{"id":2867,"date":"2020-04-03T18:07:33","date_gmt":"2020-04-03T18:07:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/?p=2867"},"modified":"2023-06-16T07:19:27","modified_gmt":"2023-06-16T07:19:27","slug":"james-faure-walker-dubuffet-drawing-and-disorder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/2020\/04\/03\/james-faure-walker-dubuffet-drawing-and-disorder\/","title":{"rendered":"James Faure Walker: ‘Dubuffet, Drawing and Disorder’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Jean Dubuffet, \u2018Dramatisation\u2019 (1978), acrylic on paper mounted on canvas (42 pieces), 210 x 280cm\n<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

In his second piece for Instantloveland as a Writer-in-Residence, James Faure Walker wonders if the great advocate of ‘<\/strong>Art Brut’<\/strong><\/em> and the authors of ‘How-to-draw’ manuals have anything to teach each other…<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018The lesser the drawing skill, the greater the creative contribution.\u2019<\/em> Jean Dubuffet<\/em> 1<\/a><\/sup>\u2018Batons Rompus\u2019, Les Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1986, p. 23., quoted by Alfred Pacquement, \u2018Scenes Champetres, Crayonnages, Recits, Conjectures\u2019 in the 1991 exhibition catalogue, Jean Dubuffet, Les Dernieres Annees, Editions du Jeu de Paume. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes I see an exhibition, and it leaves an after-image. In January I spent a couple of hours at the Dubuffet show in Valencia: it was a confrontation, eyeball to eyeball, with the blank staring faces, scrawled across in crazy patterns; the line that never rests.2<\/a><\/sup>At IVAM (Institut Valenci\u00e0 d\u2019Art Modern) from October 8, 2019 to February 16, 2020. The exhibition had travelled from Marseille\u2019s MUCEM (Museum of the Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean), and would end up in Geneva at the MEG (Museum of Ethnography), but this has now been postponed.<\/span> If there weren\u2019t personages as such, there were the \u2018Hourloupes\u2019<\/em>, felt-tip doodles made large. Works by other artists in the museum dropped away. They looked self-conscious, cautious, posed, out to please. Dubuffet\u2019s graffiti had the urgent look of the primal, uncensored, defiant and free of aesthetic principle. You could not come away untouched. It was a polemic against the pseudo-sophisticated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The exhibition included a substantial showing of Art Brut<\/em>, drawn from collections Dubuffet started in the 1940\u2019s. For him these works represented, according to the organisers, \u2018delusion-inspired inventiveness\u2019. <\/em>Here you could find a portrait of Queen Victoria constructed from seashells. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jean Dubuffet, detail of \u2018Dramatisation\u2019 (1978), acrylic on paper mounted on canvas (42 pieces), 210 x 280cm<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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\nPascal-Desir Maisonneuve, \u2018Queen Victoria\u2019 (c. 1925) seashells including a shell of Lambis lambis for the crown, Hippopus species for the cheeks and a cowry for the mouth. <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Jean Dubuffet, \u2018Les Pas Perdus\u2019 (1979), collage of 15 pieces of acrylic on paper collage mounted on canvas, (15 pieces), 51 x 70cm<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The exhibition\u2019s subtitle was \u2018A Barbarian in Europe\u2019<\/em>. Dubuffet likened western culture to a sewer. Our brains need to be \u2018demagnetized\u2019<\/em>. The art of the west, over-refined and clever, was the aberration. The art we class as \u2018primitive\u2019 <\/em>was where you would find the real creative energy: \u2018there is no hierarchy in art, there is only invention.\u2019<\/em> 3<\/a><\/sup>Part of Dubuffet\u2019s own Art Brut collection can be found in the Mus\u00e9e des Arts D\u00e9coratifs, Paris, which shows how difficult it is to classify.  <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dubuffet was notoriously combative and contrary in conversation, and some of his paradoxes were playful provocations: \u2018Only nihilism is constructive.\u2019 <\/em>At the same time he appeared to be fully grounded as an ordinary citizen. There were clips from documentary films made in the early 1960\u2019s, showing Dubuffet on the metro, or walking past the warehouses of \u2018Dubuffet\u2019<\/em>, the wine business he ran in the early forties. With his business suit and trilby, he didn\u2019t look at all like an artist. He taunted the arty elite with the mindset of a no-nonsense Paris commuter. Readymades?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018\u2026An intellectual can receive immense success for having presented a certain object to the enchanted cultural body \u2013 a urinal, a bottle rack \u2013 that all plumbers and cellarmen have been admiring for fifty years. But it never occurs to anyone that the plumber and cellarmen played the role of discoverers.\u2019<\/em> 4<\/a><\/sup>Jean Dubuffet, 1968, \u2018Asphyxiating Culture and Demagnetization of Brains\u2019, (translation by Carol Volk, 1988. published by Four Walls Eight Windows, New York. Page references taken from Verdrusz Book, Glasgow edition, 2018). Where not otherwise cited Dubuffet\u2019s quotations are from this source. Page 41. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How much of this was tongue-in-cheek? Duchamp had helped Dubuffet in\nthe USA with translation, and probably would have enjoyed this dig. Dubuffet\nwas sparring with the phoney group-think of \u2018art\nappreciation\u2019<\/em>: we should cultivate the raw rather than the cooked. He had\nbeen close to Miro and Masson in the 1930s. Surrealist subversion ran through\neverything he did, right up to his death in 1985. Somehow, he made it all work,\nmanaging to be both authoritative and ambiguous – automatism with sure-footed\ncomposition. There was no judging, no correcting, no changes of mind. Just a\nflow of crazy ideas and imagery. He treated the surface as if it were earth,\nscraped, harried, and ploughed, a farmer nurturing the crop. He spoke of the\nfermenting soil as if it were the collective unconscious. He used a black\nground colour to achieve the fluorescence of a blue. This was no unskilled amateur.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jean Dubuffet, \u2018Paysage aux Arbustes\u2019 (1949), 89 x 116cm<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Two<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the years I have amassed a collection of \u2018How-to-draw\u2019<\/em> books, from roughly 1880 to 1970, without having any reason for doing so, apart from finding them selling for nothing in junk shops or discarded from art school libraries \u2013 also, because they are generally frowned upon. They can be irritating or amusing \u2013 depending on your point of view – with many stern words against mere scribbling. They also tell a different story from conventional art history. Many are wonderfully illustrated: it was the golden age of commercial art. Before the ubiquity of photos, advertising agencies employed artists. The details are fascinating: the props for a 1920 still-life, the grandads posing in armchairs with their pipes, \u2018speed\u2019<\/em> represented as biplanes and steam engines; diagrams showing how to hold the pencil. You could dismiss it all as ephemera, the advice as obsolete as the technology depicted. If you were an actual teacher, you would say you can only learn so much from a book, from copying the pictures. The RA Schools actually banned these publications. Students often ignored the suggestion that they should draw whatever was around them; instead they copied the drawings with tracing paper.5<\/a><\/sup> For an extended discussion see my \u2018Learning to Draw from Forgotten Manuals\u2019, 2013 conference paper published, \u2018Drawing in the University Today\u2019, 2018, PSIAX, n\u00ba3, series II, Universities of Porto and Minho.  https:\/\/www.jamesfaurewalker.com\/learning-to-draw-from-long-forgotten-manuals-james-faure-walker-2013.html <\/span> But we all start from somewhere, and if you had no access to an art school, or knew nothing of museums, this is where you might have begun; and the formulae for drawing horses, trawlers or cars (vintage) can still come in handy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My book collection is mainly British. For the first half of the\ntwentieth century the writers provide sweeping introductions, nods to the old\nmasters, step-by-step exercises, and a few concessions to modern life \u2013 draw a\ntelephone if you have one. There is the occasional diatribe against\nwrong-headed teaching. Some acknowledge the new free thinking, but others weigh\nin against \u2018ugly modern\u2019<\/em> art as the\nwork of the insane, the Bolsheviks, or both. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bearing in mind Dubuffet\u2019s tirades against cultivated taste, his\ndismissal of the very idea of drawing as a \u2018skill\u2019,<\/em>\nwhat place, if any, would the drawing manual have in his Art Brut<\/em> universe? Dubuffet compares western decadence with rotting\nfruit. He knew his vineyards. He looked for the primal source, down through the\nsoil to the roots. He asked how the untutored and the raw could flourish, unaffected\nby what passed as \u2018culture\u2019<\/em>. Were the\nreaders of these instruction books potential recruits? Would they be contaminated\nby the advice of the experts? Perhaps we shouldn\u2019t take his argument too literally,\njust let the play of imagery wash over us. But the question remains of the\nuntaught versus the taught: whether you can unlearn all those reflexes you pick\nup in life drawing classes. If you were to take the \u2018ordinary\u2019<\/em> person\u2018s point of view, you could become the philistine who\nonly looks at the Western canon that Dubuffet affected to despise; you dismiss anything\nunfamiliar and \u2018experimental\u2019. The vital juices of creativity mean nothing at\nall. You are comfortable with drawing that shows skill, with impressionism,\nwith anything traditional as long as there is an explanatory label. You see children\u2019s\nart as full of \u2018mistakes\u2019, laugh at na\u00efvet\u00e9<\/em>,\nand just see other cultures as primitive. So there was the contradiction that faced\nthe idealistic avant-garde of the 1930\u2019s. The man in the street wasn\u2019t ready\nfor the medicine. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Commentators in the press periodically complain of the decline of drawing; they claim that art students are \u2018no longer\u2019 <\/em>taught how to draw. In fact every other drawing book going back to the 1880\u2019s and earlier makes that same claim – as if it were one of the lost accomplishments of ancient Greece. In recent times Art departments in universities have been singled out, as if all they taught was conceptual art. I recall many conversations with non-art people who repeat this news to me (I don\u2019t let on that I might be an artist myself); they mention the ‘School of London’ <\/em>as the \u2018real\u2019<\/em> artists, who have heroically resisted the Modern. What strikes me about these conversations is the absolute certainty that: a) observational drawing is a basis for everything; b) it can be successfully inculcated by teaching; and c) everything else that has been achieved over the past hundred years goes out the window. For the record \u2013 just look at the \u2018Large Glass\u2019<\/em> – Duchamp was a skilled technical draughtsman.6<\/a><\/sup> I owe this observation to Irving Sandler, who used to speak of Duchamp as an incongruous figure in New York in the fifties and sixties, like a dandy. See: www.meltonpriorinstitut.org\/pages\/textarchive.php5?view=text&ID=159&language=English<\/span> I have nothing at all against drawing \u2013 most days I draw something from observation \u2013 but I do object to the narrow-mindedness, to shrinking art education down to \u2018training\u2019 <\/em>in one or two approved \u2018skills\u2019<\/em>. In the past twenty years, private art schools have sprung up, sensing a gap in the market, promising the proper grounding. There is a half-truth here; studio teaching in university art departments is been rationed, the proportion of \u2018theoretical\u2019<\/em> study has increased, and the staff have to tot up research points for the funding league tables. There is little comfort here for progressive souls. Dubuffet\u2019s onslaughts \u2013 always full of humour \u2013 do strike home, decades after they were poured out in his vivid imaginings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, I doubt whether this forgotten \u2018How-to-draw\u2019<\/em> library could release the raw art energy that\nDubuffet extolled. Quite the reverse. The authors would dismiss his \u2018scribbles\u2019<\/em> as undisciplined rubbish. Amateur\nart societies might be more ambivalent. Plenty of retired people enrol in art\nclasses, enjoy \u2018mindful\u2019<\/em> life drawing,\nor a pleasant still-life. It is recreational. Some might go along with\nDubuffet\u2019s \u2018constructive nihilism\u2019<\/em>,\nbut many just want the quiet life. If their painting is a little na\u00efve and\nwobbly, no matter; it is honest and tasteful. For Dubuffet, though, it wouldn\u2019t\nbe sufficiently unhinged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018I am an individualist, that is to say that I consider it my role as an individual to oppose all constraints brought about by the interest of the social good. \u2026.It is for the State to look out for the social good, and for me to look out for the good of the individual. The State has but one face for me: that of the police.\u2019<\/em> 7<\/a><\/sup>Jean Dubuffet, ibid. p. 7. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I first read Dubuffet\u2019s \u2018Asphyxiating\nCulture\u2019<\/em> I imagined curators at the Tate, the Arts Council, the Royal\nAcademy, dressed in uniforms according to rank, with rules and regulations\npinned up in the galleries, penalties for wrong thinking. The book was first\npublished in 1968, a time of liberation politics and the Paris student\nuprisings, and \u2018Western Art\u2019<\/em> was an\neasy target. Half a century later, the Tate does indeed have uniformed guards,\nand wall texts; but the \u2018uniform\u2019 <\/em>consists\nof a simple black t-shirt, the wall text gives helpful s<\/s>uggestions for\nwhat you might like to think about, and those \u2018guards\u2019<\/em> might well be protecting the odd Dubuffet alongside all\nthe other art. Today museums tread carefully, wary of causing offence,\ntiptoeing around ethnology; in retreat from treating art as art, with labels\nstressing context. This makes us feel enlightened and socially responsible\ncitizens. I recall time spent in the Museum of Mankind when it was behind the\nRA, just looking at the exhibits as art works in their own right. I have\nHerbert Read\u2019s \u2018Education Through Art\u2019<\/em>\nof 1943 in my collection, full of analyses of children\u2019s drawing, campaigning\nfor a deeper understanding. Today we look at exhibited art less as a learning\nresource than as a tourist attraction. We traipse around museums designed by\nstar architects and respond to celebrity artists. A visitor trooping through\nthe Antony Gormley RA installation was heard to say how much better it was than\nthe \u2018awful\u2019 <\/em>Abstract Expressionist\nexhibition there. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jean Dubuffet, \u2018Trinit\u00e9-Champs-\u00c9lys\u00e9es’ \n(series ‘Paris Circus’) (1961), oil on canvas, 116 x 90cm<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Jean Dubuffet, \u2018Plurifocal Place\u2019 (1975), acrylic on canvas, 97 x 130cm<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

My favourite Dubuffets are the late \u2018Theatre of Memory\u2019 <\/em>works, collages of dozens of drawings. I had\nseen these in exhibitions in Paris and knew what to expect. They have so much\nof the city about them, crowds of commuters rushed for time. There were cars\nand parks, but nothing as restful as an open landscape. The Valencia show opened\nwith \u2018Dramatisation\u2019<\/em> of 1978, and \u2018Les Pas Perdus (The Last Steps)\u2019<\/em> of 1975, which was\na film about a rich married woman falling for a young worker. They recalled the\ngreat late paintings of Leger, the parades, workers and picnics, but without the\ndreamy idealism. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Seurat\u2019s picture \u2018La Grande Jatte\u2019 in\nthe Art Institute of Chicago would, in my opinion, be infinitely more beautiful\n\u2013 would have more style and would, without doubt, stand as the greatest work of\nFrench Art, had it been painted in the technique of the local tone.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Seurat\u2019s lack of force is due to the fact that he submitted to the impressionist diffuseness of his time and employed it in a composition where the breadth demanded the use of local tone. Rousseau, Le Douanier,  who also worked in the middle of the Impressionist period, knew how to hold out against this diffusiveness. He employed the local tone. And that is what gives him his quality and style.\u2019<\/em>8<\/a><\/sup> Fernand Leger, 1937, \u2018Apropos of Colour\u2019, translated by James Johnson Sweeney, Transition, New York, page 81. <\/span> <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is not Dubuffet discussing local colour. It is Leger, writing in 1937. Dubuffet was close to Leger. This was written in \u2018Transition\u2019<\/em>, a journal with contributions from everyone from Mondrian and Aaron Copland to James Joyce.9<\/a><\/sup> I have two copies of the journal, Transition, nos. 25 (cover by Miro)and 26 (cover by Duchamp), from 1936 and 1937. They give a hint of the pre-war milieu Dubuffet would have known during the formative period when he had twice given up on his painting career to run his wine business. Contributors included: Miro, Dylan Thomas, Franz Kafka, Louis Aragon, Fernand Leger, Le Corbusier, Paul Strand, Marcel Duchamp, Hans Arp, James Agee, Paul Eluard, Randall Jarrell, Raymond Queneau, James Joyce, Aaron Copland, Man Ray, Andre Lhote, Ladislaus Moholy-Nagy, Piet Mondrian, Erwin Panofsky, Alexander Calder, Josef Albers, John Piper. The issues include a section called \u2018Inter-Racial\u2019. When we started the magazine, Artscribe, in 1976, this was what I had in mind.<\/span> Leger\u2019s words are a reminder that the idea of rejecting and remaking the recent past was in the air. Dubuffet\u2019s painting ambitions had been frustrated before the war. He made puppets, learned the accordion, so as to perform alongside his wife, Lili. He then ran a successful wine business in occupied Paris. When he reinvented himself as an urban primitive, and more or less established the concept of \u2018Art Brut\u2019<\/em> in his forties, he had already seen more than enough of life\u2019s bitter side. The etiquette of drawing was far from his mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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L to R: ‘Transition’ Fall 1936, No. 25 (Cover image: Joan Miro); ‘Transition’ Fall 1937, No. 26\n (Cover image: Marcel Duchamp)\n<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Four<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The examples of good drawing in the \u2018How-to-draw\u2019<\/em> books show a clean-living, well-ordered world. You enter the home of the competently sane.10<\/a><\/sup> For example: \u201dthe cave dweller returning from his hunting would spend the dark hours painting and drawing on the rough walls of his home, helped perhaps by the flickering light from a fire\u2026..We know, too, that there are among us today some who return home from very different work in the city, factory or field, and find the very same satisfaction and a great deal of healthy \u2018release\u2019 in leisure hours spent with pencil and brush.\u201d Ronald Smith ATD (1942), Teach Yourself to Draw\u2019, The English Universities Press, London. Page vii. <\/span> You can find bizarre juxtapositions of everyday objects – in the 1900\u2019s you could even buy a hamper of appropriate still-life objects – but the point was to measure, to translate what you see and get it right. Circles seen from an angle could mean trouble.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Maurice Andre Kaspar, ‘Moulin du Cotterge\/Le Chable, Val de Bagnes, Valais, Switzerland\u2019 (c. 1935) watercolour, dimensions not known<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Jaume Mateu, detail of \u2018Altarpiece of St Michael the Archangel\u2019 (circa1402 and 1452), tempera on wood, dimensions unknown<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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\u2018Other Vases in Difficult Positions\u2019, from Sparkes, 1919, \n\u2018How to Draw from Models and Common Objects\u2019, p113\n<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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L to R: Aloise Corbaz, \u2018P\u00eache miraculeuse du brodequin de Thalie\n(Miraculous fishing of Thalie\u2019s ankle boot)\u2019 (circa 1954)\ncoloured crayon, geranium juice and papers sewn in seven\nsheets of paper sewn together, 204 x 147cm; On the reverse side: Aloise Corbaz, \u2018Lune de Miel dans les Jardins de la Malmaison (Honeymoon in the Gardens of Malmaison)\u2019 (circa 1954) \n<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

I was looking through a collection of pre-war architectural watercolours by the artist, Maurice Andre Kaspar, for a forthcoming exhibition.11<\/a><\/sup>The Life and Works of Maurice Andre Kaspar, 1892-1946, Bankside Gallery, London, January 256 to 31, 2021.<\/span> Though established in Switzerland, he was not widely known. He was self-taught. What makes the paintings interesting is that he was an architect whose job it was to inspect the physical and sanitary conditions of old Geneva buildings. There was one study of a waterwheel, and at first it looked a curiously-shaped mechanism. And then, as I became more familiar with his approach, I realised this shape was an unintended distortion \u2013 easy to make, and, you might say, uncensored. That wheel could never turn. I thought straightaway of a formidable exercise in the chapter, \u2018Other vases in difficult positions\u2019<\/em>, in \u2018How to Draw from Models and Common Objects\u2019<\/em> of 1919, explaining how to represent circular forms seen at an angle looking upwards.12<\/a><\/sup>W.E. Sparkes, (1919) How to Draw from Models and Common Objects. A Practical Manual. Cassell and Co, London. <\/span>Once I saw that waterwheel as deformed I could not unsee it, nor could I switch over to seeing it as creatively unskilled. A week later I came across a plaque in a church near Dedham where Constable\u2019s brother, Abraham, a miller in the family business, said of one of the early watercolours: \u2018John\u2019s mill wheels look as if they would really go round.\u2019<\/em> This could be a trivial test to apply – it probably is \u2013 but ellipses are notoriously difficult, especially in peripheral vision, or in<\/em> close-up, as Cezanne discovered when painting his still-lives. Dubuffet\u2019s distorted forms look integrated because they are squashed flat \u2013 and his distortions became part of the stylization. I came across another example, from a 15th<\/sup>-century altarpiece in Valencia, and if \u2018How to Draw from Models and Common Objects\u2019<\/em> had been available to the artist, perhaps St Catherine\u2019s wheel \u2013 no comfort to her \u2013 could have formed a proper circle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2018Cylinder above the Eye-Level\u2019, Plate XXX, Smith, A., 1935. Object, Plant, and Memory Drawing, London: Pitman, p. 60.\n<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Jean Dubuffet, \u2018Lili aux objets en desordre\u2019 (1936) oil on canvas, 100 x 63cm<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Jean Dubuffet, January 1, 1942, Les Halles, Paris, serving mulled wine.\n<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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\nJean Dubuffet, \u2018Lili, glove puppet\u2019 (1936), fabric and wood, h 66cm<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Adolf Wolfli, \u2018Untitled (The great railway of the ravine of anger)\u2019 (1911) coloured crayon and lead pencil on paper, 50 x37cm<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Archibald Standish Hartrick, \u2018Portrait of Vincent van Gogh\u2019 (circa 1930) painted from memory, dimensions unknown<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

When we dream, we are passive observers under a spell; there are no\nart tutors steppinginto correct perspective. We find we can\nfly. It is the free-floating world of fantasy of religious art, folk art, even\nchildren\u2019s art. Do we need to distinguish between the truly \u2018visionary\u2019<\/em> and the knowing imitation?\nIs the imagery meant for private solace, or for general consumption? One of the\nmost mesmerising pictures in the \u2018Art\nBrut\u2019<\/em> section of this exhibition, by Aloise Corbaz, has the tenderness of a\ndevotional painting, with the visual logic as peculiar as the title \u2013 \u2018Miraculous fishing of Thalie\u2019s ankle boot\u2019<\/em>.\nAdolf Wolfli\u2019s \u2018Untitled (the great\nrailway of the ravine of anger)\u2019<\/em> of 1911 is instantly recognizable as a\nWolfli, pulling you along its winding story-line, a melting Piranesi. Dubuffet touches\non this dilemma:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018\u2026the artist finds himself drawn toward two contradictory aspirations, to turn his back on the public or to face the public. Thus, we see the great Adolf Wolfli write on the back of his painting the price he assigns to them, which is sometimes a million billion, sometimes a pack of tobacco.\u2019<\/em> 13<\/a><\/sup>Jean Dubuffet, ibid. p.44. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Five<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dubuffet writes of the 1900\u2019s as a period when innovation meant\nwholesale rejection of past conventions. It isn\u2019t always apparent what art of\nthat period he did or didn\u2019t favour. Perhaps he needed to duck out of the\nshadow of Picasso. By the 1960\u2019s he was more settled, and had his own working\nrhythms, his own formulae. Could he have produced a \u2018How-to\u2019<\/em> manual, everything boiled down to one technique? Not\neasily. Every few years he re-invented himself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If I could time-travel back to the epoch of these drawing manuals, especially\nthose so wrapped up in the received wisdom of academic realism, I would throw\nback some questions the Dubuffet exhibition posed. Did they think drawing was\njust about being accurate? And if not, what else was involved? Where does art\nreally come from? Do they feel the unconscious, dreaming, the accidental, the\nworks of cultures remote from our own, have anything to offer? Couldn\u2019t they recognize\nthat a method as simple as collage made painting turn a corner? Perhaps I am\nbeing unreasonable, because there are good reasons for wanting the security of\na sound drawing technique, however that is defined.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The manuals of the 1920s and 1930s do acknowledge the revolutions of modern art, but tend to return to the complacency of a middle-of-the-road academicism. But sometimes you come across a first-hand encounter that makes you think twice:  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018All the \u201cIsms\u201d of the last fifteen or\ntwenty years merely represent the effort to retain or get back to the freshness\nand force of first impressions and they have been, nearly all, futile because\nof a self-consciousness which is too often but the sign of incompetence.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Nearly thirty years ago the Anarchists\nof Art in Paris suggested that the only way to get forward again was to burn\nthe museums and make a fresh start. But the museums are still with us, better\norganized and more useful than ever.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018I happen to have known personally at\nthat time two of the men who, since then, have been exalted to the position of\nleaders of new movements in Art \u2013 Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin\u2026both of\nthem came to the study of Art professionally after they had already arrived at\nmature years, with a considerable experience of the world and life behind them\n(\u2026)<\/em>
\n<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Being men of character and ability they thereupon sought a means of expression through the ruder and more primitive forms of technique. The result of this activity had been mainly to re-assert the importance of design and clearness of colour: nothing very surprising after all. Van Gogh as I knew him certainly would have been the last to claim that he was doing anything absolutely new. The names of Rembrandt and J.F. Millet were constantly on his lips. Gauguin was more \u2018intransigent\u2019. As an extreme individualist he disliked the teaching of academies with a violence that grew to be almost a mania.\u2019<\/em> 14<\/a><\/sup>A.S. Hartrick (1921), Drawing, From Drawing as an Educational Force to Drawing as an Expression of the Emotions, Pitman, London. Pp. 8,9. Further details on Hartrick can be found at: http:\/\/freepages.rootsweb.com\/~hartrickclan\/genealogy\/article4.html<\/span> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The passages above are from Hartrick\u2019s \u2018Drawing: from Drawing as an educational force to drawing as an expression of emotions\u2019<\/em> of 1921. Two of Hartrick\u2019s students suffered serious mental distress. One was David Jones , the other was Thomas Hennell, who replaced Eric Ravilious as a war artist in Iceland in 1943, but was himself killed in 1945. 15<\/a><\/sup>A new biography of Hennell by Jessica Kilburn will be published this year. See: http:\/\/www.pimpernelpress.com\/thomas-hennell <\/span> He suffered from schizophrenia. Would you guess this from looking at his work? There are traces of Van Gogh in the drawing, but the watercolours I have seen suggest that observing and recording what he saw, concentrating just on what was there in front of him, was what mattered. As in many cases, there may be disturbance in an artist\u2019s mind, but what is painted can be serenely objective. Since Dubuffet began assembling his collection in 1945, psychiatry has moved on. The pictures he collected tend to be strangely rigid, fixated on architecture, with obsessive systems, babbling stories. The connection between the inner and outer worlds is never straightforward. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Did the Valencia exhibition\u2019s after-image last? Yes and no. The\norganizers recognized Dubuffet\u2019s contradictions, but saw them as propelling his\ninvestigations. He touched on questions that get less attention today than they\nmight. Perhaps we find \u2018Art Brut\u2019<\/em> an\nunconvincing concept. We compartmentalise the art of the professional, the\namateur, the outsider, the child. I can\u2019t recall many recent conversations\nabout painting and the unconscious. \u2018Art\nBrut\u2019<\/em>, with all its cross-cultural connections, has an underlying humanism.\nIt has a particular relevance, given the rise of division and nationalism in\nEurope, and patterns of mass migration \u2013 including, of course, the current\nspread of coronavirus. He would have ridiculed the feel-good mission statements\nof art schools, the fake intellectual jargon, the academics rebranding dull art\nas \u2018research\u2019<\/em>. From a 1968 perspective\nour culture looks tame, conformist, and colluding with fashion and the market.\nYet, if you took his programme literally, with its call for the disruption and\nsubversion of institutions, it has echoes of the \u2018alt-right\u2019<\/em>, of Trump\u2019s rampant individualism. <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dubuffet left a legacy, especially in the USA after his stays there from 1950 onwards: think of de Kooning\u2019s \u2018Women\u2019, or of  Oldenburg, who was in the audience of his 1951 Chicago lecture; and not forgetting Schnabel and Haring.16<\/a><\/sup>For an extended discussion of Dubuffet\u2019s influence in the USA see Pepe Karmel, 2002, \u2018Jean Dubuffet: The Would-Be Barbarian\u2019, Apollo (London), vol. CLVI, no 489 (new series), 2002, available at: https:\/\/www.academia.edu\/9990609\/Jean_Dubuffet_The_Would-Be_Barbarian <\/span>What he produced predates subsequent outbreaks of funky figuration by decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Jean Dubuffet, \u2018Ontogenesis\u2019 (1974-5), vinyl on laminated panel, 251 x 316cm<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Jean Dubuffet, \u2018Bon Courage\u2019 (1982), acrylic on paper collage, four pieces, mounted on canvas, 100 x 134cm<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Jean Dubuffet, \u2018Mire G42 (Kowloon)\u2019 (1983), acrylic on paper mounted on canvas, 134 x 200cm<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

I am not sure what I think about drawing skill: does it just mean \u2018look what I can do\u2019<\/em>? In abstract\npainting the authenticity of a drawn line is a tricky question. To look secure,\nit mustn\u2019t look forced, impatient, vague, or be there just to help out an\notherwise floppy composition. I am rarely convinced by gestures driven by angst,\nreal or simulated. I prefer detachment. Perhaps that is temperament. I like to\nfeel the artist got over his or her upsets before picking up the brush. It is\nalso hard to make drawing look casual. Without the pull of a suggested image,\nor structure, it can be no more than \u2018mark-making\u2019<\/em>\nfor its own sake, or just an exercise in arabesque, doing nothing much.\nDubuffet was not a colourist, and needed his animated line to lasso the\nwildlife. It wanders across the surface, not so much obsessed as carefully\nwatched and \u2013 to use his term – policed. What did he really mean by \u2018creative\u2019<\/em>? Certainly not the \u2018well-painted\u2019<\/em> picture, nor pictorial\ncarpentry, nor indulgent self-revelation, or random outbursts. He had fastidious\ntaste \u2013 again I think of the wine trade. His methods for pictorial cultivation were\ntruly ingenious. He threw in something that at first looks at odds with\nhighbrow culture, but then you get its measure, its tensions and contradictions,\neven its restraint, and it becomes unforgettable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In his second piece for Instantloveland as a Writer-in-Residence, James Faure Walker wonders if the great advocate of ‘Art Brut’ and the authors of ‘How-to-draw’ manuals have anything to teach each other… One \u2018The lesser the drawing skill, the greater the creative contribution.\u2019 Jean Dubuffet 1\u2018Batons Rompus\u2019, Les Editions de…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essay"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2867"}],"version-history":[{"count":86,"href":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2867\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5585,"href":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2867\/revisions\/5585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}