Everyone can see the artist – Weekend – Kommersant
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The French artist Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) tried to liberate man from the power of culture with the help of creative anarchy, believing that culture, like any form of violence, is evil, and liberation from it will make humanity kinder. Culture, in response, played an unkind joke with Dubuffet, writing him, a fighter against hierarchies, high art and the very idea of greatness, into the ranks of the geniuses of the 20th century.
“There are no more great people, no more geniuses. We finally got rid of these malicious morons. Geniuses were invented by the ancient Greeks, as well as centaurs and hippogriffs. There are as many geniuses as there are unicorns. They scared us like that for three thousand years in a row. There are no great people. Great man. There is nothing miraculous about being exceptional. It is wonderful to be a man,” says the Notes for Literates, written in the days of the end of the war, in the spring and summer of 1945. They will be included in Jean Dubuffet’s first book-manifesto, a collection of essays, A Leaflet for All Kinds of Lovers, published by Gallimard in the autumn of 1946. By that time, he had only two exhibitions on his account, both were held at the René Drouin gallery on Place Vendôme and had a scandalous resonance, that is, they were scolded by critics who missed peaceful, aesthetic battles (the first, with the uncomplicated title “Paintings and drawings by Jean Dubuffet” , opened in the autumn of 1944, shortly after the liberation of Paris). And he also had an idea – a principle, a program, a creed formulated in two words: “art brut”, “rough art”. Dubuffet was 45 years old – he was an aspiring artist. And the “paintings and drawings” that so teased the critics looked like the work of a novice, young artist, about five or six years old.
Dubuffet really started, but for the third time – by the age of 45 he had twice finally, as it seemed to him, tied up with art, and not because he was disappointed in his own genius, could not break through in artistic circles, or was forced to earn a piece of bread more prosaic labor. Against. He was born in Le Havre in the family of a prosperous wine merchant, he was sent to the best lyceum in the city, his classmates and friends were Raymond Quenot, Georges Limbourg and Armand Salacrou – perhaps the father of Dubuffet, a snob and “literate”, a zealot of the purity of the French language and the greatness of French literature, who kept something like a literary salon in the house, would have preferred that his son, following the example of his comrades, also become a writer, but he did not resist his painting classes, the young man began attending evening classes at the Le Havre School of Fine Arts as a lyceum student. Paris, the Académie Julian, acquaintance with former cubists and future surrealists – the few surviving works of the early years indicate that Dubuffet excelled in both academic drawing and his surrealist deconstruction. He abandoned his art twice for good, returned to the family business and traded wine, lived in Africa and South America, traveled, learned languages, living and dead, was fond of music. And only in 1942 he realized that he could not live without painting. The first exhibition took place two years later – the same one, at Drouin, “paintings and drawings”. And since, by a lucky chance, this was the first big event in the artistic life of Paris after the flight of the Vichy and the parade of the allies on the Champs Elysees, Dubuffet’s debut was later perceived in a political way – as a symbol of the victory of the avant-garde, a symbol of renewal and liberation not only of art.
Dubuffet was not at all a hero of the Resistance – in his autobiography, he even boasted that he had made good money during the years of the occupation, supplying wine to the Wehrmacht, and later, like his friend, apologist and patron Jean Paulan, ardently supported the collaborator Celine. Dubuffet was the hero of the resistance to culture – its norms and rankings, its blindness and limitations. Bourgeois limitations – it was a rebellion against the father and the environment that gave birth to the father, it is no coincidence that wine-making connotations are heard in the very phrase “art brut”. Culture, the old, European, bourgeois culture, shapes and disciplines itself through language – Dubuffet rebelled against language, and it’s not just that in his texts he, a close friend of so many French writers of the first magnitude and himself a fair writer, often resorts to phonetic writing and other avant-garde techniques. His enemy was not just the grammar of the French language, hostile to any idiolects, but the grammar of culture as such, the notion of the supremacy of the verbal over other forms of human expression. In language, he saw the main instrument of cultural violence – not in the political sense, as violence against peoples, but in the anthropological sense, as violence against man and art, to which rules are prescribed through language and hierarchies are imposed. Violence against the very nature of man, since children, not yet able to speak, already know how to draw and sing.
The idea of art brut took shape in 1945, a collection of art, not strangled by culture, began to take shape by 1947 – then Drouin held the first exhibition of “brutalists” from the collection of Dubuffet. A year later, a museum opened in the basement of the Drouin gallery, soon he moved to the house of the publisher Gaston Gallimard, and under him something like a board of trustees, the Compagnie de l’art brut, was founded, which, in addition to the most ideological inspirer and collector, included Jean Paulan, Andre Breton, Michel Tapier and other enthusiasts of cultural anarchy. It is generally accepted that Claude Levi-Strauss’s Untamed Thought was born under the influence of this museum and exhibition activity, he was a great admirer of Dubuffet. Children’s drawing, the work of the mentally ill, the works of “Sunday artists”, the works of ghost-seers and prisoners, primitive and folk art, the art of the indigenous peoples of Africa and the Americas – it turned out that years of throwing, searching and abandoning the career of a painter were not in vain: he read the works of psychiatrists , who discovered the art of people with mental disorders, visited their collections, was interested in child psychology, anthropology, linguistics – all this, of course, was within the field of view of surrealism, with which Dubuffet is genetically linked. But, unlike the theorists of surrealism, the forerunner of art brut was set up practically: the collection grew rapidly and, turning from a friendly undertaking into a real museum, required institutional design, Dubuffet sought support from French patrons and authorities, transported his treasures to the USA, returned to Paris and eventually donated them to Switzerland. In 1976, the Collection de l’art brut museum, which then included more than 4,000 works by 150 artists, including such celebrities as the Swiss madman Adolf Wölfli, opened in Lausanne and continues to expand its collection to this day.
However, the true museum of art brut was Dubuffet’s own work. He wrote that he did not see a fundamental difference between the painting of cultural and ordinary whitewashing of the walls – and his canvases were covered with thick layers of “thick dough”, mixed with earth, sand, asphalt, cement, clay, so that the rough texture resembled some kind of shabby fence. He composed hymns to the primitive genius – pictograms scattered across his paintings, similar at once to rock art and fence drawings, and sculptures made of slag, tow, broken brick and sponge looked as if he had exchanged them with some African tribes unknown to science. He said: become like children – and as if he himself fell into childhood, drawing awkward big-headed men and ridiculous animals, decorating his crafts, as if in a kindergarten, with leaves, blades of grass and butterfly wings, and acrylic paints and polyester resins, to which he turned in the 1960s, they seem to be felt-tip pens and plasticine in his hands. He believed that everyone was naturally inclined to express himself in the language of art – in the L’Hourloupe series, he brilliantly imitated the hieroglyphs that involuntarily come out from under the pen, clenched in a bored hand, when the shoulder presses the telephone receiver to the ear. In addition, he turned to another universal non-verbal language and began to compose music – first together with Asger Jorn, the same knight of primitiveness and barbarism, and then on his own, without studying, because the more literacy, the less creative immediacy.
An enemy of cultural violence and school discipline, he was immediately exposed as an artist of excellent school and high culture. He learned not only from his students from the art brut collection. The motifs of André Masson and Max Ernst, the graffiti of Brassai and the micro-organisms of Wols, the impossibility of Jean Fautrier, the unconscious calligraphy of Henri Michaud, the people and animals of the artists of the COBRA group, the coloristic rebellion and the inhabited sculpture of Niki de Saint Phalle — art historians have discovered dozens of parallels in the art of those who were directly and indirectly associated with the surrealist movement. Finding parallels, however, everyone emphasizes the uniqueness of Dubuffet’s creative style. You can’t immediately tell what it is, maybe in a feeling of endless childish happiness, for which it is not at all necessary to crawl through the inner labyrinth of the sculptural tower “Tour aux figures” or watch how a crazy picture comes to life in the musical performance of “Coucou Bazar” . A tiny Dubuffet handwriting is enough.
Of course, Dubuffet, who had excellent business literacy, deftly established contacts with gallery owners and customers, took care of both his art brut collection and his heritage, successfully distributing it among museums and founding his own fund in 1973, which still manages works and copyrights. rights, was not an anarchist in the socio-political sense and was not going to fall out of the system of bourgeois culture. He was often reproached for hypocrisy – first by formalist critics, who saw through the artificial naivety of this childish drawing and modeling, then by neo-Marxist critics, disappointed by the solid bourgeois nature of the basis of this entire anti-bourgeois superstructure. Dubuffet had no social illusions – his utopia belonged exclusively to the autonomous field of the artistic. But even in this literary work there was an internal contradiction: defending the idiolect from prescriptive grammar, advocating individual characteristics and protesting against leveling universality, he nonetheless acted on behalf of the universal man – from the position that in the 20th century was stigmatized as “abstract humanism”. This universalistic view of a person who is naturally kind and only needs a kind, interested look at himself, did not allow him to become a prophet of today’s feminist or decolonial criticism, despite the outward similarity of slogans. But still, the main liberating idea of Dubuffet, that every person is an artist, not in his workplace, like Beuys, but simply because of his human nature, has not lost its charm today.
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