Dissertation

A coat that doesn't fit: Jean Dubuffet in retrospect, 1944-1951

Shaw, Jill Alison Eva

2013

Overview

My dissertation explores how Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) navigated a range of cultural institutions and artistic environments and examines the commonalities and differences in his approach to self-definition in each situation. Each chapter of the dissertation is devoted to a crucial moment in Dubuffet's early career between 1944 and 1951: his first solo exhibition at Galerie René Drouin in Paris in October 1944; his campaigns to Algeria between 1947 and 1949; and his trip to Chicago in December 1951 to attend the opening of his retrospective exhibition and to deliver his \"Anticultural Positions\" lecture at the Arts Club of Chicago. I use these three case studies both to argue against a prevailing notion in art historical literature—that there was a universal cultural rupture that occurred as a result of World War II—and to highlight aspects of Dubuffet's formal working process and self-definition in the 1940s and early 1950s. I find that Dubuffet repeatedly required certain kinds of mental and physical interruptions—or breaks—in order to advance his work and his positions on contemporary art at the time. By investigating the ways in which Dubuffet navigated institutional and personal relationships, in conjunction with his developing artistic philosophy, this dissertation foregrounds Dubuffet as an artist who established complicated patterns of geographic and social connection and disconnection. In the planning and execution of Dubuffet's first solo exhibition, I reveal the extent to which Dubuffet was impacted by the deeply complex artistic (and literary) world that was actively in flux during the Occupation and after Liberation; I also suggest that Dubuffet embraced Dada—especially the work of Paul Klee—allowing him to connect with an art historical moment without having to acknowledge his own past. Via Dubuffet's trips to Algeria, I assess his periodic need to experience a kind of cultural electroshock, a process that mentally and physically removed him from Paris and its oppressive art institutions. Finally, in the case of Chicago, I explore a situation in which Dubuffet was able to depart from his usual practice and to establish a sense of place and connection, one that seems, in turn, to have had surprising consequences for his self-definition in relationship to institutions. My work should serve as a methodological correction to much previous scholarship on the artist. Even when Dubuffet has been contextualized, the accounts have too often followed the mythologizing model that he set in his autobiography. In presenting him as an artist associated with the Liberation of Paris, for example, art historians typically emphasize that Dubuffet emerged as the product of a physical and cultural rupture that occurred in Europe during the Second World War. In this dissertation, I show that Dubuffet's work and his appearance on the Paris art scene in the early 1940s require a broader frame of contextualization. Although the Liberation of Paris was the specific moment of Dubuffet's first solo exhibition in 1944, the show cannot fully be understood in terms of a postwar, revolutionary situation, isolated from the practice and the reception of art l'entre-deux-guerres and during the wartime period. In other words, Dubuffet and his work must not be considered as representing the sort of abrupt and phoenix-like rebirth that he himself favored in recounting his past in his autobiography, but rather as a skillful maneuvering of political and artistic continuities and changes through the 1930s and 1940s. To be sure, his own penchant for creating scenarios of rupture and dislocation, which I explore in both the post-war and the Algerian context, seems to have been fundamental for his creativity and self-definition, and I do not dispute that he may himself have experienced his own history in this fashion. Ruptures of his own making, however, should not blind us to the ways that Dubuffet was, despite himself, a kind of bridge between the first half and the second half of the century. Thus I contend that art historians must reconsider the history of Dubuffet according to Dubuffet. Secondary literature consistently recycles Dubuffet's own writings about himself that were written in retrospect, resulting in the perpetuation of certain mythical anecdotes about the artist. Scholars have also been led into misreading Dubuffet's artistic projects and philosophies by utilizing selections of his correspondence and other texts without sufficient awareness of the complexity of historical contextualization in the immediate post-war period and in his own personal artistic and philosophical trajectory. Seeking to do justice to that complexity and to make a methodological contribution to the literature on Dubuffet and art of the 1940s has been one of my principal objectives in this dissertation. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Art history / European Studies / Modern history
• ISBN: 9781303423482, 1303423480