There was nothing appealing about the woman in the print. In fact, she seemed troubled, her wide eyes staring out beyond the artwork but her mind firmly planted on something inside her head.
She reminded me of a woman I had worked with at a newspaper some years ago, with the same long face and jutted chin. She even wore a big floppy hat that my old friend would have chosen.
But what was she so focused on?
That’s the beauty of art. You’re always trying to figure out what the artist had in mind when he or she put color – or in this case, the lack of it – to paper or canvas. The artist had captured her in gray tones, which worked exceedingly well because they evoked melancholy and a sense of wonder. Color would have taken the edge off her, and given her an air of positivity that would have changed my reaction to her.
The artist had written his name bold and large on the lithograph. Most times, I have to squint my eyes at a small scribbled signature in the lower right corner. And sometimes, I can’t make out the name.
It was signed Jean Dubuffet, and the artist had written both his name and the year of the print – 68 – in the upper right corner. The name was unfamiliar to me, so I Googled him before deciding to bid on it. The name came up quickly as that of a renowned French painter and sculptor.
Checking the signature on the print later, though, it was obviously different from Dubuffet’s signatures on his other works on the web. There has been at least one Dubuffet forger, but this didn’t seem to be a forgery but perhaps executed by a different artist. The signature didn’t pretend to match Dubuffet’s.
It did give me the opportunity, though, to learn about the real Jean Dubuffet. He was a painter, sculptor, printmaker and writer. He painted street scenes, people in the Paris metro, his friends, jazz musicians (he was likely drawn to the improvisation of this American music form), but not entirely as realistic images of themselves but more in a graffiti or child-like style.
In 1945, Dubuffet coined the phrase “art brut” – or raw art, outsider art or art of the insane – which established him as an avant-garde artist who eschewed art of the trained eye. The bright colors he used in his early works gave way to the use of such unusual materials as plaster, tar and cement fashioned to look uninhibited and less cultured.
His style of painting bordered on the primitive, and he used paint heavily on his canvas – “encrusted,” as one website in his honor put it. Dubuffet felt that an artist was an inventor, one who created something new and different rather than copying the old and what had already come, as he explained in a 1973 video interview at his studio, where he was creating one of his puzzle-like pieces.
Here’s how he described art brut:
“We intend with these works executed by those unscathed by artistic culture, in which, the mimesis has little role in the way that the artist draws everything (subject, choice of material, the creative process, ways of expressing an idea, rhythms, etc) from their own depths and, unlike intellectuals, not from the convensions of classical or fashionable art. Here, we participate in an artistic process which is completely pure, raw, entirely reinvented in all of its phases by the artist, from his impulses alone. Therefore, of an art which manifests itself through the function of invention only, and not those, constant in cultural art, of cameleon and monkey.”
Dubuffet and other artists of this sensibility amassed a major collection of outsider paintings, but Dubuffet did not include any of his own works. The collection now is made up of 30,000 paintings in the Collection De L’Art Brut Lussanne in France.
Dubuffet was born in 1901 to wine merchants in Le Havre, France. He began painting in 1918, studying at the Academie Julian but leaving after six months to learn and work on his own. He stopped painting for about eight years and then took over his father’s wine business, around 1935. Ten years later, he went back to painting, but two years later he gave it up again. He finally resumed his career as an artist for good in 1942.
“I had given up any ambition of making a career as an artist … I had lost all interest in the art shown in galleries and museums, and I no longer aspired to fit in that world. I loved the paintings done by children, and my only desire was to do the same for my own pleasure,” he said.
By the late 1960s, he was sculpting, creating works in polystyrene and resin. His sculptures were more like assemblages that he wanted people to walk through, to merge fantasy with reality.
Dubuffet’s first commissioned sculpture was for the Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza in New York in 1969, followed by other commissions. His paintings and lithographs are in major museums, including in this country at the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
He died in Paris in 1985.
Interestingly, the print from the auction would’ve fit right into the real Dubuffet’s notion of “raw art.” It had dabs of misplaced and mussed paint on the canvas, and may have indeed been painted by an outsider artist.
Regardless, it’s still a lovely image. When the print came up for auction, the auctioneer wasn’t very complimentary of the painted woman. It didn’t matter to me, because I had decided that I’d like to take it home. I wasn’t the only one; another bidder and I went tit-for-tat for it until he finally gave up.
I’ll have the cardboard backing – a no-no – replaced, get her a new frame and invite her to stay awhile with my other artistic finds.
