ART CHRONICLE
297
Dufuffet's case demonstrates once
again
that the "primitivism" of
which modern
art
is so frequently accused is
in
reality something quite
different from what it seems. Instead of being a return to a primitive
state of mind (whatever that may be) , it represents a new evaluation
and opening up of the past such as only erudite artists are capable of.
The whole surviving past of art, rather than that of Western Europe
and classical antiquity alone, has now been made available to contem–
porary artists. As our painting and sculpture abandon naturalism they
find more and more stimulating precedents outside the historical and
social orbit of Western culture. They find these in Mrica, Asia, Oceania
-and here at home and
in
the present as well: in the impromptu, rudi–
mentary art of novices, amateurs, children, and lunatics.
Dubuffet's and Klee's art crosses social and status lines as ·high
art
never did before. It exposes, for the first time to our respectful view,
the spontaneous graphic effusions, the
lumpen
art, of the urban lower
classes, which Klee and Dubuffet have discovered and given an
aesthetic role as Marx discovered and gave the proletariat a political
role. And
in
a way not unlike Marx's, Dubuffet exaggerates the sub–
versiveness of what he has discovered. It is true that most of the
art
we
see scrawled on sidewalks is jeering and that the obscenity of what gets
scribbled on lavoratory walls is rather "anti-social." But the beauty
these things acquire at Dubuffet's transfiguring hands is so social that
they become eligible for the museums, than which there
is,
of course,
nothing less subversive.
Clement Greenberg
