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Moreover, somewhere near the heart of Dubuffet's idea of a poor art, a raw art, was a large and genuinely democratic tolerance. "The persons I find beautiful," he wrote in a catalog preface, "are not those who are usually found beautiful . . . Funny noses, big mouths, teeth all crooked, hair in the ears -- I'm not at all against such things. Older people don't necessarily appear worse to me than younger ones." Of course, Dubuffet's nudes in the 1950s are sexist, as sexist as Rabelais -- those rosy-brown, squashed-flat, gross and scarily funny "Corps de Dames" that form such a spectacular counterpart to the women De Kooning was painting on the other side of the Atlantic at about the same time. But no moral nitpicker today could accuse Dubuffet of ageism or lookism.
As art historian Susan J. Cooke points out in an interesting catalog essay, Dubuffet's portraits of French intellectuals were something more than "literary portraits," as such things might be understood in London or New York City. They dropped, under the decidedly ambiguous title "More Handsome Than They Think," into a culture that had always put a high symbolic value on the idea of the writer as conscience of the society. And this was at a time when quite a few writers (such as Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, editor of the prestigious La Nouvelle Revue Francaise) had betrayed that idea by siding with the Nazis, and when the air was thick with charges of wartime collaboration by intellectuals.
Some of Dubuffet's subjects, like Jean Paulhan, had impeccable Resistance records. Others, like Paul Leautaud -- a brilliant aphorist -- decidedly did not. So when Dubuffet put a portrait of Leautaud, wrinkled like a tortoise or (as his title had it) "a red-skinned sorcerer," into the same portrait show as Paulhan or his friend the painter Jean Fautrier, what was he up to? Ironizing, certainly, on the idea of the portrait as effigy of virtue. But also -- despite his often repeated claim to reject tradition absolutely -- paying complete homage to an earlier French artist: Honore Daumier, whose tiny clay effigies of politico-literary notables known as Les Celebrites du Juste-Milieu, wizened, compressed and distorted, are the obvious and inescapable grandfathers of all Dubuffet's turnip men. *
Nothing remains anti-taste for long. Just as some new art (not all) starts ugly and becomes beautiful, so works of art that begin their career surrounded by announcements of a new start, a radical primitivism, tend to find a level where -- surprise! -- their ancestors emerge from the closet. So it is with Dubuffet, who never ceased to insist that he was kicking free from the conventions of Western culture, starting with the idea of beauty itself. Yet his attachment to rural images from earlier French art, particularly the earthy fields of Millet, is pervasive and obvious; some of his "Texturologies" might as well be exaggeratedly close-up paintings of the life of the soil done by a microbiologist under the spell of the Barbizon school.