Jean Dubuffet’s Primitivism

Cultural Sources for Anticultural Art

Perhaps the first response to the French artist Jean Dubuffet’s painting is the sense that it could have been created by a child. In fact, Dubuffet looked to children’s drawings as a model of unbridled creativity, and he emulated them in his art, marking his canvases with scribbles, smears and crudely rendered figures.

He was not the first European artist to mimic children’s art; many artists in the earlier 20th century had turned to the art of children for inspiration — and to breathe fresh life into European painting. The efforts of these artists to infuse their work with the seemingly innocent (read untrained) expression of children’s drawing were so successful that they made artistic revolution — the overturning of academic conventions in favor of free, expressive rendering — the modus operandi for modern art. As many painters turned their backs on the formal artistic training they had received, their works expressed both aggressive revolt and efforts to tap into what they imagined to be the unfettered creativity of childhood, which to these artists suggested a primal creative impetus.

Yet, Dubuffet’s painting style, characterized by roughly handled paint and crude, thick marks, leans more toward unrestrained forcefulness than the presumed innocence of much children’s art. His style was particularly aggressive (if at times oddly humorous) and expressed both his aims to advance art and to picture his extreme discontent with Western culture, which by the time he painted “A View of Paris: The Life of Pleasure,” was in the throes of the second world war. One would hardly guess this by the painting’s childlike qualities and title presenting Parisian life as a “life of pleasure.”

The painting is both a parody of high culture and a celebration of human activity.

The rigid, quasi-formed figures, which recall the stick figures of childhood, suggest action; the three at the bottom left address the viewer directly, with outstretched arms, and the two at right march stiffly off the side of the canvas, as if leading a carnivalesque parade.

Carnivals, circuses and parades also intrigued Dubuffet, and he saw them as sites where childlike playfulness, cultural transgression and creativity collide. This was a collision he hoped to convey — and by which he hoped to inspire the viewers of his painting.

Dubuffet’s use of irony becomes apparent with closer looking at the painting, which is a great example of the artist’s efforts to change the way people view, and think about, art. Point of view is important here both literally and figuratively. On the one hand, the painting makes use of multiple perspectives to create a forceful impact as what appear to be Parisian storefronts vacillate between elevation (frontal) and plan (birds eye) views.

Dubuffet used this strategy in many of his paintings of the mid 1940s, which were characterized by scenes of urban life and Parisian shops that, if one shifts one’s perspective, appear to flip into crudely drawn roadmaps.

Dubuffet was a wine merchant who sold his own version of Parisian pleasure — wine — before becoming a full time artist. He was concerned that art and culture would be overtaken by market forces, however, and you can see his parody of these forces in his painting. These are the signs of culture with which Dubuffet had a contentious relationship and about which he often used playful double entendres in his art.

One example in this painting is the sign at left, which reads “Modes,” the French word for fashion. At first glance this sign simply advertises a clothing store, which one would expect to see situated in a bustling urban center. But the word “modes” also means “ways” something that interested Dubuffet very much and that he wanted to change, and not merely for the artistic fashions of the day.  Instead, he wanted to do away with the idea of artistic styles or trends altogether and make art that speaks to the viewer in a way that recalls the adventure of childhood discovery. Most of all, he wanted art to be free from rules, which he believed stifled creativity.

By the time Dubuffet made this painting he had begun to look elsewhere too for artistic inspiration, particularly to art produced by so-called outsiders including mental patients. Dubuffet had begun researching and collecting such art, which he called Art Brut (roughly translated as raw art) at the end of WWII. His interest had begun in the 1920s, however, when he and many other modern artists, particularly the Surrealists with whom he associated, became fascinated with the book “The Artistry of the Mentally Ill” by the German psychiatrist and art historian Hans Prinzhorn. Just as these artists had looked to children’s art, they emulated the crude, forceful expressiveness of the art of mental patients as signs of creativity untamed by Western art schools and cultural traditions. Dubuffet became so fascinated with this art that he started a major collection of it that is now in a museum in Lausanne, Switzerland (a must see for anyone visiting Lausanne).

It was precisely these raw, untrained, qualities that Dubuffet wanted to emulate and began to experiment with in his painting. Although Dubuffet claimed that he did not copy the art produced by mental patients, one can see its impact, along with children’s drawings, in his painting.

Like many artists of the early to mid 20th century, however, Dubuffet also looked to various forms of non-Western art for inspiration. In their quest to infuse art with primal creativity artists such as Dubuffet erroneously conflated the art of children, mental patients and non-Western cultures, forming pictorial associations they lumped together and called “primitivist.”  Primitivism became a loosely termed style and works such as Dubuffet’s were often either celebrated by fans or derided by hostile critics for its crudeness. Although primitivism as a set of inadvertently Eurocentric practices (approaches that critiqued Western culture while nevertheless somewhat privileging it) has been debunked, it is important to note that for artists such as Dubuffet “primitive” meant essentially art that is free from, and subversive to, Western art and whose artistic inspiration was the art of Oceania — the island cultures of the South Seas.

Dubuffet’s “Childbirth” is a particularly striking example of his synthesis of these visual sources, particularly art forms that seemed untamed and were not yet appreciated by Western galleries and museums.

Perhaps the most immediately jarring aspect of this painting is the central figure of a mother giving birth, which has been flattened and flipped forward towards the picture plane (the frontal surface of the canvas), hands raised as if gesturing, “Stop,” or, alternately, as if signaling shock or fear. Also arresting, yet ambiguous, are the figure’s rounded eyes, which open wide and gaze confrontationally toward the viewer while seeming to also stare into space, an image, perhaps, of trauma.

Dubuffet used these compositional strategies, combined with his rough looking brushwork, use of pronounced outlines, and a blend of murky and vivid colors to achieve just this kind of glaring, slightly disturbing impact. In fact, he wanted his painting to be so agitational that it could change the way people look at art, the way people feel about art and even the ways they think about what art could be — a liberating encounter Dubuffet believed Western museums and mainstream art galleries suppressed (as he oddly enough continued cultivating gallery representation — and a cash-ready audience — for his art).

The painting “Childbirth” is riddled with references to non-Western art, particularly the Oceanic art thought by many artists at that time to express this primal creativity. Take the central figure with raised arms, for example. It is an image of childbirth, the most basic starting point for life and a motif in Oceanic art that conveys a variety of meanings and can refer to fertility and kinship. Dubuffet’s use of this form is one of his creative adaptations. On the one hand, it speaks to a modernist viewer, emphasizing the painting’s flatness and foregrounding its status as representation (rather than following the Renaissance tradition of painting an illusionistic window onto idealized scene). On the other hand, the act of childbirth signals a most primal impetus to create.

Dubuffet’s composition even plays with the notion of framing and our expectations for viewing a painting. The flattened figures of mother and child have been tipped up so that the white rectangular gurney upon which they lie presses forward rather than receding back into space, legs resting firmly on a depicted floor. This is one of the ways Dubuffet subverts Renaissance perspective while calling attention to his intent to do just that. The vertical rectangle that serves as the bed is framed by bluish rectangles on all sides, forming geometric planes occupied at left and right by additional figures. This is another convention Dubuffet borrowed from Oceanic art that adds to the tension he creates between the ordinary and extraordinary in his art.

In Dubuffet’s painting the framing figures could represent a mother and father (perhaps the woman’s parents) or perhaps the father of the child and another female observer, such as a sister or midwife. These figures, too, are crudely rendered and may actually symbolize parenthood in general as Dubuffet was interested in what Carl Jung called “archetypal” figures — images we hold in our minds of figures we associate with primal human experience.

A key difference between the visitors or spectators and the active participants of this scene is the fact that the visitors wear Western garb (suits and dresses) whereas both mother and child are nude, a most primal state of nature that here, in the act of childbirth, represents a fundamental creative act. This was the way Dubuffet viewed art making — and the raw immediacy of creation he wanted to impart to his viewers.

Shortly after creating these paintings Dubuffet began experimenting with his haute pâte technique — a process of painting with a thick conglomerate of oil and industrial paint mixed with sand, gravel and studio detritus. He continued making crude figures that seemed, on the one hand, to have been smeared in the mud and, on the other hand, to be built up of fleshy pigments using a spatula, spoon or even his fingers — such as a child might do while finger painting. Although simultaneously muddy and fleshy, these figures also called to mind the Paleolithic cave paintings and modern street graffiti that also inspired Dubuffet and his peers. In fact, it was just this suggestion of anonymous urges to make marks that Dubuffet sought emulate in his art.

Dubuffet’s efforts to suggest raw creative processes made him one of the most important artists of the late 20th century. His work has influenced artists ranging from Robert Rauschenberg to Jean-Michel Basquiat and has also informed today’s mixed media practices.

Stephanie Chadwick, ISSUE contributor