ABSTRACT
Amid the general decline that has marked French painting since the end of the Second World War, the work of Jean Dubuffet has occupied a special place. Dubuffet was widely regarded–and appeared to regard himself–as a man who had thrown into question all the pieties of French tradition. He was taken to be an artist-revolutionary, a man who would effect a wholesale revision of French values and taste. In many ways Dubuffet's style was exactly suited to the anticultural role that was eagerly assigned to it. The pigment itself tended to be corrupted with "inartistic" materials so that the surfaces of Dubuffet's pictures came more and more to resemble, physically, the cracked sidewalks and crumbling walls whose graffiti yielded the artist some of his original motifs. Dubuffet's was the case of a man connecting with the right historical moment. Dubuffet actually takes his place in the line of mandarin intellectuals who yearn to play the primitive.
