Jean Dubuffet. Nez D'apollo Pap. 1953. Collection of Dieter Scharf In

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.119.1.46 by guest on 27 September 2021 Jean Dubuffet: The Butterﬂy Man*

SARAH K. RICH

The Massacre

Why does he massacre butterﬂies to evoke effects he would better achieve with paint and brushes? —R. D., L’Information, February 19541

Good question. “R. D.” was not the only one who asked it. Many critics puzzled over Jean Dubuffet’s butterfly wing collages when they were first shown at the Galerie Rive Gauche in December of 1953. Though the exhibition “Démons et merveilles” showcased veteran surrealists like Max Ernst, Joan Miró, and Dorothea Tanning, as well as slightly younger figures like Henri Michaux, Dubuffet’s contribution of eight collages dominated critical responses and were the only works to be illustrated in reviews.2 Gaudy heaps of fritillaries, tiger moths, blues, swallowtails, and clouded yellows, most of which had been hunted down in the French Alps that fall, the collages lacked the decorum typical for the display of such specimens, to the great distress of most art critics. Dubuffet had not, for example, used a separating board to part the tender wings and keep the bodies intact. Instead, he had ripped the

* I would like to thank Yve-Alain Bois as well as my colleagues Charlotte Houghton, Nancy Locke, Christopher Campbell, and Leo Mazow for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. I am especially grateful to Sophie Webel, Director of the Foundation Dubuffet, who made archival sources per- taining to the collages available to me in the summer of 2003. I also beneﬁtted tremendously from insights and bibliographical information that Kent Minturn shared with me during my work on this arti- cle. This paper was ﬁrst presented as a lecture in the History of Art and Architecture Department, Harvard University, September 29, 2005. 1. R. D., “Démons et merveilles,” L’Information (February 15, 1954), reprinted in Max Loreau, Catalogue des Travaux de Jean Dubuffet, vol. 9 (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1968), p. 105. All translations from the French are mine unless otherwise noted. 2. The title of the exhibition was derived from a poem by Jacques Prévert, “Sables Mouvants,” in which the phrase “Démons et merveilles, Vents et marées” is used several times to introduce different metaphors for a lover. See Jacques Prévert, Paroles (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), p. 186. The exhibition was curated by René Bertelé, who had been pivotal in the publication of Prévert’s Paroles.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.119.1.46 by guest on 27 September 2021 48 OCTOBER

poor critters apart and distributed their fragmentary remains on 25 by 18 cm pieces of paperboard without regard for entomological organization.3 And, in apparent denial of the gruesome process by which his works had come into being, Dubuffet had exploited the insect remnants simply to compose blithe little figure studies and seemingly anodyne landscapes.4 Three reviews condemned Dubuffet’s contribution to the show as a “massacre,” which suggests that the word might have buzzed around the exhibition’s opening reception as well. The critic writing for L’Express, for example, com- plained that works like Nez d’Apollo Pap (1953) seemed a veritable harvest of death, as the artist “uselessly massacred hundreds of butterflies with which he covered the faces of the monsters that haunt him.” A critic in Médium going by the initials J.-L. B. would see the collages as another of Dubuffet’s experiments in abjection and debasement, though to that critic the project seemed a waste of materials: Poor Dubuffet who, with a hundred massacred butterflies, only knows how to make a rough, “informe” effigy.5

3. A memo dated Saturday, December 5, 1953, lists the following butterfly collages lent by Jean Dubuffet to Rudi Augustincic at the Rive Gauche Gallery for the “Démons et merveilles” show: Dame agée, Homme aux dents jaunes, Vache et vacher, Profil d’homme, Femme et chien, Homme au bouquet, Dame masqué (Belle au regard. . . .), Jeux. The document is located in the Augustincic file at the Fondation Jean Dubuffet, Paris. 4. “Démons et merveilles,” L’Express, no. 34 ( January 9, 1954), p. 10. Reviews of this show were omitted from the otherwise comprehensive bibliography provided by the recent retrospective catalog organized by Daniel Abadie, Dubuffet (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2001). 5. J.-L. B., “Les Papillons sont au-dessous de ça,” Médium (February 1954), p. 22.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.119.1.46 by guest on 27 September 2021 Jean Dubuffet: The Butterﬂy Man 49

An anonymous critic writing for Arts was so daring as to avoid the terminology of the “massacre” in his review, though he came to the same general conclusion regarding the uselessness of the slaughter: Dubuffet has unleashed himself upon butterflies, seizing their wings and gluing them in a terrible mess. . . . One can’t help but think that butterfly wings—such marvels—are sufficient on their own, in their form and beauty, and that the artist’s process is useless and cruel.6 This reviewer was a bit more explicit than the others in describing the specific offense of the collages. According to him, the carnage of Dubuffet’s collages was useless—and for a couple of reasons. The first was tied up in the benign aesthetic that critics perceived in the noninstrumental beauty of butterflies proper. They were just such lovely creatures on their own, why bother trying to improve upon them? Then, as it was impossible to enhance a butterfly’s beauty, the insect’s aesthetic quality was degraded by a less noble kind of uselessness—that of the superfluous kill. In their fancy for sweet little butterflies, and their disgust at the cruel artist who had cut short their aesthetically pleasing lives, these critics might have been happier with modernism’s other treatment of the butterfly—that provided by some- one like J. A. M. Whistler. After all, the butterflies with which Whistler typically signed his canvases and decorated his personal effects were indisputably light and

6. “Démons et merveilles: Toiles surréalistes,” Arts, no. 443 (December 24, 1953), p. 6.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.119.1.46 by guest on 27 September 2021 50 OCTOBER

pretty. Confections of the air, they advertised social buoyancy and expressed a wit unburdened by the tedium of bourgeois morality. Even better, those butterflies lit- eralized the flatness of Whistler’s compositions. When pinned to his canvases, their surface effects dissuaded the viewer’s gaze from penetrating the three- dimensional space of his paintings. And the delicate tracery of Whistler’s butterflies was most enjoyable when the insects were spread open, emphasizing the two-dimensionality of his compositions proper. As they were flattened, the insects’ wings were also captured within a self-contained representational system that reit- erated the autonomy of the modernist canvas: the two wings of Whistler’s butterflies would “represent” only each other, mirroring (in this context) their decorative design along a vertical axis. Part of the problem, however, was that the insects on Dubuffet’s collages weren’t so much flat as they were squashed—or at least their flatness recalled the process of squashing by which one typically kills an insect. That was the massacre. So if the conspicuous presence of the wings on the surface of the works, in good modernist fashion, may have called attention to the two-dimensionality of the collages (as did the lack of shading and perspective in the compositions), the very facticity of the dead bugs made it impossible to ignore the extermination necessary for that flatness to have been achieved. Like Dubuffet’s road-kill nudes of the late forties and fifties, in which women’s bodies appear to have been steamrolled into two dimensions (or, one might now say, in which those bodies seem to have been “butterfly cut” up the back, with the sides of the carcass peeled open to face the front), the butterfly collages obtained flatness through an unavoidable brutality. Pretty yet catastrophic, iridescent yet lifeless, Dubuffet’s exuberant massacres punctured the superficiality of the butterfly with the depth of a grave. Worse yet, as far as critics were concerned, such brutality apparently yielded no special result, as Dubuffet didn’t seem to have done anything new with the insect corpses. Rather, the collages reproduced pictorial effects common to Dubuffet’s paintings. Like his “. . . Plus beaux qu’ils croient” portraits of French intellectuals from the mid-forties, the butterfly collages mustered a number of compositional gimmicks that Dubuffet typically exploited to produce the effect of naiveté. As in those earlier portraits, the upper margin of space with which portraits usually cushion the head of a sitter is notably absent in Nez d’Apollo Pap, and the oversized head dwarfs his puny arms. Further, it seems as if the figure’s right arm is bending only because it is forced into a detour by the frame, giving the calculated impression that the artist had incorrectly estimated the amount of space he would need to complete the figure. So critics condemned the collages for their brutality, their degrading uselessness, and their derivative character. Yet, as they grasped for smelling salts before Dubuffet’s abominations, those critics also raised some important questions— questions originally left open as rhetorical, but which now deserve answering. Why butterflies? Why such violence? Was that violence a negligible by-product of the work, or did it serve a more active function? And, to these questions, the

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.119.1.46 by guest on 27 September 2021 Jean Dubuffet: The Butterﬂy Man 51

scholar looking over Dubuffet’s entire oeuvre today might add one more: how did the dead butterfly, that morbid medium, become the means by which Dubuffet would attempt to transform the very operations of pictorial meaning in his work? The artist himself assigned these collages a pivotal role in his artistic development.7 He mentioned several times that he found the medium of butterfly wings fascinating, and he would turn to it three times over the course of his career (in 1953, 1955, and again in 1957). According to Dubuffet’s published memoir, the first collages quickened his termination of the high impasto Pâtes battues with which he had busied himself for years.8 Then, from the play of veins that capillarized the butterfly wings and, consequently, the very surfaces of the collages themselves, Dubuffet gradually developed an interest in compositions that pictured dispersal, rather than viscous accumulation.9 Subsequent to the collages Dubuffet therefore began to gather wing-sized and shaped scraps of paper with which he would construct Tableaux d’assemblages. Circulating what he called “nervures” of ink around the assembled elements, Dubuffet further isolated and partitioned the surface with venous lines deriving from butterfly anatomy. Those works, in turn, eventually led to the increasingly atomized fields of the Texturologies and Materiologies of the late 1950s. The collages thus established a ful- crum point that shifted Dubuffet’s oeuvre from figuration to abstraction, and more important, from cohesive form to dispersal. They established a new pictorial (anti)order of disintegration. All with a butterfly wing.

7. It is therefore remarkable that there has been virtually no scholarly discussion of them. For reproductions and brief catalog entries, see Barbara Herzog, who describes the events leading up to Dubuffet’s creation of the collage Paysage aux argus (1955) in Andreas Franzke et al., Jean Dubuffet: Trace of an Adventure (London: Prestel, 2003), p. 98; Jessica Stewart, who offers an exhaustive description of butterfly species appearing in Dubuffet’s collage Jardin de Bibi Trompette (1955), in Judith Brodie and Andrew Robinson, eds., A Century of Drawing: Works on Paper from Degas to LeWitt (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2001), p. 207; the letters and artist commentary about the 1955 collages published in Daniel Marchesseau, Dubuffet (Martigny: Fondation Pierre Gianadda, 1993), pp. 82–87; James T. Demetrion, who quotes letters regarding Dubuffet’s gift of Le Personnage en ailes des papillon (1953) to his collector Maurice Culberg in Jean Dubuffet 1943–1963: Paintings, Sculptures, Assemblages (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), p. 89. Daniel Abadie’s formidable retrospective catalog, Dubuffet, provides many beautiful illustrations of the butterfly works (pp. 161–67) and use- ful chronologies including the years of Dubuffet’s butterfly hunts (pp. 376–81), though there is no discussion of the collages in the essays. 8. Dubuffet first argued that his “assemblages of butterfly wings determined the development of [his] later works,” when describing the second series of butterfly collages he made in 1955. See Dubuffet’s “Mémoire sur le développement de mes travaux à partir de 1952,” in Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, ed. Hubert Damisch, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), p. 112. 9. Dubuffet, “Mémoire,” p. 112. Claude Esteban summarized the transition succinctly in 1968: “With the advent of the butterflies came an entirely new order: from the playful contrasts of their natural partitions, their particularity as indivisible entities separate from each other, little trembling mon- ads, the very discontinuity of matter was revealed.” Claude Esteban, “L’Insecte et le topographe,” La Nouvelle revue française 16, no. 182 (February 1, 1968), p. 370.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.119.1.46 by guest on 27 September 2021 52 OCTOBER

Imitators

Though the collages enjoy a privileged position in Dubuffet’s memoirs, the narrative surrounding their first creation isn’t terribly heroic.10 In August of 1953, as Dubuffet and his wife Lili were returning to Paris from a vacation in the Savoy, they drove alongside a rushing mountain stream to which Dubuffet decided to return later and sketch. In a few weeks, Dubuffet was eager to “capture the lively waters and the movement of water running over the stones,” so he returned to the spot and made several drawings of the site upon which he would base three paintings in Paris.11 He also brought a traveling companion for that second trip—author, publisher, and artist Pierre Bettencourt.12 While Dubuffet drew, Bettencourt, already an amateur lepidopterist, chased the butterﬂies that prolifer- Dubuffet. Le Torrent aux papillons. 1953. ated in the region. The author also Destroyed. © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), began producing collages by gluing New York/ADAGP, Paris. their wings onto paper. Dubuffet stayed busy with his drawings for a while, but he was unenthusias- tic about the resulting compositions. While he did produce several “torrent” paintings from those sketches, he stashed them in a corner of his studio and eventually destroyed most of them.13 Perhaps Dubuffet was simply too distracted

10. The events are summarized by Dubuffet in “Le Torrent, les papillons: août 1953 et mois suivants,” a section of Dubuffet’s “Mémoire,” pp. 93–94. 11. Dubuffet, “Mémoire,” p. 94. 12. Born in 1917, Bettencourt is an author, artist, and printer who published several editions of his own work as well as writings by French writers in the forties and ﬁfties, including Antonin Artaud, Henri Michaux, Paul Paulhan, and Francis Ponge. Bettencourt also printed some of Dubuffet’s phonetic works, most notably his Plu kifekler mouikon nivoua (1950). Dubuffet described his first encounters with Bettencourt in letters to Jean Paulhan in 1945, and encouraged Paulhan to include Bettencourt in his NNRF. See Julien Dieudonné and Marianne Jakobi, eds.,Correspondance Jean Dubuffet/Jean Paulhan, 1944–1968 (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), esp. pp. 217, 399, and 433. Not long ago Bettencourt described his relationship to Dubuffet and ﬁgures in an interview with Éric Dussert and Éric Naulleau, “Les Grandes largeurs d’un fabuliste fantaisiste,” Le Matricule des anges, no. 19 (March–April 1997), pp. 50–51. 13. Dubuffet, “Mémoire,” p. 94.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.119.1.46 by guest on 27 September 2021 Jean Dubuffet: The Butterﬂy Man 53

by the butterflies his companion was putting to good use. In one of the torrent paintings, Le Torrent aux papillons (1953), three butterflies hover at the periphery of the image like annoying insects that Dubuffet might have preferred to swat out of the central composition. Barely dis- tinguishable among the circles of the streamscape, one butterfly rests directly on the left edge of the image just above center, another suns itself on a cluster of rocks just below the upper left corner of the picture, and another seems to fly just below the upper edge to the right of the center. Frustrated with his drawings and paintings, Dubuffet finally yielded to that source of distraction and began producing collages of butterfly wings. But while Dubuffet and Bettencourt, armed with nets, stalked their delicate prey, each pre- Pierre Bettencourt. Le Bouddha. 1953. Collection ferred different techniques with Fondation Dubuffet, Paris. © 2007 Artists Rights which to mount the trophies of their Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo hunt. The plump, squat figures in Archives Fondation Dubuffet. Bettencourt’s collages like Le Bouddha of 1953, tend to be much more coherent according to hue and pattern, usually because a single species is used: the central mass of the Buddha’s body is wrapped in a rhythmic robe of Emperor Moths, for example, all of which are positioned at an angle consistent with a garment’s drapery. The wings’ placement also obeys a rule of symmetry that recalls the biology of the insects proper. Bettencourt did not preserve the connection between the wings as they had originally been linked on the body of the insect, of course, but following the logic of organic bilateral symmetry, a wing on the left side of a figure’s composition always mirrors wing on the right. By contrast, Dubuffet’s figures pullulate with a variety of wings that are dwarfed by the larger composite figures they produce. Juxtaposing wings of radically different species— wings in varying patterns, colors, sizes, shapes, and reflective properties—Dubuffet played up the spectacular contrasts among the shimmering fragments. Dubuffet’s wings also rarely maintain the symmetry of insect physiology, as they are infre- quently applied in mirroring pairs. And as the wings have been pulled apart and

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.119.1.46 by guest on 27 September 2021 54 OCTOBER

distributed without regard for their natural symmetry, they have also been radically repositioned with respect to the figure. Two wings from a single butterfly will be sep- arated, and while one wing might be discarded altogether, the other, when included, will likely undergo clockwise rotations as well as recto/verso reversals that often do not contribute to the coherence of the figure’s body shape or clothing. In spite of their differences, however, the two artists worried that their works were too similar—or, more specifically, that Dubuffet might have relied too heavily upon Bettencourt’s example. Though Dubuffet neglected to mention the competition between the artists among the letters he published in his four-volume Prospectus, Bettencourt published most of the correspondence between the two men after Dubuffet’s death, ostensibly to demonstrate the deceased painter’s indebted- ness to him.14 In one such letter written in 1953, Dubuffet flattered Bettencourt by writing that he hoped to organize an exhibit of their butterfly pieces: “We will title it ‘Works by M. Pierre Bettencourt and his imitator,’” Dubuffet promised.15 Months later Dubuffet wrote that he was coaxing collector Jacques Ulmann into purchasing some of Bettencourt’s butterfly works, and he swore to Bettencourt that the latter’s collages were “far superior” to his own. This praise, however, was meant in part to soften Dubuffet’s rejection of a joint exhibit that Bettencourt had been proposing. Dubuffet wrote, I have been your imitator through this whole affair, and that makes me anxious; regarding the project of mounting an exhibit together, of sharing the glorious wall on equal footing, it doesn’t seem to make any sense to me. I think it would be best if you did your own exhibit—or I could participate by writing a preface (in which I would reveal the ways in which I was driven to mimic your technique).

While Dubuffet thus dodged the exhibition by claiming to be a mere imitator of Bettencourt’s original idea, he was not able to avoid Bettencourt’s anger when his collages appeared in the “Démons et merveilles” exhibition, unaccompanied by Bettencourt’s works or by any statement regarding his inﬂuence. Dubuffet apolo- gized to Bettencourt by claiming that the collage works were added to the exhibition at the last minute, and he waved off the critical attention his collages had received as a fluke. Dubuffet then promised to organize an exhibit of Bettencourt’s collages, though no such exhibition ever materialized. In November 1954, Bettencourt thus organized a one-man show for himself, and, in the accom- panying pamphlet, suggested that Dubuffet had plagiarized him—an accusation that Dubuffet claimed left him incredulous.16 It was then that Dubuffet changed

14. Pierre Bettencourt, Poirer le papillon: lettres de Jean Dubuffet à Pierre Bettencourt, 1949–1985 (Paris: Éditions Lettres Vives, 1987). 15. Ibid., p. 58. Dubuffet uses the word émule. The following discussion derives from letters published in Bettencourt, Poirer le papillon, pp. 61–62, 64, 75, 80, and 90–92. 16. Bettencourt at this point felt that Dubuffet’s Petites statues de la vie précaire also copied his sculp- tural works in which bones and stones were assembled into ﬁgural scenes. Ibid., p. 91.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.119.1.46 by guest on 27 September 2021 Jean Dubuffet: The Butterﬂy Man 55

his colors. He now rebutted that he was not an imitator, because he had included organic found materials in his work long before having met Bettencourt, and, in the end, their respective works were radically different: I do not have the slightest awareness of any borrowing from my work by you—certainly not, in any case, a borrowing for which you could be blamed—but that you could reproach me for borrowing from you seems a bit much. I hope you aren’t seriously thinking that.17 The professional intercourse between the two men, and the artistic process by which the collages came into being, thus took imitation as its chief trope. At first condescending to claim that he was the mimic, Dubuffet doubled his disguise by wearing the mask of an imitator. With a bit of false modesty, he pretended to be an emulator unworthy of exhibiting by Bettencourt’s side. After this diplomatic means of escaping what he feared would be an inferior exhibition, however, he would later remove the double mask when Bettencourt had accused him of plagiarism— at that point Bettencourt became the imitator, the derivative one, but one that could not be blamed. After all, Dubuffet thus implied (no longer quite so modestly) Bettencourt could hardly be faulted for finding his powerful example irresistible. This rhetoric of imitation, whether delivered in flattery or accusation, arguably derived from the collages themselves, as it originated with the substantial interest that both men shared in theories of butterfly mimicry. By the mid-fifties, the two men were well read on the subject of adaptive imitation among insects, and at the time of his death Dubuffet’s library contained many important volumes on the subject.18 And whenever Dubuffet claimed to be “the imitator” in his letters, especially in the sunnier, untroubled days of their early relationship, it was often a sort of inside joke that tapped their common knowledge of insect adaptation: just as the spots on the Owl Butterfly imitate the eyes of an animal more powerful than it, so Dubuffet could graciously claim to imitate the example of his formidable partner-in-art. Their shared preoccupation with mimicry also found expression in the collages themselves, as both artists played with the metaphorical properties of insect disguise. More specifically, the artists often exploited the effects of Batesian mimicry, wherein the features of an insect have arguably evolved to imitate those of a less palatable or more dangerous animal. Within Batesian mimicry, butterflies with eyespots that convincingly imitate the eyes of a raptor, for example, will frighten

17. Ibid. 18. Dubuffet owned, for example, a late edition of Jean Henri Fabre’s fanciful description of insect behavior: Souvenir entomologiques: études sur l’instinct et les moeurs des insectes (1879) (Paris: Librairie Delagrave, 1951). Other holdings in Dubuffet’s library range from contemporary ﬁeld guides like Jacques-Francois Aubert’s Papillons d’Europe (Lausanne: Delachaux et Niestlé, 1949) to facsimiles of older butterﬂy studies, such as Étienne Berce, Album des Papillons de France (Paris: Établissement Deyrolle, ca. 1886). For an inventory of Dubuffet’s library, see “Annexe: La bibliothèque de Jean Dubuffet,” Les Cahiers du Musée national de l’art moderne 77 (Autumn 2001), pp. 112–22.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.119.1.46 by guest on 27 September 2021 56 OCTOBER

away predators and survive to pass their genes along to subsequent generations. Both artists conspicuously pursued this mimicry in a manner that would escape the evolutionary logic of adaptation, however.19 Dubuffet paid particular attention to the most famous example of Batesian adaptation—the eyespot. But in a willful miscarriage of mimicry, Dubuffet shifted the antecedent term that was to have been imitated by the insect, as he turned eyespots into, say, nostril-spots (which are decidedly less intimidating to potential predators). When lined up in a vertical row, eyespots in a work like Le Personnage en ailes de papillons (1953) become button-spots cascading down the front of a ﬁgure’s otherwise indistinguishable shirt. Spots are also sometimes referenced through negation in areas where one expects (but does not ﬁnd) such maculae. In Le Personnage en ailes de papillons the wings that Dubuffet placed over that section of the face that should represent the eyes Dubuffet. Personnage et trois papillons. 1953. have no ocelli at all. Eyespot-eyes are © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ missing in La Belle au regard masqué ADAGP, Paris. (1953) too, though her nipple-spots return the viewer’s gaze with maculae unblinking. With clever visual punning and other metaphorical conceits, the mimicry in Dubuffet’s collages could sometimes behave as a lure to seduce the curious human viewer with the pleasure of decoding visual tropes. Let us associate this sort of seductive property of the collages with what lepidopterists consider this “pseudepisematic” mimicry; that form of adaptation in which, like the false worm of an anglerfish, mimetic devices attract prey rather than repel predators.20 Dubuffet’s puns that could attract such prolonged attention could operate

19. This form was named after nineteenth-century scholar Henry W. Bates, the first naturalist to describe the phenomenon. A canonical summary of mimicry to which many scholars (in France and elsewhere) looked in the 1940s and ’50s was Hugh B. Cott, Adaptive Coloration in Animals (London: Methuen and Co., 1940). For example, Roger Caillois’s book about mimicry, Méduse et cie (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), cites Cott as the definitive reference work on the subject. 20. This specific terminology was first developed by Edward B. Poulton, The Colors of Animals (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1890).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.119.1.46 by guest on 27 September 2021 Jean Dubuffet: The Butterﬂy Man 57

between title and work, as is the case of Nez d’Apollo Pap. The name of the work suggests that this is a portrait of a fellow named “Apollo Pap.” The nose of that figure, however, derives from a certain kind of butterfly species described in French as the apollon papillon.21 It is the orange macular stains on the posterior wings of that insect that have become nostrils. The preposition “of/de” thus operates in a twofold manner: it is the nose belonging to Mr. Pap, and a nose constructed with wings of an apollon butterfly. The intimacy between the man and insect, between nose and wing, effected by this pun is even enhanced by the truncation that the species name has undergone. The common noun “papillon” is shortened to become the proper name “Pap,” just as the butterfly’s body has been reduced to fragmentary status. It is important to remember, however, that the very means by which this lure to interpret puns takes place in the collages—the materials supplying those clever nostril-spots—derive from an insect’s adaptation to a hostile animal audience (rather than curious human one) through Batesian mimicry. Dubuffet’s gleeful shifts in meaning and playful realignment of connections relied upon materials and strategies originally given over to the anticipation of attack and the warding off of death. The latter operation haunts the former; the pleasure of metaphor and interpretation only emerge through a macabre medium provided by the insect’s (in this case unsuccessful) struggle for survival. Perhaps these competing drives—the attractive and repellent—that Dubuffet activated in his collages can help explain a peculiar gouache that Dubuffet produced at the same time that he was working on his butterfly works. Personnage et trois papillons of October 1953 separates out the ambivalent drama that the collages would compress. The gouache pictures a gentleman in an ambiguous relationship to three aerial visitors. His hands may be raised in delight or fear; he may be attempting to catch or to fend them off. Toes raised, the figure contracts his leg muscles and leans to his right either to make room for the butterflies or to ready himself for retreat. But if this is a retreating stance, it may already be too late, as his posture shows him succumbing to the insects’ influence. The lobes of his hat have already begun to emulate the curving contours of the flapping critters, and his face is bubbling out as if pulled into anterior and posterior wings. His arms and legs stretch to the sides, striking a spread-eagle stance that might also be called a spread-butterfly pose. In mimicking the insects’ open position with his body, the figure expresses the transformative effect that the butterflies inflict upon his integrity as a person. He is in danger of becoming something else, of becoming like them. He is meta- morphosing. It may even be that the butterflies’ encroachment upon his body has awakened the fellow to the general contingency of being itself. Surrendering the singularity of his own subjectivity, the fellow learns (and this might be what frightens

21. The species name is Parnassius apollo.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.119.1.46 by guest on 27 September 2021 58 OCTOBER

him most) that no being is as insular and self-sufficient as it might at first seem. Man can become other all too easily. The butterfly is, of course, the animal most easily associated with such trans- formation by virtue of its powers of mimicry, as well as its capacity for meta- morphosis. As the insect that famously changes from caterpillar to winged thing, the butterfly always already indicates a changing of form, a shifting of meaning. Further, in its drunken flight from flower to stone to tree trunk, the butterfly also suggests a denotation that is always on the move. On its peripatetic route through the environment, the butterfly points to “that,” then “that,” then “that.” Its momentary indication of anything is fickle, capricious, shifting. If we let this man stand in for Dubuffet himself, we might consider the gouache to be an illustration of Dubuffet’s epiphany in 1953. Like this bonhomme, Dubuffet was changed by butterflies that year. They awakened him to the possibili- ties of contingency itself. And with this new awareness Dubuffet developed alternative strategies of subversion for his work. Perhaps his Pâtes battues had previ- ously attempted to clog up the systems of meaning preferred by the bourgeois ethos of legibility and efficiency,22 but his collages would work in an entirely different way. They would not weigh meaning down with the inertia of mud and excrement, nor would they obscure pictorial form with infantile scribblings. Rather, the collages would send signification on a wild butterfly chase. Meaning itself would travel in an ever more dizzying traffic of associations. Everything would become something else, would imitate, and nothing could remain authenti- cally its own.

The Diagonal Flight

My friend [Werner] Schenk has written, and with good reason, that he knows nothing whose movement is more drunken than that of a butterfly.23 In Dubuffet’s cosmos, a man can become a butterfly, just as a butterfly can become a man. Of course, this reconsideration of the power relationship between human and insect, and this concern for inadvertent intimacies between such disparate forms of life, was not by any means unique to Dubuffet and his hunt- ing partner. Roger Caillois had been developing similar notions at about the same time, particularly in respect to the human-insect relationship, though his argument would travel in a slightly different direction. By the fifties Caillois was working on

22. For an excellent discussion of Dubuffet’s early interest in the disruptive effects of such fecal associations, see Rachel Eve Perry, “Retour à l’Ordure: Defilement in the Postwar Work of Jean Dubuffet and Jean Fautrier” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2000). 23. Dubuffet, December 1953, as quoted in Bettencourt, Poirer le papillon, p. 145. Werner Schenk was a banker who accompanied Dubuffet on his ﬁrst trip to the Prinzhorn archive of art by the “insane.”

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.119.1.46 by guest on 27 September 2021 Jean Dubuffet: The Butterﬂy Man 59

the first full book-length work that he would devote entirely to mimicry. That work, Méduse et cie, lobbed several arguments against evolutionary explanations for the phenomenon.24 Noting that mimicry could sometimes attract a predator, rather than fend it off, and noting that dissected predator stomachs often contained as many camouflaged as uncamouflaged insect bodies, Caillois argued that there had to be some reason for mimicry besides (or at least in addition to) survival. Caillois concluded that insect mimicry was part of a much larger trend among organic life forms to engage in exuberant forms of display and masquerade. Hoping to reconnect remote districts of the natural world under the rubric of mimicry, Caillois developed what he called a “diagonal science,” through which he searched for common examples of imitation in both the human and insect worlds. Thus, when questioning the tendency of certain insects to imitate each other for no perceivable evolutionary purpose, he looked to human behavior for an explanation. At one moment, for example, he asks: Why, then, are there these resemblances, these imitations, which seem to have no survival value . . . ? Everything seems to happen as if they were following a fashion, to which each species adapts its livery by the means at its disposal: it is a slow moving fashion, one where the changes take thousands of years, not a season, and which is concerned with whole species and not with individuals. But in the case of man, fashion is also a phenomenon of mimicry, of an obscure contagion of fascination with a model which is imitated for no reason. It is then rapid and freakish.25 In other words, noninstrumental disguise among insects follows the same impulse as that of human sartorial trends wherein people feel compelled to dress like each other. Both express the tendency common among all organisms to engage in exuberant imitation. Though human acts of imitation may develop at a more rapid pace and depend more upon individual choice, both organisms nevertheless yearn for gratuitous mimicry.

24. Roger Caillois, The Mask of Medusa (1960), trans. George Ordish (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1964). Though I am not by any means arguing that Dubuffet or Bettencourt were consciously putting Caillois’s theories to use in their writings or collage works, chances are good that Dubuffet and Caillois were acquainted, as they shared a number of mutual friends, most notably Jean Paulhan. Caillois was certainly familiar with Dubuffet’s work; in October 1952, for example, Caillois referenced Dubuffet in a postcard he sent to Paulhan. The recto of the card featured the reproduction of Giovanni Francesco Caroto’s (1480–1555) Portrait of a Child with Drawing, which Caillois had seen in Italy. About the image, which depicts a smiling boy holding up a crude pencil drawing, Caillois joked, “Here is a Dubuffet, which the delight of this young amateur introduced to the Verona Museum a long time ago. It is, I believe, the ﬁrst drawing of that school to have received such an honor.” See Odile Felgine and Claude-Pierre Perez, eds., Correspondance Jean Paulhan/Roger Caillois, 1934–1967 (Paris: Édi- tions Gallimard, 1991), p. 206. 25. Caillois, The Mask of Medusa, p. 75.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.119.1.46 by guest on 27 September 2021 60 OCTOBER

For Caillois, beneath every example of mimicry lurked a deep connection between man and insect. The butterflies flaunting their ocelli to stun animals (or even to impress those animals that do not threaten them) share with human beings a primitive desire to dazzle onlookers with acts of sorcery. Caillois similarly asserted that butterfly camouflage and the masks of invisibility worn by heroes of mythology derived from the same primordial compulsion. Once diagonal science merged entomology and anthropology, virtually all forms of mimicry, insect or human, established a universal rule for organic life. And behind every example of disguise lay the most fundamental mimicry of all—that man and insect constantly behave like each other. Insects emulate humans and humans insects, whether they know it or not. Dubuffet’s works no doubt share in the sensibility of a “diagonal science,” even literalize it.26 Dubuffet’s butterfly-men compress the relationship between human and insect, as the two sets of organisms become consubstantial. While evolution would have no explanation for such a mutual imitation, to a diagonal science such intercourse between species is presumed. And certainly the great advocate of Art Brut would have little trouble embracing the de-evolutionary emphasis of Caillois’s paradigm. Indeed, Dubuffet’s anticultural position, which he articulated most explicitly in 1951, privileged “savages” (the quotation marks were placed by the artist himself) over “civilized man,” and suggested that art was best served by traveling in a direction opposite from all such models of cultural “progress.”27 Arguing for a similar passage back in evolutionary time from human forms of life to those of insects and plants, Dubuffet proceeded: One of the principal characteristics of Western culture is the belief that the nature of man is very different from the nature of other beings in the world. Custom has it that man cannot be identified, or compared in the least, with elements such as winds, trees, rivers—except humor- ously, and for poetic rhetorical figures. The Western man has great con- tempt for trees and rivers, and hates to be like them. On the contrary, primitive man loves and admires trees and rivers, and has great pleasure to be like them. . . . He has a very strong sense of continuity of all things, and especially between man and the rest of the world.28 A little under two years later Dubuffet would implicitly add butterflies to that list of beings with which humanity might enjoy such family resemblances. From

26. Though Hubert Damisch only brieﬂy discussed the butterﬂy collages, he applied some ideas from Caillois’s recently published Méduse et cie to Dubuffet’s interest in imagery emerging from natural materials in his 1962 essay, “Retour au texte,” reprinted in Fenêtre jaune cadmium, ou les dessous de la pein- ture (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1984), pp. 99–120. 27. Jean Dubuffet, “Anticultural Positions,” lecture given before the Arts Club of Chicago, December 20, 1951, reprinted in Jean Dubuffet: Retrospective (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, 1966), pp. 3–6, 43. 28. Ibid., p. 4.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.119.1.46 by guest on 27 September 2021 Jean Dubuffet: The Butterﬂy Man 61

Dubuffet’s perspective, such connections between civilized man and savage man, or between humanity and other organisms (connections with which Caillois would certainly concur), could not even be considered a movement “back” in evolutionary time, as only Western cultures believed in such a linear progression. The triumph of savage man was that his thinking circumvented such a hierarchy of organisms, and would instead level distinctions to allow for intercourse among them. Now, according to a treatise about butterflies that Bettencourt wrote in 1953, entitled Le Bal des ardents, the intimacy between human beings and insects would assume a slightly different quality. Bettencourt’s emphasis would focus much more upon the arbitrariness of butterfly mimicry and human attempts to anchor the metaphorical properties of mimicry in a model of signification based upon authenticity.29 Bettencourt mocked humans who, rather than believe that mimicry opens the door to a never-ending chain of signification, close the system by linking

29. Pierre Bettencourt, Le Bal des ardents (1953); all quotations are from the reprint edition (Paris: Éditions Lettres Vives, 1983). In correspondence between Dubuffet and Bettencourt, the two artists would often describe the swarms of Flambé butterflies native to Chaillol as a “bal des ardents.” The phrase alluded to a famous episode from the unfortunate reign of Charles VI, otherwise known as “Charles the Mad.” For a wedding celebration in 1393, Charles and several young men disguised themselves as “wild men,” covering their bodies in pitch-soaked linen and flax. When one attendant brought a torch near the group, the costumes went up in flames, killing four members of the party. The king heroically avoided the conflagration by hiding under the Duchess of Berry’s skirt, and the event, afterward referred to by chroniclers as the “Bal des ardents,” only stoked his reputation as an unstable personality who could not handle the responsibilities of his station. To Dubuffet and Bettencourt, the crucial elements of the medieval story (masquerade, madness, and the collapse of authority) effectively summarized the disruptive effects of insect mimicry. For a thorough discussion of the event in medieval art and literature, see Lorraine Kochanske Stock, “Froissart’s Chroniques and Its Illustrators: Historicity and Ficticity in the Verbal and Visual Imaging of Charles VI’s Bal des Ardents,” Studies in Iconography 21 (2000), pp. 123–80.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.119.1.46 by guest on 27 September 2021 62 OCTOBER

insect adaptation to a single definitive referent. In such a system, humans may believe that butterflies have false eyes “for” frightening birds. It is in such a relation of cause and effect that we even place the intervention of God. But it is a cerebral mechanism that is perhaps only particular to man, quick as he is to attribute an explanation, a sense, to every sensation. Bettencourt continues, The relation of cause and effect, of question and response, was invented by man to reassure himself in establishing a link, a coherence between the world and himself.30 According to Bettencourt’s description, mimicry seems to result from a causal system of evolutionary pressures, though it is but a figment of man’s imagination—an arbitrary operation contingent upon human tendencies to develop meaning. Anyone assigning a transparent sign/referent relationship to mimicry (the macula “is” an eye) thus falls victim to a trap of believing in a rational God who assigns meaning to the world. To believe that ocelli “are” eyes is to believe that the world works upon intentionality, rather than arbitrariness—that there is a divine cause and effect governing the cosmos. Bettencourt thus concluded that mimicry is, if anything, directed toward the seduction of human associative thinking. It is “for” luring faith in natural signs because it pretends to be “for” frightening animals—but only to the human observer. Butterflies therefore wear a double mask of mimicry, in pretending to pretend. In appearing to emulate other animals, they mimic human desire for natural antecedents and causality in the world of signs—only to flutter away into arbitrariness at the last minute. The seven drawings that Dubuffet supplied for Bettencourt’s book performed a reciprocal operation in respect to the collages that he was constructing at the same time. For the collage works, many dismembered insects constitute one brilliant composite figure. In the book illustrations, by contrast, one insect con- jures the body parts of what would be provided by a single human being. On the butterfly-woman used for the book’s cover, the thorax droops with pendulous breasts, the posterior wings have developed toes, the antennae terminate in wig- gling fingers, and giant human eyes on the wings stare back at the viewer from beneath impressively long lashes. Even the emotive state of the butterfly imitates that of a person. In an operation of mimicry that is a bit tautological, the pen-and- ink butterfly mimics human pride, grinning at her capacity to emulate humanity with her body.

30. Bettencourt, Le Bal des ardents, p. 13.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.119.1.46 by guest on 27 September 2021 Jean Dubuffet: The Butterﬂy Man 63

Dubuffet’s drawings rework Batesian mimicry such that it no longer can be explained by theories of adaptation. While an insect might imitate attributes of birds or other animals for self-protection, there is little evolutionary incentive for a butterfly to imitate a person—no hunter was ever dissuaded from capturing a butterfly because the insect so effectively resembled a human being. But Dubuffet’s drawings do not illustrate scientific models of adaptation so much as they picture the larger predicament that Bettencourt described. These winged creatures embody a human craving for meaning that is “for” the human mind. If these illustrated butterflies had simply mimicked the attributes of other animals according to Batesian theories of adaptation (looking to the human viewer like birds’ eyes instead of breasts and toes), those drawings would have allowed the viewer to indulge his theological faith in authentic, transparent signification. In other words, the viewer would have been able to appreciate, from a point exterior to the mimicry system, the supposedly purposeful associations supplied by the insects’ disguises. Instead, Dubuffet’s drawn butterflies implicate the human viewer, and turn mimicry into an index of human (doomed) desire for natural signs. In other words, these butterflies are hunters, as they lure a viewer’s longing for meaning in nature that preexisted human intention—and mimicry is their bait. Bettencourt’s butterflies never perfectly followed the path of diagonal science, and there are important features in Bettencourt’s Bal that Caillois’s Méduse cannot explain. While the two men would agree that evolution is insufficient in explaining mimicry, and both would argue that insect and human behaviors are intertwined, they would describe insect/human hierarchies differently. Caillois lev- eled distinctions between insect and human, such that the human would not be exempt from the dynamic of imitation to which insects are prone. Bettencourt, by contrast, elevated the human viewer to a slightly superior position, such that the butterfly would become a mere vehicle for human fantasy. While Bettencourt would no doubt accuse Caillois of anthropomorphizing butterfly mimicry and assigning too metaphysical a role to insect disguise, Caillois would accuse Bettencourt of a provincial anthropocentrism that privileged human beings, obeyed arbitrary divisions among species, and thus obscured larger laws and drives at work in the natural world. Most important, Bettencourt’s debate regarding the theological fantasy of authentic signs within insect mimicry found no companion in Caillois’s text. Indeed, Caillois was not much interested in humans as viewers of mimicry at all; rather, he remarked only upon the ways in which insects and humans might engage in parallel behaviors. The portion of Bettencourt’s treatise in which humans look at butterfly mimicry derived from a different trend in lepidopterology at mid-century, such as that most famously described by novelist and butterfly connoisseur Vladimir Nabokov. Like Bettencourt and Caillois, Nabokov dismissed evolutionary explanations for mimicry, though for different reasons. Attempting to discredit evolutionary models of mimicry, Nabokov developed three main objections (most of which

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.119.1.46 by guest on 27 September 2021 64 OCTOBER

have now, in fact, been successfully incorporated into evolutionary models).31 First, he argued that camouflage often impedes the propagation of species, as was the case when mates are so well disguised that they are unable to find each other in order to copulate. Second, he stipulated that there was insufficient evolutionary time for butterflies to develop the attributes of mimicry necessary to be effective. Because of the slow rate of evolutionary change within one species, and because of the different evolutionary trajectories of different organisms, insects could not be expected to develop mimicry in congruity with their environment. By the time an insect could evolve similarities to surrounding flora, the flora would have changed, in the same way that “a painter, having begun a nude of a young female model, might strive for a likeness with such ardor that, as he tirelessly recorded every trait, he would, in the end, find that he was depicting the old woman into which the model had evolved during her plurennial pose.”32 Third, Nabokov argued that mimicry was often so intricate and witty as to run in excess of the imitation necessary to fool predators, as some butterflies might develop spots that imitate leaf bruises or other features too subtle for hunters to notice. Such delicious play with imitation, Nabokov reasoned, must serve a different purpose. Nabokov therefore argued that exuberant insect colorations reveal an intentionality within nature, wherein an unknowable force behind the development of flora and fauna implanted delights tempered specifically for human enjoyment: Certain whims of nature can be, if not appreciated, at least merely noticed only by a brain that had developed in a related manner, and the sense of these whims can only be that—like a code or a family joke— they are accessible only to the illuminated, i.e., human, mind, and have no other mission than to give it pleasure—we are speaking here of the fantastic refinement of “protective mimicry,” which, in a world lacking an appointed observer endowed with artistic sensitivity, imagination, and humor, would simply be useless (lost on the world), like a small volume of Shakespeare lying open in the dust of a boundless desert.33 While the respective evolutionary developments of insects and environments were not sufficiently calibrated in order for butterfly imitation to keep pace, the evolution of wit in mimicry was, for Nabokov, entirely coincident with man’s evolution of the capacity to get the joke:

31. Many scientists have dismissed Nabokov’s remarks on mimicry, in which aesthetics is favored over evolutionary explanations. Some recent scholars have argued, however, that Nabokov’s theories would not have been so dubious during the years in which he had first formulated them. Without the sophisticated appreciation of genetics now characterizing lepidopterology, there was, some argue, no direct evidence to contradict Nabokov’s theory until relatively recently. See Kurt Johnson and Steve Coates, Nabokov’s Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius (Cambridge, Mass.: Zoland Books, 1999), pp. 327–31. 32. Vladimir Nabokov, “Father’s Butterflies” (1939), reprinted in Nabokov’s Butterflies, ed. Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle, trans. Dmitri Nabokov (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), p. 224. 33. Nabokov, “Father’s Butterflies,” p. 219.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.119.1.46 by guest on 27 September 2021 Jean Dubuffet: The Butterﬂy Man 65

As soon as a creature capable of appreciating the unexpected resemblance, its poetry and magical antiquity, had matured on this earth, this phenomenon was proffered to him by nature for admiration and amusement, as a precious symbol of the homogeneousness (oneness) in which [Nature] had once found the prime compound for the creation of the first denizens of her kindergarten.34 Today Nabokov’s theories of mimicry are, not surprisingly, considered dubious among scientists—particularly in an age of indisputable DNA evidence that sup- ports evolution to all but the most slavish followers of “intelligent design.” Yet, the impulse behind his arguments was not necessarily so objectionable. Nabokov sought to invigorate human understanding of natural phenomena by turning science into poetry. To an author for whom the delirium of metaphorical language was superior to banal positivism, the cleverness of mimicry was more important than any mechanistic explanation for it. And Nabokov’s argument could almost be shrugged off as commonplace from the perspective of the humanities, so neatly does it fit into traditions of Western aesthetic theory. The notion that mimicry seems like a design drawn by nature’s pencil to please human perception is thoroughly Kantian at its base. In such a scenario, beautiful butterfly markings are not merely like Whistlerian deco- ration—rather, they embody a purposiveness without purpose, an implied intentionality wherein pleasing forms and the capacity to enjoy them are both given to human beings. With such a formulation, however, Nabokov’s theories ran up against the same dilemma encountered by the philosopher of Königsberg—the problematic role of theology as the means of mediating the relationship of subject and object in aesthetics. Like Kant, Nabokov would resort at times to an unde- fined omnipotent presence that grounded subject/object relations, as Nature would assume a theological aura. Bettencourt was selective in his borrowings from figures like Nabokov. Like Nabokov, Bettencourt dismissed evolutionary explanations for mimicry, and regarded human beings (not other predators) as the ultimate audience for such phenomena. Nabokov’s intimation of an intentionality within nature (an intentionality verging on a theological presence), would, however, provide a foil to Bettencourt’s position. The magical intentionality in nature that Nabokov cher- ished was entirely distasteful to a figure like Bettencourt, steeped as he was in Parisian existentialism. Indeed, Bettencourt often relied on a Sartrean vocabulary when refuting theology in his Le Bal, arguing that the eyespot was simply

A NOTHING that is almost SOMETHING . . . From there, speaking of the terrible activity of the Zero and of this Nothingness considered as something, there is a step that we almost cannot bring ourselves to

34. Ibid., p. 227.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.119.1.46 by guest on 27 September 2021 66 OCTOBER

make. To terrorize and to fascinate, to destroy and to create, such is the power of the Zero, this eye par excellence that bears such resemblance to the very soul of God.35 Bettencourt would thus invert Nabokov’s argument. The eyespot was not the proof of divinity in nature, but just the opposite. The dark core of the eyespot was nothingness—a gaping hole left behind after God had been ripped from human epistemology. Though butterﬂy camouﬂage might stimulate a feeling of purposive beauty, no supernatural artist-in-nature is conjuring such visual delights. Though maculae give the impression of nature looking back, though the gaze seems to rely upon an external agency, no consciousness actually radiates that look.

Psyche

This seeming-to-be within mimicry evoked, for Bettencourt, the much larger problem of a Look that governs or watches every human look. To the human gaze, mimicry seems to confirm another Gaze that is more authoritative and external to the view a human being might cast upon any butterfly. This was Bettencourt’s primary insight and his preoccupation with butterfly mimicry—it always gives one the feeling that some willful agency lurks behind the mask of nature, guiding our gaze. It is this special property of ocelli in butterfly mimicry that has made that insect so appealing to theorists of the gaze. It is why even Jacques Lacan claimed the butterfly as his own signature insect at one of the most important passages of his Eleventh Seminar.36 To explain his theory of the gaze, Lacan summarized a famous dream in which Chinese philosopher Choang-tsu became a butterfly. Here is Lacan’s own version of the diagonal science through which man becomes insect and insect becomes man: In a dream, [Choang-tsu] is a butterfly . . . he sees the butterfly in his reality as gaze. What are so many figures, so many shapes, so many colours, if not this gratuitous showing, in which is marked for us the primal nature of the essence of the gaze. Good heavens, it is a butterfly that is not very different from the one that terrorized the Wolf Man . . . When Choang-tsu wakes up, he may ask himself whether it is not the butterfly who dreams that he is Choang-tsu. Indeed, he is right, and doubly so, first because it proves he is not mad, he does not regard himself as absolutely identical with Choang-tsu and, secondly, because he does not fully understand how right he is. . . . [H]e is a captive butterfly, but captured by nothing, for, in the dream, he is a butterfly for

35. Bettencourt, Le Bal des ardents, p. 15. 36. Jacques Lacan, “The Split between the Eye and the Gaze,” in Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), p. 75.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.119.1.46 by guest on 27 September 2021 Jean Dubuffet: The Butterﬂy Man 67

nobody. It is when he is awake that he is Choang-tsu for others, and is caught in their butterfly net. This is why the butterfly may—if the subject is not Choang-tsu, but the Wolf Man—inspire in him the phobic terror of recognizing that the beating of the little wings is not so very far from the beating of causation, of the primal stripe marking his being for the first time with the grid of desire.37 Two different butterflies dart through Lacan’s synopsis. First is the butterfly that became the key with which Freud would unlock metaphors of the Wolf Man’s neu- rosis.38 Flitting and tumbling, the wings of a swallowtail became a woman opening and closing her legs; the stripes of the swallowtail became the striped pear called a “grusha,” which was also the name of the nursery maid (and first mother substi- tute) who threatened the Wolf Man with castration; and, when the posture of Grusha, on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor, reminded the patient of the sexual posture struck by his mother in the famous a tergo coitus, the Wolf Man dreamed of exacting revenge by tearing off the wings of another yellow striped insect—the butterfly then became the espe, which became the initials S.P., and thus became the analysand himself. Through dream work and analysis, the butterfly eventually marked the “beating of causation,” became that animal that activated the very process by which the self is continuously deferred. Analyzing the butterfly, Freud led his patient on a chase after himself through the Other—the myriad loci of desire through which the patient’s very identity was mediated. On his butterfly hunt, Freud tracked the different landing points of the patient’s unconscious, and followed its drunken flight. But if the first butterfly revealed the particularities of the Wolf Man’s neu- rosis, it was the second butterfly in Lacan’s story whose wings beat with the pulse of scopic drives within human subjectivity. Choang-tsu’s butterfly embodies the general condition of the gaze. With its piercing eyespots, the butterfly exempli- fies that dynamic wherein the world looks back at the subject and holds it in its stare. The butterfly bodies forth the gaze of the world, the Other through whom the human subject represents himself and is mediated. But Choang-tsu’s butterfly also provokes an unusual feeling of strangeness because it also shows itself. It puts the otherwise implicit character of the gaze on exhibit. The gaze that is usually camouflaged (as a butterfly could be masked by its markings) can alternately become conspicuous in the very exhibitionism of the butterfly’s dazzling rai- ment. Marking the finitude of the subject—the finitude in which the subject perceives himself as a limit, in which he knows that he cannot possess his own desire, and that his very selfhood is contingent upon fantasies of desire through others—the gaze-as-butterfly terrifies precisely because it makes exuberant, shameless display of that finitude.

37. Ibid., p. 76. 38. Sigmund Freud, Three Case Histories, trans. James Strachey (New York: Collier Books, 1963), p. 198.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.119.1.46 by guest on 27 September 2021 68 OCTOBER

Upon waking, the Chinese philosopher wonders if the butterfly is not dreaming of being Choang-tsu, and so, Lacan says, he “proves he is not mad” because he understands that normally he is subject to the gaze—the butterfly hunts him, not vice versa. Choang-tsu therefore does not assume that he is self-defining, and instead comes to understand that his very subjectivity is governed from the out- side, he is subject to the “eyes” of the butterfly/Other. Dreaming of the gaze’s self-display, and of the necessity of showing himself before the gaze, Choang-tsu is thus doubly captured. In the dream, however, the terrible situation of the subject as subject to the gaze can be briefly compacted. In his dream, according to Lacan, Choang-tsu comes to realize and yet temporarily assuages his predicament as a subject-for-others. Only in the dream can Choang-tsu occupy both sides of this stare—he is the gaze of the Other (he is the butterfly), even as he shows himself (is subject to the gaze of the butterfly’s eyes). In the mystical writing pad of the dream space, the subject is self-mediating. He is, if only in a dream, a “butterfly for no one but himself.” Dubuffet’s intuitive understanding of the gaze would find confirmation in Lacan’s description, as the artist produced several works showing a world that, like the butterfly-as-gaze in Choang-tsu’s dream work, is both all-seeing and exhibition- istic. Just look at his 1955 Paysage aux argus—a work that, like most butterfly pieces made after 1953, is a laterally oriented, uninhabited landscape. For his shimmering landscape, Dubuffet made good use of the contrasting effects that wings of the

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.119.1.46 by guest on 27 September 2021 Dubuffet. Top: Dead Butterﬂy. 1953. Bottom: Vache et Personnage. 1953. © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.119.1.46 by guest on 27 September 2021 70 OCTOBER

Argus butterfly provide.39 Half of the wings decorating the hillside sparkle with the electric blue typically found on the recto side of Argus wings, but Dubuffet flipped the other wings over to display the tiny ocelli dotting their light-brown under- sides. So Dubuffet’s butterfly universe catches our look with its gleaming surfaces, just as it locks us in the collective stare of these miniature eyes. The entire cosmos seems given over to the gaze—as subsumed by it as the multi-eyed mythological guardian from whom the species name derives. Even those portions of the landscape that are not covered with wings have learned to imitate such butterfly imitations. Scattered about the image (look to the lower left corner or the center of the image), small pockets of white dots and small circles partition the landscape into what might as well be ocelli. Dubuffet’s butterfly men almost convulse beneath the strain of the gaze. They swarm with it. Tiger moth eyes for ears, Apollo eyes for nostrils, Argus eyes for pores and a five o’clock shadow, Mr. Apollo Pap is pulverized by the wing beat of causation—the desire of the Other. And Le Strabique’s chest is but a cluster of little eyes peering back at the viewer. Even the air surrounding the figure trembles beneath this strobe. Dubuffet, having run a comb through the still-wet ink of the black ground, produced an effect in Le Strabique that in French would be called papillotage—a flickering. The fellow’s body and his very surroundings shake with the rhythm of wings and ocelli. Dubuffet’s butterfly men tremble beneath the force of the gaze that Lacan described, to the point at which it seems they might scatter all together. On the verge of total dispersal, they might finally fall apart.

The Dead Butterﬂy

As the last illustration for Bettencourt’s book, Dubuffet provided the image of a butterfly with a skull’s head, its body shriveled in decomposition. To his collages, Dubuffet would offer a similarly depressing conclusion. Dubuffet wrote to Bettencourt in 1953, I’ve transformed my final butterfly piece with a savage technique, the wings having been scratched, pulverized, mixed with glue and paint— the death of the butterflies, the close of the series.40 It is unclear which of the collages Dubuffet was describing. It is difficult to judge from formal analysis at the present time—most collages are decaying because of the organic materials used. Reviews from 1953 are of little help, as critics covering “Démons et merveilles” assigned mortuary aspects to all of Dubuffet’s works without singling out any one collage as being particularly deathly. Certainly all the

39. The French term for the Lysandra bellargus—a butterﬂy called the Blue in English. 40. There is no speciﬁc date for the letter, and it is only marked as having been written on “Tuesday, 1953,” in Bettencourt, Poirer le papillon, p. 64.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.119.1.46 by guest on 27 September 2021 Jean Dubuffet: The Butterﬂy Man 71

collages are, as critics agreed, funereal because they exploit the remains of dead things. The bodies of those once-living insects are subjected to some pretty degrading ends too, as their hapless corpses are made to imitate smiles, bow ties, and bouquets of flowers. However, some of the early collages exemplify the death-of-the-subject in mimicry in a different way—through the relationship of the figure to its pictured surroundings. These works, such as Vache et personnage (1953), engage conven- tions of landscape.41 Unlike the “portrait” collages, in which vertically oriented paperboard features solitary figures against contrasting grounds of black ink, the horizontally arranged landscapes of 1953 allow for no such easy differentiation between figure and ground. Neither do they offer a horizon line by which land could be distinguished from sky. No India ink wash borders the figures; rather, the entire surface is plastered with butterfly wings. One has trouble distinguish- ing the vache from the personnage, and one almost has to take Dubuffet’s word for it that a cow and person truly inhabit the picture. Relatively large ocelli along the top third of the image betray the location of the heads (vache-eyes and personnage-eyes), but the bodies are hard to find. Part of the problem is that the wings constituting the two animals (clouded yellows and marbled whites) also appear haphazardly among wings of the surroundings. Because Dubuffet packed the pictorial field with insects of similar species and hue, everything begins to blend into everything else, and the two figures float in space, their boundaries indistinct. Human being and animal seep into each other and their surroundings. This is in many ways a reversion—the butterflies whose wings constitute the ground, in their original context, had performed a similar disappearing act even before they were made to imitate a cow and person. Before Dubuffet had found them, they had imitated the bark of trees, leaves of plants, and other characteristics of the environment. This is an entirely different order of mimicry. This is not Batesian imitation, but camouflage. The subject does not show. It disappears. It merges. In the process, the figures and their pictorial context surrender their respective boundaries. Human and animal figures, composed of butterfly wings, verge on dissolving into the landscape—a landscape that is itself always already dissolving. It is in these works that Dubuffet would exceed the preoccupations of Bettencourt, who was primarily interested in Batesian mimicry as perceived by the human subject. Rather, in those last collage works, Dubuffet explored mimicry as a means by which the camouflaged entity succumbs entirely to the ubiquitous gaze, and finally dissolves beneath its stare. Again, it is Caillois’s diagonal science that would prevail here. In an early version of the arguments that he would develop in his Méduse, Caillois addressed camouflage. In his 1935 essay “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” a discussion

41. I believe this work was shown at “Démons et merveilles” under the title Vache et vacher, mentioned in Dubuffet’s 1953 list of works for the Rive Gauche Gallery, note 3.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.119.1.46 by guest on 27 September 2021 72 OCTOBER

that would famously influence Lacan, Caillois argued that the insect, in adopting the characteristics of its surroundings through camouflage, succumbs to a death drive to which humans are also prone.42 In surrendering the boundaries of its body to the patterns of the environment, the creature loses its insect ego in a manner similar to the loss of self suffered by schizophrenics. In mimicking the surround, the organism is no longer located at the origin of the coordinate system but is simply one point among many. Dispossessed of its privilege, it quite literally no longer knows what to do with itself. . . . Under these con- ditions, one’s sense of personality (as an awareness of the distinction between organism and environment and of the connection between mind and a specific point in space) is quickly, seriously undermined.43 Lacan’s discussion of mimicry in the case of Choang-tsu’s dream clearly relies upon Caillois’s interpretation, though his passage regarding the gaze’s “showing” through the butterfly would place emphasis upon the occasional, uncanny self- revealing of the gaze. By contrast, Caillois (and Lacan in other passages of the Eleventh Seminar) was primarily concerned with the means by which the subject dissolves beneath the gaze, and in so doing loses its selfhood. Drawing parallels between the necrosis of the human ego when suffering from certain forms of psychosis and the mimicked mortification of the insect when engaged in camouflage, Caillois argued for a deep structure of natural behavior wherein humans and insects, together, play like each other when they like to play dead. For in the end, Caillois concluded, such camouflage proves that alongside the instinct of self-preservation, which in some way orients the creature toward life, there is generally speaking a sort of instinct of renunciation that orients it toward a mode of reduced existence, which in the end would no longer know either consciousness or feeling—the inertia of the élan vital, so to speak.44 Through camouflage, the organism yearns for a post-mortem state. Counterintuitively, it yields to the death drive even in that moment in which it seems to be avoiding capture by predators. It lies still, loses itself, and in melding its subjectivity with the Other of its own existence, it behaves as if it has already returned to the dust.

42. Roger Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” ﬁrst published in Minotaure (1935), reprinted in The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, ed. Claudine Frank (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 89–103. Rosalind Krauss has famously demonstrated the importance of Roger Caillois’s theories of mimicry to both Surrealism and the writings of Jacques Lacan in “Corpus Delicti,” in Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston, L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism (New York: Abbeville Press, 1985), pp. 55–112. 43. Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” pp. 99–100. 44. Ibid., p. 103.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.119.1.46 by guest on 27 September 2021 Jean Dubuffet: The Butterﬂy Man 73

It is important, then, that in later years figures would disappear from the butterfly collages almost entirely, as Dubuffet turned his attention ever more to landscape motifs similar to that of Vache et personnage. His 1953 series offered just one landscape work, while the following two series of 1955 and 1957, dozens. Some of those later landscapes turn rolling hills, which would otherwise curve into the distance, into flattened patterns in which figure and ground are self- dissimulating, merging and disintegrating. The figure loses itself and decays into the ground. Much more than Batesian mimicry, it was this mode of camouflage that would govern the direction of Dubuffet’s work. Indeed, among the last butterfly works that Dubuffet produced are “landscapes” that defy the very definition of that genre. In Paysage aux demi-deuils— “landscape in half mourning”—there is no horizon, and there is hardly an intimation of gravity that might help the viewer decide that the bottom of the image is, in fact, the bottom of a scene.45 The lack of gravity makes it difficult to interpret

45. Once again, Dubuffet was punning upon a species name. The black-and-white butterﬂy appearing in the landscape is commonly called the demi-deuil in French, thus the mortuary implications of the landscape are played upon by the name of the butterﬂy species used.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.119.1.46 by guest on 27 September 2021 74 OCTOBER

certain figural elements in the composition: clusters of gazé butterflies might be petals of flowers, but wings of the same species and in similar organization hover in other sectors of the image with no identifiable representational purpose. But there is one suggestion of the figural, and that derives from the orientation of the picture plane. This is a landscape in portrait orientation. As such, the image calls us to a different relationship with the scene. We look to the vertical rectangle for the figure, seek a singular inhabitant who might greet our look. We are beckoned to that relationship, cued by the portrait format, only to be given the depersonal- ized landscape instead. The pictorial field thus becomes a space that is haunted by the absence of that figure we are trained to expect. We look for that figure who, perhaps, has now completed its disintegration. The camouflage, the disappearing of the subject, is complete. What can we do but chase after its memory? Why does Dubuffet use butterfly wings? How could he have resisted them? How could an artist so famously preoccupied with the dissolution of subjectivity, with pictorial idioms that verged on the breech of sanity, have withstood the brilliant, fatal allure of such material? How could he not obsess on the showy properties of such markings that were, at once, ebullient displays and confessions of mortal finitude in the very process of such display? And how could it have taken us so long to appreciate it?

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.119.1.46 by guest on 27 September 2021