‘Art in Raw’ Proponent Jean Dubuffet, 83, Dies

Jean Dubuffet, the iconoclastic artist whose contentious sculptures dot a landscape across the Western world, is dead of emphysema at age 83.

The New York Times reported Wednesday that Dubuffet, whose conversations were as tradition-defying as his work, died Sunday in Paris.

French Culture Minister Jack Lang said France had “lost one of the 20th Century’s great artists” and called Dubuffet “a painter of essential truths, outside the mainstream of modern art and wary of its trends. . . . “

If there was a single word that ran through the critical appraisals of Dubuffet’s more than four decades of prints, lithographs, paintings and sculptures, it was “strange.”

In 1962, Henry Seldis, The Times late art critic, called Dubuffet “an alchemist, a metaphysician and a clown.” Other critics found him “deliberately ugly” but also found him the single most important artist to emerge from France since the end of World War II.

Dubuffet acknowledged the peculiarity of his output but defended it as his own truth, once writing: “That truth is strange; it is at the far end of strangeness that one has a chance to find a key to things.”

The “keys” that Dubuffet, the son of a wine merchant, crafted were first displayed publicly at a show in Paris in 1944, just after the liberation of the city. The shocking imagery of that show, referred to since as “psychotic art and men’s room scribbling,” led police to quickly shut it down as obscene.

A less-secure man would have been discouraged, but not Dubuffet. He said he welcomed being compared to a graffitist or a mental patient whose skewed drawings were a manifestation of some desperately needed therapy.

He called his walk-through sculptures and madcap drawings l’art brut (art in the raw) and wrote--at a time when France was hoping to resurrect its prewar traditions--that “once disencumbered, it (art) will doubtless begin again to dance and yell like a madman, which is its function, and stop putting on preposterous airs from its professor’s chair.”

Despite that explanation, two generations continued to ask of his work: “What is it?”

It was a question first raised by Parisians in 1944 and again 10 years later when a he exhibited some small statuary made from slag and other refuse of that city; by New Yorkers when his 43-foot “Group of Four Trees” was erected in Chase Manhattan Plaza in 1972, and by Chicagoans in 1984 when “Monument With Standing Beast,” a 10-ton fiberglass, white-and-black sculpture, was placed in the Loop district.

Dubuffet gloried in his “newness,” having in his early years pursued and then abandoned a career in more traditional art forms.

Fled His Parents

As a youth he fled from what he called his bourgeois parents, settling in Paris to exist on a small allowance and to paint. He exulted in the miserable quarters he occupied in Paris’ Montparnasse section where he read ancient and modern literature and studied music and language. But he also grew disgusted with what he felt were callow imitations of his fellow artists--Raoul Dufy, Suzanne Valadon and others.

He returned briefly to his father’s wholesale wine business but abandoned that to an associate and returned to the Left Bank where he was known as a sardonic wit, treasured for his impertinence rather than his art. But the wine business, under the associate, began to falter, and Dubuffet returned to the mercantile world before war interceded.

He was mobilized in 1939 but discharged a year later because he could not submit to military discipline. In 1942 he decided to return to art, renouncing his earlier efforts as prosaic and vowing to concentrate solely on lithographs.

It was not until 1945, after the debacle of his Paris opening, that he resumed a wider range of painting and completed three mural-size canvases of jazz musicians. His first American exhibition came in 1947, and Clement Greenberg, writing for the Nation, found his newer work “original and profound” as opposed to the Dubuffet of the 1930s, which the noted critic dismissed as “impoverished.”

Greenwich Village Years

Dubuffet began to travel--to North Africa, where the solitude of the Sahara Desert was reflected in some of his later work, and to the United States, where he lived in Greenwich Village in the early 1950s, painting in a loft near the Bowery.

By then Dubuffet was covering Masonite panels with putty and then beating on the surface until he said the panels looked “like (the hide of) a hippopotamus.” On that wrinkled plane he threw globs of paint of various sizes and at varying speeds. He rubbed his panels with rags or crushed them with a house painter’s brush, depending on his mood, and worked with colors he discovered by mixing house paint with chalk and sand.

The statuettes he designed from junk for his 1954 Paris exhibition began to grow into the bizarre, free-flowing forms that became public sculpture in cities able to afford him.