant ideas. Dubuffet is, of course, widely known for his espousal of what he called Art Brut, or "raw art," the work of those untutored and compulsive creators now called "outsider artists." Was he a primitive himself? Of course not: his art is as sophisticated as his writing, and in his apparent desire to shake off the burden of French culture, he was quintessentially French.

In the beginning, Dubuffet appealed to Ubu buffs: people with a taste for the macaronic and the absurd, who saw in his work a visual resurgence of the antiauthoritarian wit whose chief image in French literature was the grotesque kinglet of Poland invented nearly a century ago by Alfred Jarry in his play Ubu Roi. From the moment Ubu waddled onstage and pronounced his first line, "Merdrrre!," the vaporous culture of Symbolism was on the way out and something newer and indubitably nastier was on its way in. "After us the Savage God," noted W.B. Yeats, who was in the audience that night.

In Parisian painting, Dubuffet had a comparable effect at the end of World War II. One critic headlined a review, in imitation of the Dubonnet ads one used to see on the Metro, UBU -- DU BLUFF -- DUBUFFET, and others were not wrong in detecting, in Dubuffet's entranced and ironic use of thick pastes, an excremental vision parallel to Jarry's. One of the portraits of French intellectuals in his extravagantly controversial 1947 show at the Galerie Rene Drouin depicted the Surrealist writer Georges Limbour under the title Limbour Fashioned from Chicken Droppings. And even critics who disliked such mordant images were right on target about the context into which Dubuffet emerged, that of a postwar Paris depressed by material shortages and riven by political suspicions. "An empty pantry," wrote one critic, "assures the triumph of a Dubuffet."

Moreover, somewhere near the heart of Dubuffet's idea of a poor art, a raw art, was a large and genuinely democratic tolerance. "The persons I find beautiful," he wrote in a catalog preface, "are not those who are usually found beautiful . . . Funny noses, big mouths, teeth all crooked, hair in the ears -- I'm not at all against such things. Older people don't necessarily appear worse to me than younger ones." Of course, Dubuffet's nudes in the 1950s are sexist, as sexist as Rabelais -- those rosy-brown, squashed-flat, gross and scarily funny "Corps de Dames" that form such a spectacular counterpart to the women De Kooning was painting on the other side of the Atlantic at about the same time. But no moral nitpicker today could accuse Dubuffet of ageism or lookism.

As art 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 with the Nazis, and when the air was thick with charges of wartime collaboration by intellectuals.

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 of politico-literary notables known as Les Celebrites du Juste-Milieu, wizened, compressed and distorted, are the obvious and inescapable grandfathers of all Dubuffet's turnip men. *

Nothing remains anti-taste for 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 be exaggeratedly close-up paintings of the life of the soil done by a microbiologist under the spell of the Barbizon school.

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, 1959.

The funniest and most agrestic of all his paintings were, undoubtedly, the cows -- a snook cocked at Picasso's heroic Spanish 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.

As Peter Schjeldahl points out in the catalog, Dubuffet "had the transgressor's secret love of limits, the outlaw's perverse attachment to laws," and this repeatedly shows itself in a sense of surface, texture and inflection that becomes extravagantly, almost morbidly, refined. His figures made of butterfly wings are exquisite; looking at some of his surfaces, particularly in the later collages and "Texturologies" of the 1950s, one finds oneself comparing them to the tarnished and mottled silver leaf on a Japanese screen or to richly tanned and patinated leather. Doubtless some of them present insoluble problems for the conservator -- see them now, they won't be around in another 50 years -- and yet, in a perverse way, they look like the work of a craftsman-artist obsessed with nuance, an art that is not raw at all but cooked exactly au point.