Hubert Damisch, “Dubuffet or the Reading of the World” Art de France 2 (1962): 337–346

Translated by Kent Minturn and Priya Wadhera

“It’s not being an exceptional man that is so marvelous, it’s being a man;”1 but the

undertaking is not so easy, when one believes neither in gift nor in genius, to cover a canvas

which is like a fragment of the human condition, with our humors and most constant thoughts,

and with our most assiduous perceptions.2 This task that Jean Dubuffet formulated for his own

use, in his Prospectus aux amateurs de tout genre from 1946, allows us, fifteen years later, to

measure its breadth and its—let’s say the word, even though it would seem repugnant to this

“common man”—originality. It is perhaps because the idea to paint as each and every person

could do is, in our society, neither natural nor “common” that Dubuffet had to wait until his

fortieth year to—as he put it—find an entrée and dedicate himself definitively to the exercise of

painting. In his forties, during the sad days of the Occupation, and hoping for a Liberation from

which he himself was expecting “something.”3 Doubtless he would have felt reluctant to clarify

his thoughts on this point: but as L’Avant-projet d’une conférence populaire reminds us, the poets

of the day dreamt of a language which was audible to all, and this painter of returning art to the

street, painting for everyone, for the little informed passer-by.

This idea, which occupied him for a long time, had up to this point prohibited him from

entering the exclusive world of avant-garde art, an art of the select few if ever there was one.

Retracing the aesthetic disappointments of the young Dubuffet, Georges Limbour observed the

estrangement he felt towards the established names. As if he had judged that the art of the

1
Jean Dubuffet, “Notes pour les fins lettrés,” in Prospectus aux amateurs de tout genre(Gallimard : Paris
1946), p. 99; Jean Dubuffet, Jean, “Notes for the Well-Read” (1945), trans. Joachim Neugroschel, in
Mildred Glimcher, Jean Dubuffet: Towards an Alternative Reality (New York: Abbeville Press, 1987): 85.
2
Ibid., p. 87. Glimcher, p. 82.
3
Jean Dubuffet, “Lettre à Jean Paulhan,” ibid., p. 138.
 2

Cubists, the great iconoclasts of the time, was still situated within the perspective of the tradition

which they denounced. He came of age while Picasso was paying homage to academicism; it was

not working any longer “towards” the destruction of the art of the museums that mattered so

much to him, but rather deliberately ignoring any tradition, and becoming grounded at once in the

transcendence of art which Hegel, in his Aesthetics, evoked without even knowing it. But if the

portrait of Lili au chapeau garni de cerises [Lili in the Hat Garnished with Cherries] (1935), or

similar paintings from the same time, are just flat images, without impact or virtue; doubtless this

is less a question of the death of art and its “superannuation” than of its lack, its absence. In this

way Dubuffet was measuring the difficulty of the task facing the artist today: to make a

“humanist” work—“and naturally that is what one wants”4—without forgoing the spirit of radical

contestation which constitutes the foundation of modern art.

It was necessary then for him to wait for the right moment to assign negation a new

figure. A war, and about ten years, separate Lili’s portrait Big Coaly Nude and the first Hautes

Pâtes, shown at René Drouin in 1946, from the aforementioned portrait of Lili au chapeau.

These works—and those that followed (up until the series of Portraits plus beaux qu’ils croient in

1947)—have retained their power of provocation: and doubtless it is necessary that we can, even

today, doubt some of them in order to understand the wager on which they were based, taking no

notice of the labor of the painter and the subsequent development of his work, following the

example of those critics who feared back then that such a mode of representation exempted him

from any spirit of invention. Because it was indeed a wager made by the creator of the Vues de

Paris [Views of Paris] and Mirobolus, Macadam & Cie. A wager on the aesthetic scope of means

of representation and materials held as unworthy, and which he would be the first to use in a no

longer occasional, but rather systematic and exclusive way: soils and white lead, clinker, tar

mixed with grit, tow, shavings, scratches, incisions and scrapings, imprints and reliefs, which one

will find precisely named in the invaluable working notes of the painter. A wager, more

4
“Notes . . .,” p. 68. Glimcher, p. 75.
 3

adventurous still, on the effectiveness that the spectator would be able to recognize in these

representations that are certainly barbaric, but also completely devoid of the picturesque (“he

knows that in having decided to believe in it, he soon really is going to believe in it”5).

Make no mistake here: if Dubuffet appeals in this way to the spontaneity of the spectator,

to his engagement, his work should not simply be taken as scandalous or provocative. If this

work has critical value, it is in the sense that, from a Marxist perspective, revolutionary theory

inaugurates a challenge to the established order to which the action of the proletariat is called to

give real content. Because fortunately Dubuffet was not content with ignoring the aesthetic order

or with denying it solely in principle: he became a painter from the moment that he set one order

against another existing order, when he set against the tradition of museums a savage rhetoric

which seemed to effectively negate it, attributing to forms the least socialized by art— lumpen art

as Clement Greenberg described it so well —the aesthetic meaning which Céline had recognized

in the spoken forms of language.6 It is in this literal sense that it is therefore necessary for us to

understand the intention asserted by this painter to put art back in the street. And, indeed, how to

escape the aristocratic circle of art? This preoccupation, since Goya, periodically surfaces in

European art, and painters—Géricault, Courbet— sometimes believed that they could accomplish

it by borrowing subjects from popular prints, and even some of their compositions, and by trying

hard to confer upon the image the density of the painted material, to establish a communication

between the art of salons and that of the peddler. But the print imagery itself offers for the most

part only a reflection of aristocratic forms, currency of a culture which the superior classes

elaborate for their own use and which they then aspire to impose on society as a whole.

Compared to this, the paintings from the series Mirobolus and Macadam & Cie. seemed

immediately subversive: because it was not a question, for the author of the Prospectus, of more

5
Ibid., p. 81. Glimcher, p. 80.
6
Clement Greenberg, “Jean Dubuffet and ‘Art Brut’,” Partisan Review 16:3 (March 1949), 295-297;
reprinted in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism (Vol. II), (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1986), 289-291.
 4

widely opening up the reserved domain of art to the masses but, on the contrary, of rehabilitating

the most common and disdained forms of expression, forbidden in the name of the art of

museums, and to demonstrate their aesthetic reach: of graffito, for example, which was very

fashionable at a time when, night after night, the walls of the city were covered with inscriptions

that testified in man’s favor.

This perhaps is the true meaning of the challenge of Art Brut preferred to, —as Dubuffet

put it —“cultural arts;” a challenge which for many lies in the reservations that this art has often

inspired, even in those who wished to defend it. But our task is not to lock Dubuffet into his

origins, and I am not sure that our discussion gains anything from being conducted on the

theoretical plane. Whether the idea to look for individuals allegedly “unscathed by any artistic

culture” and forced to express themselves by, “deriving everything from their own reserves,” and

“reinventing the artistic operation in its entirety,” is well founded or not, whether the “primitive”

arts, the productions of children and madmen are, on the contrary, profoundly socialized and

cultural, and whether art brut is, after all, more Meissonier than Dubuffet7 (and I could add, in

spite of appearances, more the portrait of Lili au chapeau than the Grand nu [Big Nude] or the

Texturologies series) it matters little once one admits that Dubuffet is interested in discovering,

with full knowledge of the facts and with a creative perspective, new modes of appropriating

reality. Doubtless, works from the “irregulars of art” presented by the Company of Art Brut

inspired in him a certain tendency for Expressionism, for the most brutal and “naïve”

transcription of intention. By claiming to recognize in the madman, the child, the visionary, and

man in general, a common function, the function of art, the same in all cases,8 Dubuffet satisfied

7
André Berne-Joffroy, “L’exposition Jean Dubuffet,” Nouvelle Revue Française (May 1954).
8
Jean Dubuffet, “Our point of view on this question of the function of art is the same in all cases: there’s
no more an art of the insane than there is an art of dyspeptic people or the art of people with knee
problems.” L’art brut préféré aux arts culturels (Paris, 1949). Dubuffet, “Art Brut Preferred to the Cultural
Arts” (1949), trans. Joachim Neugroschel, in Mildred Glimcher, Jean Dubuffet: Towards an Alternative
Reality (New York: Abbeville Press, 1987): 104.
 5

the demand for an art which was authentically that of man, and no longer the privilege of a

certain group or class. A demand whose simultaneously historical and utopian character, which is

to say the critical relationship it maintains with contemporary society, he did not underestimate.

In interrogating the irregulars of art, Dubuffet connects with the Gauguin of the Marquesas

Islands. But there is no longer any need, today, to flee to the antipodes of the globe to invent a

modern art: this can very well be done in Paris, and even in Vence.

However, this same Dubuffet, who said at the time that he was afraid of nothing except

ideas, is succumbing today to “metaphysics,” and this previously by nature obscurantist spirit gets

carried away ever more easily.9 Georges Limbour warned us of it: “This man was born a

contrarian and all positions in art are reversible.”10 In fact, from December 1959, when the

Geologist was executed, Dubuffet’s work was to take a turn no longer as much social as it was

philosophical (as he said himself about the Grounds and Soils and other Landscape Tables

because “painting can be a subtle machine for conveying philosophy—but also to elaborate it”11),

while the choice of a new partner—one that was commensurate with his intentions—was

necessary for him.

Dubuffet had been seeking this partner systematically—at least in its most apparent

guise—, from the time of the Haute Pâtes series of 1946. And, here again, what could be more

against the rules of tradition than this acquiescence to the powers of “chance,” to the fortuitous

reactions of the absurd (and yet the most common), even hostile, materials? But such abandon

was contrary to surrealist games: because representation did not arise, at least in the first of the

Haute Pâtes, from a more or less automatic and spontaneous pictorial practice; the painter was

9
Jean Dubuffet, “Texturologies, Topographies,” Les Lettres nouvelles (April 22, 1959).
10
Georges Limbour, Tableau bon levain à vous de cuire la pâte. L’art brut de Jean Dubuffet (Paris: Pierre
Matisse, 1953).
11
Jean Dubuffet, Peintures initiatiques d’Alfonso Ossorio (Paris : Pierre Volante 1951), Translated by
Richard Howard and published in Klaus Ottmann and Dorothy Kosinski, ed., Angels, Demons, and
Savages: Pollock, Ossorio and Dubuffet (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 115-128.
 6

not waiting for images but, on the contrary, eager to put them to the test of the material: as in

Mister Macadam in which, once finished, “the sort of white crepe dough with which the person is

thickly buttered, was, by its proximity to the tar, dyed the color of burnt bread like a used

Meerschaum pipe.”12 To be sure, this recourse to the most lowly and unworthy of materials

answered his parallel attempt to rehabilitate the least valued means of expression. Dubuffet

forced us to distinguish between the aesthetic quality of the work and its value as a luxury object.

But these unusual ingredients still had the virtue of confounding the expectations of a painter

even this highly respectful of their vague desires, their aspirations, and who wanted to see the

emergence of the art of the material as much as that of the tool. It is remarkable that Dubuffet, as

he progressed in his knowledge of the language of the various materials, recognized in their

reactions, in their dialogue, an ever more decisive role, a deeper meaning. As if “chance” had

soon appeared to him as the mask of an otherwise effective power. This same “chance” about

which Valéry stated that it does not do anything in the world— except draw attention to itself,

and Dubuffet said that there is no chance other than that which is led and provoked, or more or

less “consented to,” taken advantage of by the artist.13

Chance intervenes every time that man, as in the game of heads or tails —attributes to

apparently unpredictable objective processes a meaning that is foreign to them. But does this

painter not seek natural order for aesthetic purposes, expecting from the material adventures

pictorial effects that he would not have been able to produce, nor even conceive of,

deliberately?14 Here is precisely, one might say, something that contradicts the very notion of art.

Does this mean that Dubuffet relies on the most elementary mechanisms to decide on the

12
Jean Dubuffet, “Indications descriptives,” in Michel Tapie, Mirobolus, Macadam & Cie. (Paris, 1946).
Dubuffet, “More Modest,” (1946) trans. Joachim Neugroschel in Tracks: A Journal of Artist’s Writings 1:2
(Spring 1975): 26-29.
13
Prospectus, p. 58.
14
Ibid., p. 59.
 7

elaboration of his paintings and the development of his work? Yet there’s no need to exaggerate

because the author of the Haute Pâtes, or Texturologies, the lithographer of the series of

Phénomènes deploys, as far as I know, the most intense activity, which is also the most

deliberate. It is true that his works always have an experimental appearance and that he himself

even looks at them as so many preliminaries to his subsequent works (always put off until later).15

However, these experiments, and his ceaseless search for new techniques which bring into play

the properties of the material—in the Lacquer paintings, for example, the incompatibility

between oil painting and enamel paintings—, even (in the case of the Imprints) the properties of

the support, have nothing arbitrary or gratuitous about them. And how can one continue to speak

of chance when the painter no longer wonders at the aesthetic efficiency of natural productions

but recognizes it, and claims to play with it; when he appeals deliberately, by means of the

imprint, to the mineral kingdom and the vegetable kingdom? Laboratory of forms, Natura

Genitrix . . . : a singular artist, this one, and freed from any cultural tradition in a different way

than the primitive or the child (although one says gladly—but this is just an image—that Nature

“imitates” art). And this same painter who, in a still life from 1923, strove to reproduce the veins

of wood—as had been done by the Cubists, and previously by Munch or Gauguin, before

obtaining their imprint (the Spirit of the Woods, etc.) twenty six years later is doubtless the first to

have claimed, if not to compete with the pictorial production of butterflies, at least to be inspired

by it, trying hard—having integrated it into some of his works, embellishing the background, with

the paintbrush, with “fine lines recalling those that the nervures [veins of a leaf] form

15
Cf., Jean Dubuffet, “Mémoire sur le développement de mes travaux à partir de 1952,” in: Catalogue de la
rétrospective Jean Dubuffet (Paris: Musée des Arts décoratifs, 1960), p. 163; “Memoir on the Development
of My Work from 1952,” trans. Louise Varèse in Peter Seltz, The Work of Jean Dubuffet (New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 1962): 73-138.
 8

spontaneously,” — to obtain by means of art the scintillating effects equivalent to those of his

first assemblages of lepidopteran wings.16

The care that Dubuffet brings to working in the direction (and in the continuation) of

natural processes—underlining and completing patiently with the paintbrush the networks of tiny

folds provoked by the presence of hostile substances or transcribing with pen and ink the intimate

organization of a fragment of ground, the passionate rigor with which he interrogates nature, of

which his admirable text on the Imprints is, outside the works themselves, the most remarkable

illustration, this is what gives a new direction to the intervention of “chance” in works of art.

Because Dubuffet does not claim to understand the mechanism of these formations, nor even to

form a “model” of it—a simple shift employed by the mind to imagine for itself the phenomena

that belong to a different order—but only to collect the imprint of it; to observe its traces;

proceeding with the greatest speed, “to let nature do here as she does elsewhere, and to learn from

her in order to imitate her manners of operation.”17 Transmutarsi nelle mente di natura: if the

program defined by Leonardo has not lost any of its current relevance, doubtless this is because it

answers a permanent necessity of the mind that neither the development of the sciences nor the

progression of ideas have succeeded in eliminating. As if the artist, following the example of the

philosopher who is delighted at his plentiful and flowery beard, had to embrace passiveness in

order to reveal to us that this apparently completely arbitrary and conventional activity, art, has its

roots in the part of man that is not merely, in his being, a discontinuity but an integral part of

nature.

16
Ibid., p. 93 and 110. Cf., Roger Caillois, Méduse & Cie. (Paris, 1960). On this point, he has already
noted that what the wing is to the butterfly, painting is to man. Translated by George Ordish as The Mask
of Medusa (New York: C.N. Potter, 1964).
17
Jean Dubuffet, “Empreintes,” Les Lettres nouvelles (April 1957), p. 513. Dubuffet, “Empreintes” (1957),
trans. Lucy R. Lippard in Theories of Modern Art, ed. Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1968): 606-616.
 9

The idea of nature as a supplier of forms, and maybe as an artist, surfaces in mythology,

which led painters and amateurs of the Renaissance to take an interest in “stones bearing images,”

while naturalists classified marble according to their representational virtues: Florentine stones

and marbles from Ferrara “specializing” in urban panoramas and landscapes of ruins, marbles

from Sinai displaying plant representations, stones revealing religious images, marbles and

jaspers in the form of anthropomorphites, cynites, scombriformes or polymorphites, oriental

marbles embellished with whirlwinds of algae and shells “that no painter’s hand could imitate.”18

All the images that one has judged as natura depicti born from the coagulation of vapors and

whirlwinds, from the petrifaction of fluids without ruling out divine intervention, or even the

quite human intervention of the painter, who clarified forms and finished the work of nature (ars

adaptavit)—aberrations; or—as Baltrusaitis put it—“anamorphoses of the mind”? But “what

exactly is an aberration?” “Does not all art begin with aberrations?”19

As for the assemblages of “brut” elements, flints, roots, fragments of coal and scoria,

which frequently appeared among the objects gathered by the Company of Art Brut, how not to

evoke on this subject the introduction into their compositions by Baroque architects and

decorators of feigned rocks, shells and vegetables, even of ropes and cork floats sculpted in

stone? But if these practices give evidence of the same concern to put art to the test, to place it

among the works of nature and men, the same distance separates the Small Statues of Precarious

Life (1954) from the window of the Convent of Christ in Tomar, and the lithographic series of the

Phénomènes from the stones covered in images dear to the scholars of the Renaissance. Because

if the hand of the painter cannot imitate the “artistic” productions of nature, it seems that this

hand was content for a long time to evoke the images in which man took pleasure, and the artist

18
Ulysse Aldrovandi (1522-1607), Muséum Metallicum, published in 1648; cf. Jurgis Baltrusaitis,
Aberrations. Quatre Essais sur la légende des formes (Paris, 1957); trans. Richard Miller, Aberrations: An
Essay on the Legend of Forms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).
19
Prospectus, p. 56.
 10

himself to reproduce his vegetable or mineral forms in the most naturalistic way. Instead Jean

Dubuffet’s works are a matter of an otherwise peculiar aberration.

It is, in fact, to a veritable conversion of the gaze and the fundamental structures of

perception that the painter of Topographies and Texturologies (1957–1958)—but already that of

the Grounds and Soils and Landscaped Tables (1951–1952)—invites us. Walking on the shores

of the Mediterranean, the artist does not stop to pick up some shell and to dream, as Valéry did, of

the mathematical, philosophic and aesthetic properties of its organization. Because his gaze is

less attracted to these remarkable natural formations that are set free against an undifferentiated

background than by this very ground and various hardly recognizable materials, roots, twigs,

sponges (preferably the least regular and thus unsellable like the one used for the fragile

Grouloulou).Valéry’s L’Homme et la Coquille called for a continuation—the Man and the Root,

the Man and the Sponge—, and this continuation is brought to us today by Jean Dubuffet’s work.

The celebration of base materials was not only, for the apostle of art brut, a matter of

taste, or even politics—by this I mean aesthetic or cultural (if I may use the term) politics.

Because these materials—tars, soils, vegetal debris, and that food in vast supply on which the

mind ruminates and which is regurgitated before digestion: the newspaper—interested him

insofar as they establish the base of our daily life, and guarantee the continuance of this big broth

“which always has the same taste.”20 Any reflection is qualified by the choice of the object to

which it applies itself, of its pretext—a piece of wax or shell, a sponge and an old wall: beyond

the aesthetics which it suggests, such a choice reveals the perceptive attitude on which any

authentic philosophy bases itself. If Valéry’s philosophy was essentially a theory of attention, of

the faculty that extracts from the text of the world and from the mind the most remarkable, the

most deserving figures, indeed, of attention, then Dubuffet’s philosophy resembles the

phenomenology of perception in the painter’s concern to put in brackets reflexive consciousness

20
Ibid., p. 69.
 11

and to restore at the same moment “the fleeting phases of the inattentive gaze, what sights are

projected onto whoever perceives them, and what he in turn projects onto them, what they reflect

back to his gaze ”21—which means describing the perceptive field in a wild, native state. But

Dubuffet does not stop there, and the program of which Texturologies is the outcome does not

aim at anything less than to shake the essential structures of perception, starting with the

elementary figure/ground relationship, without which one would not know how to speak of a

“perceptive field” in the proper sense of the term. In truth, this preoccupation is not as new as it

appears, and the adversity that Mister Macadam underwent—whereby the color of the ground

contaminated that of the figure—curiously makes the link between the analytical experiments of

the beginnings of Cubism and these works where Dubuffet tried to maintain the figure/ground

relation in an essential ambiguity. But the painter of Texturologies knew how to bring this

preoccupation to fruition. Because if the arts of the past offered us multiple divisions of the

perceptive field, modern art often suggested, having knocked them around a bit, painting no

longer things but—as the painter of The Quay of Mists put it—“what there is behind things.” It is

this illusion of the “behind-worlds” that Dubuffet denounces tirelessly and his work—the least

literary there is, and therefore made to entice men of letters—eventually boils down to the

stubborn assertion that behind things, and under figures, there is nothing but the ground.

Tables which absorb little by little the glass and the bottle which the painter deposited on

them, even the ham or a whole Souper Riche [Rich Supper]; landscaped figures, Geographied

Portraits and those Corps de Dames (1950–1951) where the drawing does not confer on the

figure any defined shape, but “on the contrary, prevents the figure from taking this or that

particular form” and maintains it “in a position of general concept and immateriality”22; cows

endlessly infused by their meadows; Monolithic Personages (1955), torn away from the ground

21
Jean Dubuffet, “Apercervoir,” in Catalogue, p. 25-26. Dubuffet, “Perceiving,” in Glimcher,
22
Dubuffet, "Notes du peinture," in Georges Limbour, op. cit., p. 94.
 12

by the application of newspapers to the still wet painting: Cursory Places (1957), where the

painter maintains ambiguity between the accidents of the built up impasto and the

representational traces; figures born from a gap in the landscape or from the Terres radieuses

(1952), like an image caught in the web of a child’s riddle; and up until those Barbes [Beards],

which are like so many swarming carpets —the law which presided darkly over the succession of

these always chancy enterprises appears in regard to Topographies, Texturologies, Materiologies

and other Routes and Roads, continuous surfaces from which is excluded any idea of a center

“from which would radiate or emerge organized composition.”23

Georges Limbour sees in Dubuffet the Bard of the Soil: he discovered in the painter of

Grounds and Soils this same movement of the mind which urged the pre-Socratic philosophers to

recognize in one of the four elements the original principle of all things, the permanent

foundation of all that is, and all that will be. But why the Earth, rather than the Air, Fire, or even

Water which bathes it and renders it fertile? Why, if not because the Earth is ground, the base of

our perceptions, the common place of our undertakings, the most constant foundation of our

being. This idea, to paint the ground, to celebrate it—perhaps came to Dubuffet following the

repeated stays that he took beginning in 1947 in El Goléa, on the fringes of the desert, where the

sun discolors things until it returns them to the color of ground and reduces beings to the short-

lived print they leave in the sand. But does this not link up, once again, with one of the most

obstinate preoccupations of modern art, at least since Degas—and perhaps Goya?

It was again Valéry who observed, in the pages that he dedicated to Degas, that the notion

of form is changed—if not called into question—by the projection on the vertical plane of the

canvas the horizontal plane of the ground, which no longer acts then as a neutral and indifferent

ground, but as an essential factor in our vision of things, and can—in the end—constitute the very

subject of the painting. But the erection of the ground, and the dissolution of the forms which it

inaugurates, does not only have a negative sense: the ground has to be wall and the wall has to be

23
Dubuffet, “Mémoires,” p. 181-182. Selz,.
 13

ground, so that from a surface which proposes to the eye nothing more than a pattern of

distraction or serenity, everything is to begin again with the gesture. The Wall of Soil is the

obstacle where pictorial doubt is abolished; the original foundation offered to the gesture by

which man introduces into nature his representational order. Hasty, elementary draftsmanship,

less a line than a trace, inscription of man in the sand or on the table, this diligent partner being

nothing other, for the painter, than a “raised ground”24: it seems that Dubuffet becomes attached,

at quite the same moment, to restoring spontaneous impulses of the hand that elaborate signs and

merge them with the accidents of the material, as if to persuade us better that this activity that so

magisterially contradicts nature is for man the most natural thing, and that it is up to us to decide

on the nature of the world at each instant.

Therefore the intention clearly asserted by the painter “to find in the arrangement of (his)

compositions a way to blur the vertical with the horizontal, to mix them or to establish in the

painting a state of ambiguity between one and the other,”25 satisfies the double desire to force the

gaze to consider the painted surface as a ground seen from above and, at the same time, to

establish the ground as a wall which calls for the intervention of man, by way of a line or an

imprint. Walls of the Soil and Feet of Grassy Walls represent, in this way, the outcome of

Grounds and Soils, where the impastoed surface of the ground rises vertically until it meets a

horizon that is reduced, in the last canvases of the series (1952), to the dividing line between the

two textures of which that of the clouds is not the least complex or laden. Still this painter

affirms that he is pulled by two contradictory humors, one being “interventionist” and

“humanizing,” to which impetuous drawings in the impastoed surface bear evidence, the other

“inhumanizing” or metaphysical, which corresponds to the “bracketing” of the perceiving subject

and culminates in these landscapes without man, devoid of centers of interest, and where painting

24
Ibid., p. 192.
25
Ibid., p. 169.
 14

freed from drawing is reduced solely to the language of surfaces, and textures where the gaze can

no longer find a place to anchor itself.26 But these two humors, are they mutually exclusive?

Does it not occur that they overlap, in the literal sense, in the same painting, as one sees by the

transformation brought about between June and July, 1953 to certain of the Beaten Pastes—those

canvases characterized by a line gouged, with the end of the palette knife, in a light-colored paste

whose darker-colored underneaths are revealed, having been covered, by means of a wide

paintbrush touching them lightly, with monochrome tones which confer on the whole

composition a shadowy and ambiguous texture?27 Better still: are they not both complementary

expressions of the same design, which is to bring the intellect to doubt his works and sentient

forms in which it registers a “finished” image of itself, to invite it to go—as they say so aptly —to

the bottom of things and, reconnecting its native relation with the world, to find, at the same time

as the sense of finitude, a concern for its liberation? The artists of the last century considered the

messy business of painting to be a part of their art that was certainly fascinating, but always a

little bit shameful—and one which it was important in any case to hide from the spectator.

Delacroix, while insisting on the necessity of making the material “rebellious” so that he could

better conquer it, did not like to be caught in the middle of the “groping around” phase. As for

Degas, he dreamed of the technique of fresco, which would have had freed him from the grinding

required by oil painting and the preparing of grounds. In fact, Impressionism, and after it a

considerable sector of modern art, developed as a function of the search for thoroughly legible

pictorial means; but the asceticism of analytic Cubism did not have to resist the seductions of an

art that Delacroix himself judged “all the more close to the heart of man because it appears more

material.”28 And the “messy business,” as one knows, has today rediscovered its place. However,

26
Ibid., p. 194.
27
Ibid., p. 142-143.
28
Eugène Delacroix, Journal, ed., Joubin, t. 1, p. 17.
 15

because it belongs after all to each to decide on the relation that he maintains with the works, I

shall say that there is no task more exciting for me than the one Dubuffet assigns explicitly to the

spectator: “The painting will not be looked at passively, not embraced all at once by an

observer’s immediate gaze. But relived in its elaboration, remade by thought and if I dare say re-

acted . . . All the gestures made by the painter, he feels them reproduced in him.”29 Does this

activity not persuade us that art is a domain open to all and that indeed every man is a painter,

even if he has never held a paintbrush or spread a color—to move in us the impulse toward

pictorial expression?

Such a program supposes that all the means employed in the manufacture of the painting

remain visible, and that the painter sacrifices nothing in search of the effect, which always

implies some idea of dissimulation and surprise. Furthermore, Dubuffet sees here not merely a

moral imperative, but—very concretely—the principle of an aesthetic. Because this painter

assumes that entire aspect that painting endeavored, as I have said, to keep secret, in particular the

grounds in which it is so rich. If Dubuffet hardly appreciates the use in painting of flat areas of

color, it is because the observer of the Underneaths of the Capital (Métromanie, in 1943), and the

geologist that he became afterward, likes working in the thickness of the ground—I mean of the

painting— to reveal the underneaths of it: to scratch the paper, to incise and to beat the impastoed

material, to flay it, to whip it, to reveal its underlying layers, this is what gives him the greatest

satisfaction, and it can be said of him in more than simply a metaphorical sense that he laid the

landscape “bare.”30 But what does this mean? That Dubuffet in turn would fall for the illusion of

other-worlds? Is he not satisfied to have reached the bottom? Is it necessary for him to search

even further—below the ground, to scratch down to the subsoil?

29
Dubuffet, Prospectus , p. 75.
30
Louis Parrot, Jean Dubuffet (Paris, 1944), p. 12.
 16

This would be to underestimate the properly phenomenological intention that resides

within this diligent reader of grounds and soils, routes and roads. Dubuffet stops at the epidermis

of beings and the Earth in order to teach us to decipher their text, as far as the history which is

retained in the network of its folds and wrinkles: from which originates the taste that he has for

grounds and for faces marked by time, historiated with a “profusion of tracks, signs and

inscriptions.”31 Just as aerial photographs reveal, under certain conditions, a registration in the

geography of the traces of a human past that classic archaeology looked for in the depths of the

ground, isn’t the consideration of surface features the point of departure for any geognosy—as it

is even, so to speak, for any science of the “depths,” including psychology and sociology? But

this is only true, and such steps are only fertile, as long as the observer does not linger in the

analysis of his optical powers and that he recognizes in the strictly visual data a much more

general meaning and value of information.

“I use my eyes less and less,” “art does not address the eyes”: such assertions can be

surprising. Is modern art not, in principle, a culture of sight, an asceticism of the eye? However,

the effort made by the Impressionists to imagine themselves in the conditions of “naïve”

perception and to free the gaze from traditional rhetoric, that of the first Cubists to replace the

poverty of the optical image with the profusion of the “profiles” under which things are offered to

perception, these efforts which overlap with that of contemporary philosophy to reveal structures

native to the perceptive experience, resulted curiously in a form of Scientism which amounted to

its negation. The reduction of visual data to their physical constituents—color, light, the optical

analysis of sensations and the elements of pictorial language, on which was based an essential

part of research at the beginning of this century, contradicts one of the clearest tenets of

phenomenology, namely that natural perception engages all the senses at the same moment and

that each gives us access to the world in its unity and its sensorial plenitude. “The eye perceives

31
Jean Dubuffet, “Lettre à René Auberjonois,” (1945); Prospectus, p. 145.
 17

what is hard and what is soft, what is porous and what is impervious, what is warm to the touch

and what is cold.”32 If Dubuffet refuses for art to be a celebration for the eyes, it is because he

places it at the originary level of sensation, before the distinction of senses, and because he

assigns to the artist the job of systematically playing the keyboard of correspondences and

synesthesia. Whence, among other things, his recourse to colors immediately suggestive of

substances: sand and putty, dead leaves or the dregs of red wine. “To paint is not to dye,”

Dubuffet says once again. And if it is true that there are strictly speaking no colors but only

colored materials, and that the way in which these are applied matters more than their selection,

one begins to understand that this painter is used to making the material “speak” while not letting

us ignore the work of the hand: the kneading of the dough through which it reveals its textures.

Georges Limbour underlined Dubuffet’s indifference towards a problem that has long

occupied painters, that of light. If the Texturologies and certain panels of the Phénomènes appear

to contradict this assertion, it should be noted that phenomena of the light—brilliance, shadow,

brightness, sparkling—hold the attention of the painter or the lithographer only to the extent that

they are connected to the material textures, capable of being shadowy and reddish, as they are

downy or cheese-textured, radiant and wet, pulverized, shimmering. Here again, in the

distinction operated by reflexive analysis, Dubuffet sets the irrefutable evidence of naïve

experience, which recognizes in color and brightness the primary qualities of bodies: and, in fact,

the metallic shine of the Substance of Stars persists beyond the intermittence of the source of light

which reveals its reflective properties. But the brightness of the metal, the softness of the down,

the porosity or the coolness are not connected to the figures of things as such, and if the senses

communicate between themselves, it is at a level where the intimate structure of beings prevails

over their contour, where things are less known than perceived in their singular presence.

It was thus not a completely arbitrary decision that led Dubuffet to maintain the

figure/ground relation in an ambiguity, in permanent indecision. By treating figures as so many

32
Jean Dubuffet, “L’auteur répond à quelques objections,” (1946) Prospectus, p. 115.
 18

vaguely drawn grounds, whose texture he endeavors to decipher and—reciprocally—by directing

his gaze towards the least differentiated ground to reveal within it secret figures and mechanisms,

this painter has returned to the notion of form its original meaning, if it is true that form is not

reducible to the precise outline of objects, but rather remains connected with the texture of things,

that it appeals at the same time to all of our senses.33

This painter is clearly a painter of formlessness, for as long as he persists in confusing

form with its geometrical or graphic outline: does he not claim to free painting from drawing, to

the point where he desires that “the graphic system of the painting consist of nothing other than

these limits between neighboring marks” that arise from the interpretation of colored fluids?34 To

paint is not to dye, nor is it to draw: and how should we draw formlessness, asked Valéry; the

formless, which is to say, those amorphic forms which “ find nothing in us which allows them to

be recreated by an act of clear-cut tracing or recognition?”35 Now it is here, precisely, that the

painter of the Corps de Dames and Grounds and Soils seizes the pen or the calamus and ink and

seeks to restore, by means of line drawing, effects comparable to those produced by the

triturations of the impastoed material and the physio-chemical reactions of its ingredients.

If Dubuffet’s drawings represent perhaps the most surprising part of his art, it is due to

this contradiction in terms, as much as to the reflexive and critical function which the painter

recognizes in graphic exercises: exercises in the formless, as Valéry would have said, and which

teach us, among other things, “not to confuse what one sees with what one believes what one is

seeing.”36 Because it is indeed to make intelligible native structures of sensation and of form that

Dubuffet applied himself in the Radiant Earth series (1952) and the texturological drawings,
33
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), p. 265, trans. Kegan
Paul, Phenomenology of Perception (London : Routledge, 1962).
34
Dubuffet, “Mémoires,” Prospectus, op. cit., p. 148.
35
“Degas, danse, dessin,” in: Oeuvres Completes (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, t. II, p. 1194). Paul
Valéry, Degas, Manet, Morrisot, trans. David Paul (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960): 36-47.
36
Ibid., p. 1195.
 19

where pictorial research is taken to its philosophic and aesthetic conclusions: “From the point of

view of technique, I liked there to be internal lines in objects, I mean that instead of

circumscribing forms, they animate the insides of things—the inside of formless and non-

delimited areas. They function as internal textures and not primarily as contours.”37 Dubuffet

was to obtain equivalent effects with the Imprint Assemblages series: but, either because the

juxtaposition of cut elements inevitably implies the idea of outline, or the technique of the imprint

and the fantasies which it favors solicit all too openly an image-forming consciousness, it does

not seem to me that these assemblages —I’m not speaking about his paintings—have an

efficiency, a rigor comparable to those of Radiant Earth, in which Dubuffet took up, in a most

learned way, the subject of networks and interlacings, thus satisfying the requirement—expressed

by a Pollock in identical terms—for a surface which would not present centers of interest and

where figures would remain prisoners of the texture of the ground.

The image as an “accident of reading”?38 In order to perceive in the network of lines of

the landscape the violinist and his dog or the lost traveler, do we not have to aim to figurate the

lacunae of the background? Elsewhere also, does the painter not expect the spectator to fill in the

space of the painting, and finish it in some way, so he too, in turn, takes risks? But if he judges

that the aggressive presence of the material means, by obliging the spectator to return ceaselessly

from the image-forming consciousness [à la Sartre] to the perceptive consciousness [Merleau-

Ponty], will increase the intensity and virulence of the images, it is nevertheless important to

Dubuffet that these remain always problematic and vague, and that they offer the mind only a

precarious refuge. By making any representation dependent on a system of necessities that are

apparently foreign,39 does he not aim to force thought to wonder about its perceptive past and its

37
Dubuffet, Catalogue, p. 47.
38
Daniel Cordier, Les dessins de Jean Dubuffet (Paris, 1960), trans. Cecily Mackworth, The Drawings of
Jean Dubuffet (New York: George Braziller, 1960)
39
Dubuffet, “Mémoire,” p. 141.
 20

own genealogy? Doubtless the sense of uneasy gaiety which arises today from the presentation

of his works in the museum has something in common with the emotion aroused in us by the

sight of an antique statue exhumed from the sea floor, the slow work of marine nature having

revealed the contradictory virtues of the stone, whose spiritual aspirations, whose sublimity were

all the sculptor had been able to recognize in it. Hegel judged that the notion of form—in the

classic sense of the term—corresponded to a past event in the relationship of the Mind with itself,

when it obtained from the outlines of an external form the perceptible reflection of the Idea. But

could the author of the Aesthetics foresee when he defined art as a thing of the past, that the Idea

having reached the end-point of its progress, the mind would soon grow tired of contemplating it

and would turn its attention to games, to the snares of the Geologist, that it would once more

address art, not this time to raise it to the level of the Concept but, on the contrary, to reconnect

with its original grounds and return through it to the text of the world?

1. Jean Dubuffet, Lever de lune aux fantômes, 1951.

2. Jean Dubuffet, Paysage avec personage, ink, 1952.

3. Jean Dubuffet, Lit de débris au pied du mur, Tableau d’assemblage, October 1957

4.Jean Dubuffet, Noble empire de l’herbe, from Assemblage d’empreintes, February 1957.

5. Jean Dubuffet, Jardin d’or et noir, Ailes de papillons, August 1955.