Jean Dubuffet, Intervention, 1954

Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty is at Barbican Art Gallery until 22 August 2021

Jean Dubuffet’s work is a glorious assault on good taste and ‘fine’ art. Amongst his materials – butter, cement, bitumen, coal dust, sand, butterfly wings(!); amongst his images the iconography of graffiti (Pisser at the wall); his sensibility is that of the madman and the child. (Dubuffet coined the term ‘Art Brut’ (Raw Art) and collected and celebrated the work of psychiatric patients and other outsiders. A room in this exhibition is devoted to Art Brut.)

However, Dubuffet was no naïf. There is a mischievous wit running through his work, a sureness of touch and line, whether ink on paper, or gouged into a paste of sand and pigment; he delighted in experiment – even if it didn’t always work; Searle tells how he was just as pleased if his paintings cracked or flaked or even if they spurted wet paint from beneath their congealed slurries on to the floor or people who got too close. Not all his work has survived.

This exhibition promises or be a treat and a revelation – it is long overdue: this is the first major showing in the UK for more than half a century. Dubuffet is arguably one of the major European artists emerging in the aftermath of World War 2, alongside better-known figures such as Bacon, Giacometti and Beuys, and contemporary, too, with Pollock and de Kooning. Along with them Dubuffet is one of the great inventors of modern art.

A late starter, Dubuffet dropped out of art school around 1918 and chose to make his living as a wine merchant; at the age of 41, in 1942 he decided to devote himself to art, and did so with a vengeance. He made portraits of his friends (not generally flattering!); he reinvented the nude (not flattering) in a series he called Corps de dames - ‘Nothing seems to be more false, more stupid, than the way students in an art class are placed in front of a completely nude woman … and stare at her for hours’ (Barbican); Dubuffet’s women appear, in the words of the Tate’s description of The Tree of Fluids (1950) as if flattened by a steamroller, with sexual parts laid bare; he made three dimensional busts, The Little Statues of Precarious Life, assemblages of discarded materials – steel wool, charcoal, driftwood, silver foil, pieces of a burnt out car; figures that look like sci-fi monsters congealed from the ‘incompatible’ mixture of industrial enamel paint and oil; the Texturologies, exhibited as Celebrations of the Soil, appear, at first glance, to be just that – framed areas of soil – in fact they are paintings created by shaking a brush to scatter droplets of paint onto the surface. And, there are the panoramas of Paris life: diners filling Restaurant Rougeot, (1961), passengers packing into a bus (Paris-Montparnasse, 1961). And there is more…

This looks fun!