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Audio Stop 20

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Tall, narrow, black building fronts fill this abstracted, horizontal painting. Partitions separating the buildings extend above the rooflines, and those, along with low domes atop some of the buildings, brush the top edge of the canvas. The narrow band of sky between the flat rooflines and the top of the composition is filled with cream-white paint, applied heavily in thick strokes. The buildings are painted with wide, horizontal strokes of black paint. The outlines of doors, windows, and the brick partitions between the buildings were incised into wet paint to delineate those features. Some of the outlines are also streaked with cobalt blue, butter yellow, brick red, and plum purple. Six people with oversized, round, peach-colored heads on spindly black bodies look out at us from windows across the composition. Cartoon-like eyes, noses, and smiling mouths are incised into wet paint. Along the bottom level, the buildings are numbered 78, 80, 82, and 84. Signs, also incised in wet, black paint to reveal white outlines, appear over the doors. The leftmost building reads “OPTICIEN” above “Leroy.” The next store is “PARFUMS,” then “MODES,” “Coiffeur,” “JOURNEAX,” “PRIMEURS,” and “BAR.” Under “PRIMEURS,” a sign on the store front reads “FRUITS ET LEGUMES.” Two people walk along the street, at the bottom of the canvas. One is to our left of center and stands facing us, smiling. The other is to our right, also smiling as he walks to our left in profile.

Jean Dubuffet

Façades d'immeubles (Building Façades), 1946

Feeling as though painting needed to start from scratch after World War II, Jean Dubuffet turned for inspiration to the art of the untrained, particularly by children or self-taught artists, which he collected and dubbed art brut (rough or raw art). In Façades d’immeubles (Building Façades), Dubuffet showed his own art brut. Using the schoolroom technique of scratching through black paint to a previously applied colored ground, Dubuffet elaborated a view of a Parisian street as it might appear to a child. However, the carefully controlled grid and imposing, allover wall of paint testify to Dubuffet’s awareness of modernist tactics.

Read full audio transcript

NARRATOR:

To make this painting, Jean Dubuffet adopted a rudimentary technique you may have tried in elementary school. He applied layers of paint on the canvas, covered that in black paint, then scratched through the paint layers to create this scene.

Harry Cooper, curator and head of modern art, describes the artist’s method.

HARRY COOPER:

He was very interested in stepping back from all of the techniques of the academies and starting over in a way, as if he doesn’t know anything. After World War II, there was a feeling that he had—and a lot of his European compatriots had, too—that they couldn’t just continue doing what they were doing. They had to try to go for something, more basic, more direct. The old techniques just hadn’t worked. They hadn’t worked in politics, and they hadn’t worked in art. The results we see here really looked like a very direct sort of, untutored, burst of painting. And I think that’s the effect he wanted.

NARRATOR:

Dubuffet was fascinated by the art of the untrained, particularly by children and the mentally ill—a genre he called “art brut,” or raw art. Here he depicts a flat, jumbled landscape just as child might, with no sense of three-dimensional space. But the work is deceptively simple. Note how he enlivens the scene with color and meticulous, witty details.

HARRY COOPER:

I think the color draws us in. It welcomes us, it makes it much more fun, more playful. But also in some of the very fine drawing—if you look at the balustrades, the railings, the brickwork—he is sometimes slashing and smearing. But sometimes the scratching is very delicate and engaging.

NARRATOR:

A tireless innovator, Dubuffet experimented across a range of mediums and techniques. The graffiti-style technique you see here—and his art-making approach in general—influenced a generation of late twentieth-century artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat.

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