Art: Dubuffet: Realism As Absurdity

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I would like people to see my work as a rehabilitation of scorned values and, in any case, make no mistake about it, a work of ardent celebration.

Thus Jean Dubuffet, 71, the ex-wine merchant from Le Havre, described the paintings that have earned him a reputation as France's most eminent living artist as well as its official culture scourge. The three decades of his output now displayed in an enormous retrospective at Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum resemble a strip-mining operation. With indefatigable and clamorous gusto, Dubuffet has chewed up whole tracts of land once thought to be outside culture.

This is the territory he calls art brut—"raw art." Its landscape includes the gay scribblings of children, the darker grotesqueries of madmen's art and the limitless repertory of graffiti and folk images—naive, threatening, bizarre or just plain corny—that lies between.

Dubuffet's position is odd. The products of a foe of "orthodox" beauty, his tarry clumps of mud and orange peel, highly insured, decorate half the bon bourgeois salons of Paris. The author of many eloquent tracts, he speaks in defense of incoherence and illiteracy as poetic principles. An intellectual, Cartesian to the fingertips and a close friend of such literary eminences as Raymond Queneau, Jean Paulhan and FranÇois Ponge, he has based 30 years of work on the premise that Western culture is a grotesque irrelevancy. Dubuffet is indeed a quintessentially French figure.

Despite the ritual assurances in the Guggenheim catalogue that Dubuffet is still a subversive force, the flurry and scandals that once attended his shows have died. Whatever else he may be doing, he is not—as a New York critic claimed in 1948—"debasing and perverting the very nature of art." His crude little turnip-men and personages compounded, apparently, of excrement and butterfly wings, his animals and objects in all their quirkish black humor with (lately) their deadpan repetition of red and blue stripes within the wiggling contours, are only pictures after all. They have altogether lost their shock. Most of them are now drained of their power even to surprise. Some look ornamental to the point of sleekness. To an extent that nobody would have predicted 15 years ago, they have entered the canon of belle peinture: what tract of paint surface could be more grazeable than the richly troweled field on which Dubuffet's Cow in a Black Meadow stands mooing soulfully, the hilarious bovine essence of solitude?