Jean Dubuffet – Brutal Beauty review: One of the exhibitions of the year

Jean Dubuffet was one of the seminal artists of the immediate post-war period, a former wine merchant who only found his feet as an artist in his early forties, amid the bomb-blasted, graffiti-spattered streets of occupied Paris. He translated these devastated surfaces into paintings of unprecedented rawness, that were hugely influential throughout the angst-ridden Fifties.

Even more significantly, Dubuffet effectively invented outsider art – the art of the mentally ill – which he dubbed Art Brut or raw art, turning what had been a matter of largely medical interest into a lucrative art-world phenomenon. But how deeply felt are Dubuffet's paintings? Was he an authentic visionary of the streets, or more of an entrepreneur and a showman – even a conman: not so much an enabler of artists on the margins of society as an exploiter?

The Barbican's major Dubuffet exhibition, the first in this country since 1966, presents him from the outset as a performer-artist – a forebear of Warhol, Beuys, Emin et al – adept at projecting himself through the media. Blown-up images of his forceful bald cranium and slightly sinister grin seem to crop up every few yards, along with quotes – “Anything can be an object of beauty”, “Millions of possibilities for expression exist outside the accepted cultural avenues” – that situate him very much in his time. If such ideas have become commonplace, they were a genuine revelation in 1945.

Dubuffet divided his early adulthood between working in the family wine business and trying to establish himself as an artist, always put off by suffocating conventional notions of beauty. He wanted to create art with the immediacy of “base” experience, the filth in the street, evoked on the canvas with dust, sand and ash, and with the magical intensity he perceived in outsider art, which he had discovered as early as 1923 through the writings of psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn.

A collection of early lithographs mix the spontaneous energy of child art with a toilet-wall scabrousness: looking at the gaunt and grinning figures relieving themselves against the blackened oil-stained surfaces in Pissers at the Wall, you can see why Dubuffet was such a liberating influence on David Hockney when the young Yorkshireman was finding his feet in London's gay underground nearly 20 years later; throughout the show you can see the connections to Jean-Michel Basquiat, half a century on.

While Dubuffet claimed he was an amateur artist, he was far from an outsider. A group of portraits of artists and writers encountered through the soirees of the American socialite Florence Gould show his absolute mastery of visual texture. Oil paint is mixed with plaster, while grit from the street is shovelled onto the canvas, compacted or scraped, and hacked off. The best of these images – such as the portrait of mescalin-experimenting artist Henri Michaux – have a stark immediacy, the image thrown together in a few gouging strokes; though the image of writer Andre Dhotel feels too close to caricature. Indeed, while these seemed to contemporaries to be all of a piece with the anguished mood of a world recovering from horror, what strikes us now is their playfulness. There's a disconcerting sense that even the rawest imagery, which aspires, like these paintings, to bring itself into being without the effete intervention of “art”, can rapidly start to feel stylised, even slightly mannered.

Dubuffet began collecting outsider art in 1945, founding a gallery to promote it with a group of likeminded enthusiasts, including the surrealist leader Andre Breton. Two rooms are given over to some of the best works from his collection, including the bizarre pink-pencil romantic fantasies of Aloise Corbaz, a schizophrenic failed opera singer from Lausanne; the swirling blue monochrome abstract compositions of spiritualist medium Laure Pigeon; and the obsessive pattern-making of Dubuffet's outsider art hero, Adolf Wolfli.

If it’s easy to see why Dubuffet identified with the tormented intensity of art that wasn’t aware of itself as art – created without the “cultural conditioning” of the conventional bourgeois world – he was nothing if not knowing as an artist himself.

Yet he went on trying to sublimate his conscious artistic personality, immersing himself into a kind of primordial human flow, in the works the exhibition considers his most “controversial”: the Corps de dame series, started in 1950, in which he set out to attack the “specious” beauty of the classical female nude – and, some might argue, the female body itself. In The Tree of Fluids, a billowing female form appears poured onto the canvas in rivulets of oil paint, zinc oxide and viscous varnish that swirl over the painting in a turgid mass of pink.

This is the female body not so much seen as felt, in some mother-fixated dream: an unfathomable morass of flesh and fluids. It’s a visual idea that's developed in a series of extraordinary scratched and spattered pen-and-ink drawings, all with tiny heads and arms, protruding bellies, and massive thighs. Some viewers may find these images difficult, but they touch on a key preoccupation of the time – the desire to create new images of humanity that would have credibility in the horrified aftermath of the Holocaust and Hiroshima.

Dubuffet’s sculptures and paintings of the mid-Fifties, however, stretch the notion of human form to its limits. Figures hacked out of volcanic rock gape in a kind of primal astonishment, while The Extravagant One, with its complex, weirdly “knitted” patterns in enamel paint, looks like some hallucinatory teddy bear. Beside the high seriousness of rivals such as Francis Bacon and Alberto Giacometti, Dubuffet's post-atomic figures feel tongue-in-cheek, with even a touch of sci-fi in the red-eyed “monster” figure looming out of Intervention.

The show reaches its climax in three large canvases from the Paris Circus series, evoking the theatrical commotion of the city’s streets. By the time Dubuffet created these paintings in 1961, he is generally thought to have been past his classic phase, but his madcap energy and feel for texture remained undimmed.

This is a modern city that appears populated entirely by miniature versions of the artist himself, all big-nosed, bald-headed and apparently male – crowding the tables in Restaurant Rougeot I, jammed into strange globular cars in Caught in the Act, packed into a bus in Paris Montparnasse – while more mini-Dubuffets float like dreamed apparitions along the pavements. Every centimetre of each of these paintings vibrates with hilarious life. In Caught in the Act, the effects of shimmering neon and ceaseless movement are evoked not through literal depiction, but through a frantic semi-abstract jigsaw that appears to have been scraped off and haphazardly repainted so that everything seems to be jumping at once.

From here on there's a slight falling off, as a collection of chance doodles in multicoloured ballpoint pen are explored in the crazy-paving-like paintings that were to occupy much of the last 20 years of Dubuffet’s life. While they’re attractive in small doses, there are acres of them in museums throughout the world. At the time of his death in 1985, collapsing while drawing aged 84, Dubuffet was still producing very credible abstract paintings, but they don’t hold a candle to his earlier work.

This, I predict, will prove to be one of the exhibitions of the year, not least because it provides such a refreshing contrast to the sanitised ethereality of most art today. Yes, Dubuffet was a bit of a dandy and a trickster, who stole a few riffs from his genuinely visionary outsider artist proteges, but he also saved vast amounts of their work from destruction. He comes across as a hugely benign figure, arriving in a world emerging from global catastrophe – just as we are, or hope we are now – to creating art with the kind of inalienable actuality we’ve come to crave in our digitalised world. After a year of face masks, hand sanitising and Zoom meetings, Dubuffet will make you want to rush out and embrace dirty real life.

Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty is at Barbican Art Gallery from 17 May – 22 August 2021

Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty by Eleanor Nairne is published by Prestel