Jean Dubuffet. Nez d’Apollo Pap. 1953. Collection of Dieter Scharf in memory of Otto Gerstenberg, Kupferstichkabinett Berlin. © 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 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 contri- bution 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 yel- lows, 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. OCTOBER 119, Winter 2007, pp. 46–74. © 2007 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2007.119.1.46 by guest on 27 September 2021 48 OCTOBER Dubuffet. Belle au regard masqué. 1953. Collection of Dieter Scharf in memory of Otto Gerstenberg, Kupferstichkabinett Berlin. © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. 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 “mas- sacre,” 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 Dubuffet. Personnage en ailes de papillons. 1953. Smithsonian Institution, Joseph H. Hirschhorn Purchase Fund Gerstenberg. © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. 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 use- less—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 butter- flies 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 col- lages (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 neces- sary 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 brutal- ity. 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.