Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [125]
Dubuffet believed art as practiced for centuries had run out of steam. It was dry and lifeless compared to the compelling images he discovered scrawled in graffiti or turned out by people on the margins of society, like mental patients and criminals. “It was my intention to reveal,” he said, “that it is exactly those things [others] thought ugly, those things which they forgot to look at, which are in fact very marvelous.”
Dubuffet, “The Cow with the Subtile Nose,” 1954, MoMA, NY. Dubuffet’s work represented, he said, the “values of savagery. ” Throwing out conventional oil-on-canvas, Dubuffet used new materials as well as a new mind-set. He incorporated mud, ashes, banana peels, butterfly wings, and chicken droppings into his paintings. With these, he mixed oil, cement, asphalt, or putty to build up a thick paste, then scratched deliberately primitive designs into the thick surface.
For Dubuffet, only amateurs could tap the imagination without self-censorship. Professional art was, he thought, “miserable and most depressing.” Art by social outcasts is “art at its purest and crudest, springing solely from its maker’s knack of invention and not, as always in cultured art, from his power of aping others.”
OUTSIDER ART. Like Dubuffet’s L’Art Brut, Outsider Art, or work outside the mainstream of professional art, is produced by self-taught, inwardly driven artists. Their work includes not only entire environments like Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers in Los Angeles, but paintings and sculptures of outrageous inventiveness.
Outsider art encompasses work by the insane and criminals as well as by unschooled artists. Often its practitioners are obsessively committed to their work, using whatever means and materials are at hand, such as cast-off metal and roots or stumps of trees. Swiss mental patient Adolf Wolfli, for example, was unstoppable, compulsively covering any surface in reach with dense drawings. North Carolina artist Jimmie Lee Sudduth paints with mud and sugar water from plastic bags of thirty-six different colors of dirt. When he can’t find exactly the right earth-tone he needs, Sudduth mixes up a batch of rose petals for red or wild turnip greens for — what else? — green. “I don’t like to use paint too much,” he says.
Hampton, “Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nation’s Millennium General Assembly,” c. 1950-64, National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC. A janitor who created this work in his spare time in a garage, James Hampton intended the gold-and-silver-foil-covered structure as a throne for the Messiah.
BACON: THE POPE OF PAINT. London artist Francis Bacon (1909-92), a descendant of the Elizabethan Sir Francis Bacon, was known for his twisted, horrifying figures that look like melting monsters. First widely seen in 1945, the images were “so unrelievedly awful” said art critic John Russell, “that the mind shut with a snap at the sight of them.” Bacon painted human figures as freakish half-human, half-beast embryos, with snouts for noses, bloody eye sockets, mouths with no heads, and feet that dissolved into puddles. At the same time as the eye recoils from the image, Bacon’s handling of paint is so seductively beautiful, it’s hard to look away.
A self-taught painter, Bacon consciously searched for forms that would have a visceral impact on viewers’ emotions. He believed photography eliminated the artist’s need to report reality. He hoped his deformed portraits would leave “a trail of the human presence,” he said, “as the snail leaves its slime.” To suggest the truth, he distorted it. “Fact leaves its ghost,” he said. Typically, Bacon placed figures in realistic settings and glaring light but smudged and twisted them. “I get nearer,” he said, “by going farther away. ”
A WOMAN’S LIFE
Kahlo, “Self-Portrait,” 1940,