The show of paintings and sculpture by Jean Dubuffet, now at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, is not exactly a retrospective. It covers only 20 years of the artist's working life, from 1943 to 1963. And the 100 or so works in it represent only about 1% of his enormous output. But Dubuffet was so visually loquacious that a full retrospective would be indigestible -- he repeated himself endlessly, especially in his later years. And by the same token, most of his best work was done in those first two decades, before he got down to filling the world's collections with the wiggly-jigsaw-style images that he derived from his "Hourloupe" series of 1963 and that, seen in any quantity, are such a repetitious drag.
In its effort to present Dubuffet as one of the four truly important figures of postwar European art -- along with Giacometti, Bacon and Beuys -- the Hirshhorn has taken the right tack, for it's the early work that justifies the claim. Dubuffet came to art late. Until 1943, when he turned 41, he had been a businessman, a wine merchant. His career illustrates the energy that a late flowering can produce, both in art and in its attendant ideas. Dubuffet is, of course, widely known for his espousal of what he called Art Brut, or "raw art," the work of those untutored and compulsive creators now called "outsider artists." Was he a primitive himself? Of course not: his art is as sophisticated as his writing, and in his apparent desire to shake off the burden of French culture, he was quintessentially French.
In the beginning, Dubuffet appealed to Ubu buffs: people with a taste for the macaronic and the absurd, who saw in his work a visual resurgence of the antiauthoritarian wit whose chief image in French literature was the grotesque kinglet of Poland invented nearly a century ago by Alfred Jarry in his play Ubu Roi. From the moment Ubu waddled onstage and pronounced his first line, "Merdrrre!," the vaporous culture of Symbolism was on the way out and something newer and indubitably nastier was on its way in. "After us the Savage God," noted W.B. Yeats, who was in the audience that night.
In Parisian painting, Dubuffet had a comparable effect at the end of World War II. One critic headlined a review, in imitation of the Dubonnet ads one used to see on the Metro, UBU -- DU BLUFF -- DUBUFFET, and others were not wrong in detecting, in Dubuffet's entranced and ironic use of thick pastes, an excremental vision parallel to Jarry's. One of the portraits of French intellectuals in his extravagantly controversial 1947 show at the Galerie Rene Drouin depicted the Surrealist writer Georges Limbour under the title Limbour Fashioned from Chicken Droppings. And even critics who disliked such mordant images were right on target about the context into which Dubuffet emerged, that of a postwar Paris depressed by material shortages and riven by political suspicions. "An empty pantry," wrote one critic, "assures the triumph of a Dubuffet."