JEAN DUBUFFET — Waddington Galleries, London, 1981

Waddington Galleries, London, 1981. 9 September–3 October 1981. Staple-bound exhibition catalogue, 34 pages, 12.5 × 16.5 cm. Colour reproduction to front wrapper; plain white reverse; illustrated throughout.

By September 1981, the artist who had spent decades resisting official culture was being exhibited almost everywhere at once.

Issued for Jean Dubuffet’s exhibition at Waddington Galleries, this modest thirty-four-page catalogue arrives at an extraordinary point of contradiction. Dubuffet had built the idea of Art Brut around forms of making he understood as operating beyond established cultural systems. In 1971 he donated his collection of nearly 5,000 Art Brut works to the City of Lausanne; in 1976 it became the Collection de l’Art Brut, the first public museum devoted exclusively to the field. The anti-cultural proposition had acquired its own institution.

Five years later, Dubuffet himself was undergoing something close to total canonisation. The Guggenheim’s A Retrospective Glance at Eighty ran in New York from 31 July to 27 September 1981. Waddington opened this London exhibition on 9 September. The Centre Pompidou’s Sites aux figurines, Psycho-sites followed on 23 September, and Richard Gray Gallery’s Jean Dubuffet at 80, Most Recent Work opened in Chicago two days later. For several days that September, Dubuffet was simultaneously on view in London, Paris, New York and Chicago.

The work, however, was refusing to behave retrospectively. Beginning in February 1981, Dubuffet produced more than 500 Psycho-sites within a year: rapidly worked, intensely coloured paintings populated by figures without fixed identities and placed inside increasingly unstable spaces. At eighty, he was not tidying the archive. He was producing at extraordinary speed, pushing figure and landscape back towards uncertainty.

The Waddington catalogue carries that tension beautifully. One crowded image sits inside a wide white border on the front wrapper. No title. No institutional fanfare. The reverse is almost entirely blank. An artist being transformed into art history presented through an object that still behaves like current information.

Waddington had given Dubuffet his first British exhibition in 1972. Nine years later, the gallery was showing him precisely as the museums were fixing his historical position. Canonisation on four fronts. Escape underway in the studio.

Condition: good. Light handling, edge and corner wear, minor surface marks and age toning consistent with use.