Jean Dubuffet at the Barbican (July 2021)

Exhibitions of Jean Dubuffet are, it seems, rare. This seems surprising given that Dubuffet offers what appears to be a genuine outsider, someone who did not form part of the mainstream of the artistic development of his time, but who nonetheless made significant statements through his art.

Most importantly is the idea of Art Brut: that so-called naïve art, lacking correct perspective and very close at times to caricature, can be a valid art form in its own right. Of course, it is common knowledge that Picasso and early 20th-century painters looked to early African art to give their paintings an immediacy that the official art of the day lacked. But Dubuffet takes it much further than that. Picasso, for all his modernism, retains throughout a reassuring classicism which makes the viewer feel comfortable: it’s not quite right, thinks the observer, but I can still see the talent of the line drawing and the composition.

With Dubuffet, you see the full “primitivism” of the image. Its not primitive, because Dubuffet knows exactly what he is doing, but it is still a shock to see the human body without any beautification (which is, after all, what most art has been doing since prehistoric times).

That rawness, observed from the art of the severely disturbed, has a haunting quality to it. It breaks the Western myth of the beautiful image. Not surprisingly, Dubuffet diverges from the tradition of painting beautiful images of women. His female figures are equally devoid of attractiveness, just a lump (or several lumps) of flesh presented bluntly to the viewer. 

Dubuffet’s art has a hit-or-miss quality, undoubtedly. It seems he would go off on the trail of an idea or theme and pursue it for some months with a passion, then change tack entirely. Some of these themes were covered in the Barbican Dubuffet exhibition, but it would appear there were several others as well – Dubuffet was amazingly prolific. But you forgive him the occasional lapse because of the compensation: an engagement with the immediate, the full force of the moment. Some of his best works, for me, were those done in the 1960s when he was depicting everyday reality on the Paris streets and in restaurants:

 

This is just a picture of people on a bus. But for some reason, the image of a crowded urban landscape is powerfully present. The painting is two-dimensional, so the pedestrians appear upside down at the top.

Most disturbing is the kind of manic smile, again, taken from children’s art and the art of the disturbed, that can be seen on the faces of the people on the bus. This fixed grin is a frightening reminder of the need to keep up appearances in the city. Don’t, whatever you do, give the impression that you are not enjoying yourself and in control.

If Dubuffet were to paint your portrait, you would not expect him to do a full likeness, but the painter, who it seems was very skilled at making controversial statements, said that his aim when portraying someone not to make any sketches from life, but to deliberately wait and then try to compose an effective portrait from memory of how that person appeared to them. Whatever the technique, the result is compelling: here is a drawing of Antonin Artaud: 

 

With paintings like these, who needs an art academy?

Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth in Ostend

Zweig and Roth in Ostend, 1936: a terrifying image of Joseph Roth

The idea of two famous Jewish writers meeting in exile in Ostend in 1936 as their world disappears around them is such a powerful image that the story could hardly fail to be fascinating, if desperate.

Yet Volker Weidermann, author of Summer before the Dark (2014) almost manages to mangle the story. Vague when he should be precise, and detailed when any reader would expect to have more evidence of where the information is obtained, he manages not to tell us what makes Zweig and Roth distinctive and leaves us guessing for more of the story to make it intelligible. It is a book with no index, no sources, no citations, no chapters. The translator appears to have added a few notes about some of the characters, but these notes are inadequate.

As for missing details, how about:

• (page 21) “Belgium, that glorious country … that had heroically resisted all invaders over the centuries”. Since Belgium only became a nation state in 1830, that hardly seems an apt comment.
• (page 68) “She travels to Brussels for the day. She’s been told she could get to know Hermann Kesten there.” Who is Kesten? we are told a little in the following pages, but it is typical of Weidermann’s style to introduce characters without any description, or even, at times, without any name.
• (page 140) “From his homeland … It’s Festival time, as it is every year.” Which festival? Would you like to tell us? We guess half a page later, but why does the author play this guessing game with his readers?
• Ostend figures loosely in the narrative, but two pages (92-94) are dedicated to a murder that took place there. An account was written by Hermann Kesten, but are we supposed to believe that Ostend is exceptional for murders? Or that the group of exiles took any interest in Ostend, apart from it being a conveniently neutral base?
• (page 98) As for sexual politics, this is a book where the women are subservient, even to men who are drinking themselves to death. And, of course, young women are stunningly attractive:  “Wherever she goes with him, writers almost go crazy at the sight of her youth and beauty”.  This is a description of Christiane Grautoff, whom Roth met when she was 15.
• (page 116) “Irmgard Keun loves Joseph Roth and sees into him more deeply than anyone ever has.” If this were romantic fiction, I wouldn’t question such a statement, but given Roth’s advanced alcoholism, it might perhaps be more accurate to say she is prepared to drink with him more than anyone else does – a rather different relationship.
• (page 143) Zweig is preparing to travel to Argentina and he and his partner are learning Spanish. But on page 150 he arrives in Brazil, and spends the rest of his life there. It would be interesting to know how the switch occurred. On page 152 we learn he only planned to spend two weeks in Argentina. They don’t speak Spanish in Brazil. Am I the only one to be confused by this narrative?

Finally, it isn’t clear from this book why Zweig committed suicide, or even what happened to his wife Lotte. Weidermann writes that Zweig was received with adulation when he arrived in Brazil, and writes of Zweig’s “love for Brazil” (page 152). It’s a bit of a jump to committing joint suicide a few pages later. Here is literature reduced to Sunday newspaper journalism, sex, scandal and drinking, with little care if the pieces don’t all hang together. For me, the final straw was the quote from the FT on the cover of the English paperback edition, a club-footed and tasteless comment on what is after all the description of an alcoholic writer's decline and death:

"Death in Venice with more sex, more booze, more action".