Jean Dubuffet developed art brut, the concept of anti-intellectual art, in post-war France.

Dubuffet’s artistic approach was characterized by a radical questioning of the art and cultural systems of his time. He sought to find more innate points of reference and was inspired by the design and visual vocabulary of children and the mentally and physically ill. Dubuffet’s work is characterized by a desire to materialize and corporealize the abstract. He believed that art should be a direct and passionate expression of inner, instinctive movement.

What impulse was Dubuffet following here?

In 1830, the conquest of parts of present-day Algeria began, accompanied by decimation through famine, disease, and displacement…uprisings and suppression of the Arab-Berber resistance…a region in turmoil. After the French massacres of members of the Algerian independence movement (1947-1949), Dubuffet spent ten months in the Algerian Sahara, annexed by France from 1873 to 1962.

He recorded his impressions in Arab with Footprints (1948), which are based on sketches from his sketchbook El Golea II 1948 (https://www.moma.org/artists/1633).

The focal point of the portrait is the schematic representation of a figure, half in profile and half in frontal view, with outstretched hands. Two camels and five other figures can be seen on the extremely high horizon. The rest of the painting is covered by many footprints.

Dubuffet’s painting, “Arab with Footprints” can be interpreted as a construction of the Arab through the European, orientalizing and colonial gaze. For “the Arab” has no name and no history. It remains uncertain whether he is Arab. El Golea (present-day El Meniaa) was inhabited mostly by Zenete Berbers. Under the white gaze, however, such details seem trivial. For most European observers at that time, and to some extent still today, “the Arab” is perceived as a “brutal, mischievous, uncivilized camel driver.” And that is how this painting can be interpreted–as a brutal way of constructing the supposed Other – Art Brut, indeed!

While Dubuffet may have been interested in the footprint as a symbol of an imaging process, he leaves footprints of his gaze on the “Other”. Inspired by Brassaï’s graffiti photographs, which highlight the relief of a wall under a large, sweeping light, Dubuffet delved into the process of graffiti carving. In this work, he processed his impressions of materiality by transferring the relief-like structure of the wall onto the canvas with several layers of oil paint and working into the not-yet-hardened paint with his brush handle. In this sense, I work my words into this text.

Translated by: Melody Makeda Ledwon

Trivia:

Dubuffet was a wine merchant and not a self-taught artist; he came from a bourgeois family in France.