To mark the Barbican’s forthcoming exhibitionJean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty, the first of the artist in the UK in over 50 years, The Courtauld Research Forum is hosting a conversation between acclaimed art historian Hal Foster (Princeton) and Dubuffet scholar Kent Minturn (Institute of Fine Arts, New York University). Based on Hal Foster’s 2020 monographBrutal Aesthetics: ٳܴܲڴڱ,Bataille,Jorn,Paolozzi, Oldenburg(Princeton University Press).
InBrutal Aesthetics, leading art historian Hal Foster exploreshowpostwarartists and writers searched for a new foundationof culture after the massive devastation of World War II, theHolocaust, and the atomic bomb. Inspired by the notion thatmodernist art can teach us how to survive a civilization becomebarbaric, Foster examines the various ways that keyfiguresfrom the early 1940s to the early 1960s sought to develop a“brutal aesthetics” adequate to the destruction around them.With a focus on the philosopher Georges Bataille, the paintersJean Dubuffet and AsgerJorn, and the sculptors EduardoPaolozziand Claes Oldenburg, Foster investigates a manifoldmove to strip art down, or to reveal it as already bare, in orderto begin again. What doesBatailleseek in the prehistoriccave paintings of Lascaux? How does Dubuffet imagineanart brut, an art unscathed by culture? Why doesJornpopulatehis paintings with “human animals”? What doesPaolozziseein his monstrousfigures assembled from industrialdebris?And why does Oldenburg remake everyday products fromurban scrap? A study of artistic practices made desperateby a world in crisis, Brutal Aesthetics is an intriguingaccountof a difficult era in twentieth-century culture,one that has important implications for our own.
Hal Foster is the author of numerous books, including, mostly recently, What Comes After Farce? Art and Criticism at a Time of Debacle (Verso, 2020), Ի Brutal Aesthetics (Princeton University Press, 2020), his 2018 Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery in Washington. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he teaches at Princeton University, co-edits the journal October, and contributes regularly to the London Review of Books Ի Artforum.
Kent Minturn is a New York-based art historian and critic, currently teaching for ColumbiaUniversity’s ArtHumanities program. He has published widely on Art Brut and Jean Dubuffet, including a recent essay in October on the artist’s relationship with the late French philosopher, HubertDamisch. In the spring of 2019 Minturn led a seminar on “Modernism’s Reception of the Art of the Insane” at The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.
Organised by Professor David Peters Corbett (The Courtauld) and Eleanor Nairne (The Barbican)
