The Return of the "Repressed": Dubuffet, l'Art Informel, and Giacometti

Karel Appel: Scream into Space, 1947

In the 1960s, an exhibition called the "Responsive Eye" included various forms of abstraction, ranging from the stained paintings of Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis to the more "objective" or post-painterly abstractions of artists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Kenneth Noland and including op art.  It did not include any figural art.  In contrast, the 1959 exhibition, "New Images of Man," curated by Peter Selz,  was entirely devoted to figural art, both European and American.   The European artists had begun to address the figure well before the 1959 date of this show; the Americans were more directly repsonding to the abstraction and absence of the figure associated with abstract expressionism.  With the exception of De Kooning, the American artists in the show were primarily Chicago and California artists.  Although the issues facing these artists (European and American) were not the same, Selz claimed that the art in this show was united by an attitude toward life which he called "existential essentialism."

Some characteristics of the art in this show

Some works and artists included in the "New Images of Man"

Nathan Oliveira: Standing Man with Stick, 1959 H.C. Westermann: Memorial to the Idea of Man if He was an Idea, 1958 Richard Diebenkorn: Woman at a Window, 1957
Giacometti: The Chariot, 1950 Giacometti: The Artist's Mother, 1950 Francis Bacon: Study after Velasquez's Portrait of Pope Innocence X, 1953 (oil on linen)

Existential essentialism:
Essentialism in this phrase refers to the unchanging essence of human nature, and in particular, to the inevitability of death and endings in life.  Existentialism refers to the unique ways in which every person faces this fate.  When Harold Rosenberg talked about existentialism and the abstract expressionists, he was referring to a focus on starting over in the painting as a metaphor for starting over in life, on facing each decision as something new.  The idea of "existential essentialism" does not share this emphasis on the idea of always starting over.  Instead, it focuses on the subjectivity of human beings and the sense that in the end, people are not in control of their destiny.  It is a less optimistic position than the abstract expressionist goal of remaking the world in painting.
With respect to the art work which Selz associated with this position: these were not artists who were united by any sense of sharing a movement or style.  If anything united them, it was the commitment to finding this "new image" of mankind - retaining the human figure in their art work but a human figure which was not the descriptive representation of a person.  Much as the abstract expressionists did, they wanted to put the psychological qualities of the world in which they lived into the painting, but not in a personalized or recognizable way.  It is in this sense that the paintings are "psychologized" - the paintings are communicative and disturbing through the treatment of materials, the choice of materials, and their "non-descriptive" representations of the human figure.

JEAN DUBUFFET: The Inconstancy of the Object

examples from the collection of Dr. Prinzhorn:
 Peter Meyer, The Destruction of Jerusalem work by Johan Knopf

Some of the guiding principles of Dubuffet’s creative output are captured in these statements of his:
“I believe (and in this I am in agreement with reputedly primitive civilizations) that painting, which is more concrete than the written word, is the richest instrument we have for communicating and elaborating thoughts.”
“I have said that the part of the thought which interests me is not the moment when the thought is crystallized into a formal idea but the stages which precede that crystallization.”
 

Dubuffet: A View of Paris, The Life of Pleasure, 1944 Dubuffet: Childbirth, 1944
Hairy Dhotel with Yellow Teeth, 1947 Bertele with a Crawfish on his Sinus, 1946
Dubuffet: Corps de Dame: Bloody Landscape, 1950 Dubuffet: Will to Power, 1946

His earlier paintings are derived from daily or ordinary life events, rendered in a crudely childlike style and suggestive of the uncultivated person as well as of graffiti.  These paintings are characterized by a lack of perspective, distortion of forms, use of primary colors or conversely, the technique of scratching through a black surface to find something underneath.
We then begin to see his ongoing interest in the transformation of materials, such that textures in his paintings begin to become the painting, as figures seem to explode into the background field, even as the outline of the body remains in tact.  This tendency to maintain the body's boundaries is quite different from de Kooning's explosive bodies in which the background and body become inseparable.  Many of Dubuffet's works of this type use a paste-like ground for the painting, which he made from sand, earth, fixatives, and pigment.  Then he scratched into the surface to create the suggestion of drawing.  Much later this becomes an obsessive interest in the interlocking and repetitive forms which eventually grow into sculpture and outdoor environments.
 

Dubuffet: Highway Gardens, 1956 Dubuffet: Person of Butterfly Wings, 1953
Dubuffet: Tide of the Hourloupe, 1963

L'ART INFORMEL (formless art)

Fautrier, Tapies, and Nicolais de Stael are artists who were primarily associated with l'art informel, an art dominated by an interest in materials.  One of their central organizing tenets was a drive toward the sensual handling of materials; in this respect, they are the logical heirs to Dubuffet’s interest in materials, although their purpose may have been more directly political than his, signifying a rejection of social and artistic conventions.  In this second respect, they model Bataille’s belief in the “unformed” or anti-form properties of media.  Somewhat related to these art works were paintings given the name of tachisme, from the French for “blot” (tache) and referring more specifically to European versions of gestural painting.
 
Fautrier: Nude, 1960 Fautrier: Hostage, 1945

Fautrier, a leading pioneer of l’art informel, began his career working in a style of representational painting.  During WWII, he began to change his focus to paintings which consisted of a large mass of paint suggestive of decapitated human heads or dismembered bodies.  Traditionally, these paintings have been explained by relating them to an incident in Fautrier’s life: after being arrested by the SS, imprisoned and interrogated, he deserted his Paris apartment for several months.  Later, he hid in an asylum for the mentally ill.  While there, he witnessed the executions of hostages.  It is unclear as to whether this narrative is entirely true, although Fautrier himself encouraged it and contributed to it.  But recent research has shown that he actually began this series of bodies, generally referred to by the series title “L’Otages,” before this incident in his life. Because it is also known that some of the hostages in this series are named as “Jewess” or with a female name that sounds Jewish, the paintings may be less of an autobiographical experience and more of a response to the collaborationist government in Paris and Nazi policy toward Jews.  Fautrier’s antagonism is not directed at the Jew–his paintings are an attack on the Vichy government.  Positioning the women as though their bodies have been ripped open and spilled out on the ground, the viewer, as with a floor sculpture by Giacometti, is symbolically looking down on the object and complicit in the act of degradation to the person whose body has been extruded, allowing its guts to spill out.  We might consider, as well, that what Fautrier is doing here with the figure is not that different from what Newman or Pollock did without the figure.  In each case, the viewer must symbolically encounter the work from a different position–above and looking down, inside and looking out.
 

Fontana: Spatial Concept, 1956 Burri: Sack, 1962 Tapies: Figure of Newsprint and Threads, 1946-7

Spatialism is a word used to refer specifically to Lucio Fontana's theory of the rejection of illusionism and the use of color and materials to create literal or real space in painting.  As your textbook points out, Fontana's interest relates more directly to explorations of space and a cosmic order than to an interest in either the existential or psychological properties of materials and their manipulation.  This latter interest is more characteristic of Burri and Tapies, both of whom were influenced by Dubuffet's interest in materials, and possibly Robert Rauschenberg, who had begun making his combine paintings by the mid-1950s.  Kuspit's article on Tapies provides an interesting perspective on the use of automatist marks in Tapies' work and the relationship of his work to psychological and traumatic wounds.

Giacometti: From Surrealism to Heroic Existentialism

Giacometti is usually considered a surrealist for the first half of his career, although as is the case with many artists whose careers span a long period, it’s unlikely that the visual references and ideas of one period of his work are completely obliterated by later developments.  The earlier, more surrealist works are more pictorial in nature, suggesting complete dream sequences while his more renowned work after the war becomes more of an obsessive attempt to "get the figure right."
 
Giacometti: The Cage, 1930-1 (wood) The Palace at 4 a.m., 1932 The Invisible Object (Hands Holding the Void), 1934-5 

None of the surrealistic pieces can be definitively pinned down to a single interpretation but all of them inspire questions.  The Invisible Object raises questions about the void space between the hands: what is it that we can't we see?  Is is the ultimate representation of the unobtainable desire?  Or is this the work in which Giacometti both memorializes and decries the relationship with his father, an artist who encouraged him and recognized his gifts but did not approve of the abstract styles favored by Giacometti and a parent who died a year before this work was made?  Is the work a sublimated expression of Giacometti’s fantasies of violence, in particular, patricidal fantasies, intermingled with the guilt he undoubtedly felt after his father’s death?  These, of course, are the more psychoanalytic approaches to the work.  Whether true or not, the work has an undeniably powerful impact in person - you don't need to know anything about Giacometti's life to respond to the combined sense of impotent longing and the desire to protect something which can't be seen.
 

Woman with Her Throat Cut, 1932 (bronze: 1949)
The Chariot, 1950 Tall Figure, 1947

One critic has recently suggested that after a period of not working very much and destroying most of what he made, a period which coincided with WWII, and after his exposure to the truth of what had happened during the war, what the “Final Solution” had meant and how many people had lost their lives, Giacometti began to devote his work to the production of the human figure and the obsessive goal of getting it right.  One of the interesting contradictions in his figural work, a contradiction which does seem to support the idea that his work is an attempt to resolve the psychological conflict he experienced in himself with respect to fantasies of violence and the recognition of what violence in real life achieves, is the difference between looking at his figures from a direct position in front of them and looking at them from a profile position.  This dual vision conveys the helpless fragility of humankind as well as the inner strength which becomes flesh.  Giacometti’s own comments neither contradict nor completely confirm this hypothesis.  He speaks of the impossibility of trying to model a figure or draw a head, and says that it will never be more than a pale reflection of what he sees.  He describes this as both a failure and a success and perhaps an obsession in that he keeps trying and keeps asking how you honestly make something.  He concludes that he doesn’t know if he continues to work in order to make something or if he works in order to know why he cannot make what he would like to make.  Perhaps that’s the reason why his figures always appear to be far away from us, no matter how close we may get to them–and that’s the quality which Sartre found so existential in Giacometti’s sculpture.  His drawings of the late 40s struggle with many of the same issues: the figure in space.  Although Giacometti claimed not to be an existentialist, Sartre  describes his work best: “Emptiness filters through everywhere; each creature secretes his void.”

Here, I would take issue with Fineberg's discussion of Giacometti as an existentialist, finding the existential quality in the gestural presence of the artist in the surface of the sculpture and the sense that these works are never finished.  I find Sartre's analysis to be more convincing in this case.  Central to Sartre’s argument is the notion that the unconscious has no place in this world; it does not even exist.  Taking issue with Husserl’s notion of consciousness as something which cannot be reflexive (the conscious self cannot be aware of itself as conscious, in much the same way that when we talk, we are not talking about the act of talking or actually hearing what we say), Sartre argues that the individual conscious self can be reflexive.  At the same time, the attempt to be reflexive means that the conscious is always trying to catch something which it cannot catch up to.  The implication of this is that the person essentially becomes two: the original and the copy who can never catch up to the original.  The alternative to this impossible and futile task is to exist in the moment.  This becomes the non-repeatable, existential act.

Giacometti, in Sartre’s eyes, does achieve this impossible synthesis of the self one is conscious of and the self who is conscious of that other self, and the creation of this ultimate existential act in the work of art.  First, all his figures have the attenuated appearance of being seen from a distance, despite the fact that many are quite small and despite the fact that we may be standing quite close to them.  In other words, Giacometti gives us the image of the human being as it exists in an imaginary space which always separates it from us.  These figures, no matter how many are made, whether it is one of Giacometti’s townscapes, with multiple figures, or a single figure standing on a chariot, are indivisible and unique.  Ultimately, if there is more than one figure in the work, it is the same figure at different moments in time or points in space.  Thus, for Sartre, Giacometti’s figures are optimistic expressions of existence.

Certainly, this optimistic assessment is not shared by all viewers.  To some viewers, the figures are scarred, fragile victims who speak of ineffable isolation and loneliness, the reduction of society to its most irreducible element, man alone in the crowd of other, similarly isolated strangers.  And perhaps that duality of essence and existence is precisely the poignant theme that each of these artists, from Bacon to Dubuffet and even to Guston, was trying to express and the meaning of Peter Selz’s choice of words when he described his show, existential essentialism.