DUBUFFET: INFLUENTIAL ICONOCLAST

World War II was a justifable battle against Fascist madness, but when it was over even the victorious Western European allies looked back on the carnage with revulsion. Along with the the terrible loss of life, European culture was reduced to rubble. Artistic leadership moved to America, where energy and optimism still lingered. Artists who could once depict the inheritors of Hellenic culture as heroic and as rational as cool marble now saw humankind as absurd and repulsive.

Paris, lovely as ever, became an artistic ghost town. Among the few pockets of new energy was the art of Jean Dubuffet, which seemed to get its drive from a jeering contempt for civilization and its values. Dubuffet scrawled his images into wet paint like a demented clochard making graffiti in cement or a bad kid scribbling on bathroom walls. His first exhibition in 1944 caused a scandal. Images like that of a squatting woman giving birth as if she were defecating gained his Art Brut a reputation as an art out to gain high ground through shock tactics.

By the time of his death last week in Paris at age 83, he had become an Establishment darling, but the art world had long since kicked him upstairs. His big lumpy sculpture for corporate plazas now seem more entertainingly clownish than threatening.

Dubuffet occupied a somewhat difficult spot on the map of history. He lacked the protean inventiveness of Picasso or the lovableness of Chagall and, of course, lived at a time when disgust for civilization was a fact long since established by the Dada generation of World War I.

These circumstances were exacerbated because Dubuffet’s art did not get better. At best, it tended to remain too close to its sources in the art of the mentally disturbed and the primal primitivism of New Guinea’s rougher styles. As time wore on a manic energy that once made bracing images out of everything from feathers to tar and sponges gave way to easier solutions, bloodless designer-label versions of his own work.

Nonetheless, Dubuffet makes perfectly good sense as the leading artist of his abandoned place and odd period. It was a time when intellectual life was dominated by Jean-Paul Sartre’s brand of Existentialism, which tried to structure meaning out of hopelessness. Ionesco, Beckett and Genet fostered a theater of the absurd that was as anti-social as it was wearily humanistic. The sensibility extended into the New Wave films of Godard from France into England’s angry young playwrights and the terrified, spectral art of Francis Bacon. Northern European artists like Karel Appel and the rest of the so-called COBRA group elaborated on Dubuffet’s themes.

There is something about Dubuffet’s art that seems to spit in the audience’s eye. Maybe that is why there has been a tendency to minimize his influence, which has been both profound and widespread. Spiritual and stylistic links to present European Neo-Expressionism are as obvious as an unzipped fly but rarely cited by critics.

Even less recognized is Dubuffet’s impact in this country. His jagged, sneering sensibility is out of phase with the California aesthetic, but it is hard to imagine Chicago’s “Hairy Who” school without him. Early Pop Art owns a debt to his interest in popular sources for art and his use of humor to express anger. Claes Oldenburg cheerfully admits to his admiration for Dubuffet.

He seems to be one of those artists whose inspiration may outstrip his own accomplishment, a shrewd guerrilla tactician and scout whose trailblazing is blurred by the arrival of the army.