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These have sometimes been interpreted as the most radical of Dubuffet's works because they are the most apparently abstract. But Dubuffet didn't see them that way at all. No matter how small the teeming signs got, they still represented something -- a point the artist later emphasized by cutting some of them up and using them as the facial hair in his hilarious sequence of bearded heads, such as Beard of Stubborn Refusal, 1959.
The funniest and most agrestic of all his paintings were, undoubtedly, the cows -- a snook cocked at Picasso's heroic Spanish bulls. Kippered there on the canvas in their dense yet somehow airy paint, yearning, dumb and absurdly coquettish, they are among the most memorable animals in modern art. Several of them, like Cow with the Beautiful Muzzle, 1954, also contain some of the most inspired and wristy drawing of Dubuffet's career, formed by the brush -- or its handle -- dragging through the thick paint.
As Peter Schjeldahl points out in the catalog, Dubuffet "had the transgressor's secret love of limits, the outlaw's perverse attachment to laws," and this repeatedly shows itself in a sense of surface, texture and inflection that becomes extravagantly, almost morbidly, refined. His figures made of butterfly wings are exquisite; looking at some of his surfaces, particularly in the later collages and "Texturologies" of the 1950s, one finds oneself comparing them to the tarnished and mottled silver leaf on a Japanese screen or to richly tanned and patinated leather. Doubtless some of them present insoluble problems for the conservator -- see them now, they won't be around in another 50 years -- and yet, in a perverse way, they look like the work of a craftsman-artist obsessed with nuance, an art that is not raw at all but cooked exactly au point.