Jean Dubuffet. A retrospective.

Ein gutes und sauberes Exemplar. - Jean Dubuffet's sharp profile began to delineate itself in the middle of the nineteen-forties against the pale background of the postwar School of Paris. His final emergence, after a number of false starts, was timely, and his rude disturbance of efforts to continue the great modern traditions in diluted form evoked anguished outcries from the world of institutionalized culture. It was then that Dubuffet's iconoclastic identity was established through the provocative projection of his brute images, his artless techniques and his relentless anticultural stance. Thirty years later, Dubuffet remains a harsh opponent of cultural pretension and a fervent partisan of original, indigenous expression. During these three decades, however, the artist has undertaken an investigation of formal possibilities which, in scope and thoroughness, is probably without equal in our time. The Dubuffet of the seventies, therefore, cannot be seen solely through preconceptions deriving from his work of the forties. Even then, the earthy, passionate and creatively destructive image, which he projected so powerfully, was balanced by a less visible but nonetheless insistent alter ego that strove, on its own terms, for order and authority. Through encompassing both the Dionysian and the Apollonian, Dubuffet exemplifies the paradox without which his art eludes us. This paradox is based upon awareness of the fundamental cohesion between polarities and a capacity to reach out for the grand embrace that brings contraries into a tense, oscillating harmony.