Jean Debuffet
(1901-1985)
The general public in France soon after World War II sought
beauty and redemption in art after the horrors that had just been confronted by
many. However Jean Debuffet was a
contradiction and provided paintings that he regarded as honest and without
pretense. He used mediums which included
gravel, straw and texture paintings that were primitive and opposed to the
ideas of high traditional art. This
emphasis on “materiality” was a way of starting from scratch by ignoring the
past, much as the Dadaist movement had done in its time, so the gritty texture and
earth colours in his paintings was like the very soil itself a new beginning
from the bottom up, as it were.
The “Hourloupe” style he developed from black lined doodles
encouraged him to create sculpture using a similar technique as he felt these
represented the way we perceive objects in the mind. He was the pioneer of Art Brut, a way of
seeing art at it’s most uncontrolled and primitive. He promoted the work of children and mental
patients, and influenced his own approach to art. He says: “For me, insanity is super
sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of
creativity”.
Art Brut (Raw Art) coincided with the Italian Art Povera which
in turn was a reaction against Abstract art in the 1950s. The movement also refers to the “poor” materials
used, i.e. burlap sacking, earth, rope, rocks, paper and clothing. Art Informel
(mainly in Germany) was similar in the
sense of rejecting traditional art in favour of non-geometric Abstraction. From these three art movements it is possible
to see that post war European art had gone through a major change in its
progression from “High” academic art to ground-breaking beginnings which are
fuelled by a primitive base. This echoes
the desire of the Dadaist movement that wanted to reject previous art and start
from the beginning.
It took a while before Debuffet overcame his doubt in art,
twice he reverted to his father’s wine business. But in 1942 he made his choice to pursue an
artistic career, painting child-like images, and work influenced by the insane. He also made assemblages of polyester
sculptures. There is an unsettling
violence to his work that can often be attributed to similar paintings, for
example using children’s dolls.
Daniel Buren (1938 -
)
Buren uses stripes as a neutral symbol in his sculpture,
installing his art in and around Paris during the 60s. He was commissioned to use striped columns at
the 2012 Monumenta festival in Paris.
The latest installation at the Grand Palais has disks of plastic colours
that fill the space and are mirrored from below. I personally don’t find his work rewarding because
I don’t get any message, and like others think it is repetitive, but he is
regarded as France’s most important living artist. His use of coloured plastic in the BALTIC
Centre Contemporary Art exhibition reminds me of Matisse’s church windows that
he produced at the end of his life. The
reflected light is joyful but for me is closer to interior design techniques
than to art. It is interesting that his concern is mainly the “scene of
production”, i.e. the process of making, rather than representing anything but
the work itself, so a conceptual artist.
In terms of stripes, I think Bridgette Riley produces far more
interesting work.
I am not sure what
all this says about the late 20th Century, I suppose that people
aren’t interested in ideas only material things and particularly processes
that might relate to Information Technology; people glued to machines and appended to their
devices. I am convinced the ‘computer’
will prove to be the womb of future art, but the gestation period seems a bit
protracted. However we are starting from the beginning, which is of course the
end, and the end is indeed the beginning”
