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ART CHRONICLE
JEAN DUBUFFET AND "ART BRUT"
Jean Dubuffet is perhaps the one new painter of real import–
ance to have appeared on the scene in Paris in the last decade. Though
himself an erudite and sophiticated artist, he professes to despise cultiva–
tion, tradition, professional skill-all that which makes art "fine"-and to
see genuine value only in the rawest forms of pictorial representation:
graffiti, scrawlings on walls and sidewalks by untrained or impatient
hands, the drawings of very young or untalented children, mudpies:
"art brut,"
"raw"
art,
art in its first and most rudimentary and least
conscious stages. This is not at all the same thing as what is called
"primitive" or naive
art
(Rousseau
Ie Douanier,
Alfred Wallis, Bombois,
Vivin, Kane, Pickett, Bauchant,
et aI.),
which is a relatively recent
phenomenon and is in almost every case the result more or less of an
untutored or visually innocent or only half-talented person's attempt to
approximate traditional easel painting. The "primitives" do not appear
in
force until the popular diffusion of museum art is made possible by
reproductions and journeyman copies.
Art brut,
however, does not de–
pend on history or culture as much as that. It is found essentially the
same in all times and places, wherever anyone without training, interest,
or artistic aspirations tries to communicate something graphically.
Dubuffet discovered
art brut
at a time when many advanced writers
in
France were beginning to question the premises of literature itself
as
a cultivated discipline and some among them were attempting-as
they still are-to bring the novel and short story closer to actual con–
temporary experience by stripping the narrative of its acquired conven–
tions and modelling their prose on colloquial, popular usage, as Heming–
way has done. Like these writers, Dubuffet is reacting against a tradition
so rich, mature, and recent that it still dominates the scene of its triumphs.
Even though it is no longer adequately relevant to contemporary experi–
ence, the splendor and abundance of its achievements seem to threaten
the originality of those who wish to make a fresh response to a fresh
reality. In the face of such a situation, one is apt to decide that nothing
less in principle than a radical rejection of the past will be enough to
