Hello my name is Eleanor and I'm a curator here at the Barbican Art Gallery
I wanted to show you some highlights of our new exhibition, Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty
Dubuffet was born in Normandy in France in 1901 to a family of wine merchants
he studied briefly at the Académie Julian in Paris but dropped out after six months deciding that
he could gain a richer artistic education in the so-called real world. It was only at the age of 41
in the midst of the Second World War that he decided to devote himself to being an artist
He set out to make art that would shatter conventions of good taste
and inspire people to see that true creativity could flourish in the least likely of places
We open with this photograph of Dubuffet in his studio on the Rue du Rennes in Paris
by Robert Doisneau from 1951
You can see how the artist frames himself like a cook amid their pots and pans
or an amateur scientist in their laboratory
The mess of materials dominates the image reflecting Dubuffet's belief that experimentation
should be at the heart of an artist's practice
For him these are enchanted materials that seem to have a will of their own
and it's this drive for invention over a 40-year career that has won him such admiration from fellow artists working at the time and since
Our first room focuses on Dubuffet's love of graffiti
He aspired to make an art that would feel directly plugged into real life
and one source of inspiration for that ambition were the war-torn streets of Paris
He admired the photographs of graffiti that had been taken by the Hungarian emigre photographer Brassei and
published in the avant-garde magazine Minotaur in 1933
You can see one example from that series here
For Dubuffet, The Walls, which was the title of this series of lithographs
were meet witnesses to the turbulence of recent years and the messages etched into them
offer a tender impression of the lives lived against them
With a painting like Large Black Landscape, Dubuffet doesn't offer us a picturesque image of rolling hills
It looks like it could have been made using steaming tarmac, the jaunty horizon line suggests
a cross-section of the city but the crude figures and fields that we can see etched into the surface
have the quality of an aerial view and it's this blended perspective that has quite a child-like
feel and it reflects Dubuffet's interest at the time in the raw energy of children's drawing
In 1947, Dubuffet staged an exhibition of portraits at his gallery, Rene Drouin, which was called
'People are much more handsome than they think, long live their true face' - the series had begun two
years earlier with a portrait of his friend Jean Paulhan, who was a prominent intellectual and key to
introducing Dubuffet's work to a wider circle of artists and writers in Paris.
When he gifted one of these to Florence Gould a wealthy American expatriate who hosted a weekly lunch at her
home on Avenue Malakoff, she suggested that he might think about depicting other guests of hers which
set him off on what he called a wild adventure
If the history of portraiture has been about flattering the great and the good then Dubuffet deliberately reduced his subjects to mere matter
reminding them of their visceral mortality
With each work he spent hours just staring at the sitter
before returning to his studio to create what he called a likeness burst in the memory
A phrase so evocative that the American poet Frank O'Hara used it in his poem Naphtha.
The resulting portraits of figures like the experimental theatre director Antonin Artaud,
or the Belgian writer and artist Henri Michaux,
are poised between playful caricature and powerful effigy
As Dubuffet's great friend George Limbour described, they seem charged with a magical and hallucinatory secret power
From the beginning of his artistic journey Dubuffet was fascinated by self-taught artists
including graffitists, tattooists, spiritualists, incarcerated individuals and patients in
psychiatric care. He felt their work was more alive and passionate than anything
on display in Paris' esteemed museums and dedicated much of his life to their research and recognition.
Dubuffet coined the phrase Art Brut in 1945 which literally means raw or crude
but with the suggestion that this work is also as brut as fine champagne
In 1947 he persuaded Rene Drouin to allow him to create a foyer in the basement of the gallery for exhibiting art brut
This room brings together eight artists that Dubuffet planned to display in a final show in
the summer of 1948.
One of my favorite artists in this room is Alouise Corbaz.
She was born in 1886 in Lausanne in Switzerland and worked as a governess for the court of Wilhelm II in Germany
with whom she fell passionately in love
At the age of 32 she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and admitted to the Cery psychiatric hospital back in Lausanne
It was there that she began making these incredibly vivid drawings mostly using crayon
but also unusual materials like crushed flower petals and toothpaste
Her work was encouraged by the doctors there and Dubuffet admired it hugely
describing how she manages to fill her page to bursting point but without ever going into clumsy overcrowding
The Corps de dame or ladies bodies are among the most controversial works of Dubuffet's career
His female form seems to have been steamrolled and the edges of their form pressed against the canvas
or the page
For a work like Tree of Fluids from October 1950, he would mix a thick paste of zinc oxide
and viscous varnish which he would apply to the canvas with a putty knife
this mixture would repel oil paint so that when he would brush on thin layers of sensual colours
they would marble bringing to mind the circulation of fluids within our bodies
This imagery may feel harsh but Dubuffet was clear that his attack was not intended at women but at
the western tradition of the female nude from classical statues to glossy magazine covers
He explained that he found this miserable and most depressing and wanted to create a female form
that would feel amorphous reminiscent of ancient fertility goddesses
We find a similarly anarchic approach in Dubuffet's relationship to landscape painting
between 1947 and 1949 he took three extended trips to Algeria where he lived with Beouin
communities and learned Arabic
He made some sketches when he was there and when he returned decided that he would try and capture the spirit rather than the likeness
of the extreme Saharan desert
In this room we present landscapes from 1952 to 53
which also show his interest in the mind itself as a kind of landscape
populated by a disorder of images
With a painting like The Abandoned House, I love how it's as if we're looking at the craters of the moon
The high horizon line also became a signature motif for Dubuffet
reflecting his desire that we pay more attention to that which is literally and culturally base
Some of the rarest works within the exhibition are Dubuffet's Papillon or butterfly collages which he
began in 1953.
He had collected the wings himself when he was on holiday with his friend Pierre Bettencourt
at a time when butterfly catching was a common hobby like fishing
He arranged the wings into jaunty characters and landscapes
and added touches of watercolor to dramatize the luster of their patterns
The collages became a pathway into a whole new way of working
because Dubuffet loved the flexibility of a assemblage
So with a work like The Clown's Point from 1956,
you can see that he made these different oil paintings which he then cut up
and reconfigured into a complex composition like this
There's a great quote from the writer Alexandre Vialatte, who visited Dubuffet in his studio in Vance
Dubuffet is there, he said, with his flowery hat and his green polka dot socks
but he no longer paints with butter, cement bitumen but with shoemaker's glue
This room is one of my favorites within the exhibition
In the vitrine here you can see how Dubuffet continued his experiment with assemblage
into three dimensions creating what he called his little statues of precarious life
These are very rarely exhibited because of their fragility and you can see that they're made from all sorts of
scavenged materials like sponge and lava stone and shards of broken glass
In dialogue, we're showing some of the enamel paintings which were begun in 1954
He worked in thin layers of paint bleeding the colours into unusual patterns
and allowing strange monstrous characters to emerge
Like this The Extravagant Lady
Together this room speaks to Dubuffet's belief that an artist should be a kind of alchemist turning base material into gold
These paintings are called Texturologies a word that Dubuffet invented to describe his
studies of the earth beneath our feet he made them using a technique that he
borrowed from stone masons he would dip juniper branches in paint and then spray
fine droplets over the surface of fresh plaster to soften the tone
Dubuffet explained that he wanted to create a surface that could give the impression of teeming matter, alive and sparkling
and that could represent both the piece of ground but also all kinds of indeterminate textures
even galaxies and nebulae
When i look at a painting like this, The Exemplary Life of the Soil
I think of the fantastic question posed by the contemporary writer, Maggie Nelson
Empirically speaking we're all made from star stuff, why aren't we talking more about that?
Our move downstairs corresponds with Dubuffet's move to Paris in 1961 which marked a major break in his practice
The bustling city had changed dramatically in the intervening years
The population had swollen and the post-war economic boom had given rise to a new consumer society
which you can see in this series, Paris Circus which features the frenzy of street life
In this painting, Caught in the Act, we can see him sending up this swinging capitalist spectacle
The cars at the bottom have number plates and French and American brand names
and higher up the shop signs say things like society of scoundrels
An underground bank indicating the seedy underside of cosmopolitan life
Here we have the second room dedicated to works from Dubuffet's collection of art brut
In 1951 he'd sent the 1,200 works to the artist Alfonso Ossorio in Long Island
hoping to be able to return his attentions to his own studio
but after a decade of separation, he was longing to be reunited with the collection
He bought a house on the Rue de Sers in Paris and renovated the spaces into galleries
where he personally reinstalled the works
His passion for art brut was reignited
He reactivated his old network of contacts and began actively collecting again
Within a couple of years, he'd acquired 900 new works
Some of these works were brought to his attention like the extraordinary drawings of the spiritualist artist Laure Pigeon
which were abandoned after her death until Dubuffet was telephoned
and asked if he might rescue them
Others like this calico drawing by Madge Gill were only made possible because of the larger spaces at the Rue de Sers
Crucially Dubuffet's re-engagement in art brut prompted a major change in his practice
which is rarely given much attention in writing on his work
It prompted him to realize that he wanted to create a truly immersive world of his own
And so we come to L'Hourloupe, Dubuffet's longest series of works
For 12 years he made these undulating forms in red white and blue
The story began with him doodling on the telephone with a four colour ballpoint pen
He made these fluid figures and forms that he liked the look of
and so he cut them out and mounted them on black paper
Those little works became the gateway to an all-consuming series of paintings, sculptures, architectural environments
and performances which he described as a dive into fantasy - a fantasmagorical parallel universe
Look closely at a painting like Skedaddle and you can see how he liked to embed
letters, figures, objects into this sinuous web
in order to encourage a sense of visual confusion
His meandering line reduces everything to graphic surface
reminding us that the divide between the so-called real and the imaginary is very much of our own making
In 1973 these patterns took on a life of their own in the performance Coucou Bazaar
which was staged first at the Guggenheim in New York and then in Paris and Turin
The one-hour spectacle designed to be a living painting featured actors wearing
costumes designed by Dubuffet moving slowly amid painted flats
A reeling painting then, designed to make us question the supposedly concrete world around us
The powerful work on the back wall is called Vicissitudes and is one of the strongest
examples of the Theatres of Memory a series that Dubuffet made between 1975 and 1979
Like the Paysage which we looked at upstairs, the work represents the idea of a mind
teeming with images and ideas some of which hark back to his earliest iconography from the 1940s
These works were exhibited at the Pace Gallery in New York in 1979 where they had a significant
influence on a generation of American artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring
We're showing them alongside these striking black and white drawings made using felt tip pen
which also feel in dialogue with a new urban consciousness and a younger generation of artists
The paintings in this room date from the final years of Dubuffet's life and it's a remarkable
thing to look at a painting like Mire G 177 (Bolero) and realize that this strength of mark making was
made by an 82 year old man
The painting was included at the Venice Biennale in 1984
where Dubuffet represented France and it shows how to the very last he continued to evolve stylistically
For me what's so exciting about this show being the first of Dubuffet in the UK in
50 years, is that it offers the opportunity to inspire a whole new generation of artists