Comical, cartoonish, wonky-nostrilled brilliance – Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty review

Grinning and bald, Jean Dubuffet leans comically over one of his little sculptures, a frangible little figure that looks like almost nothing at all. Here he is again, in one of the many photos of the artist that punctuate the Barbican’s exhibition, sitting in his studio surrounded by his painters’ paraphernalia, his pastes and concoctions. For all their wild galumphings, the boss-eyed grins and childlike caricatures, the lumps and excretions and strata-like accretions, Dubuffet’s paintings were the product of an ordered mind and an equally ordered studio.

He may have wanted to give the impression that his art was produced in a state of laid-back amateurism, but it is belied by the professionally stretched canvases stacked-up behind him, their corners all nicely wedged, their heaving surfaces kept within their perfect rectangles. Even so, he delighted in the fact that bits of his paintings cracked and flaked and sometimes slid off, or spurted wet paint from beneath their congealed slurries on to the floor or people who got too close.

Here’s the artist again, on film, stuffing the pockets of a filthy old raincoat with lumps of clinker by the train tracks in the pouring rain, then peering into rubbish bins as if he might find some secret there, and next looking natty in his trilby and patterned overcoat, like the urbane wine dealer he once was, when he was making a decent living illicitly shipping booze into occupied Paris and flogging it to the Wehrmacht.

Dubuffet’s career as an artist had several false starts, not really beginning in earnest until the tail end of the second world war. In a series of lithographs made shortly after the liberation, Dubuffet treated the limestone litho stone as though it were a wall to be graffitied, writing odd phrases that might be taken as coded messages (like the ones the BBC broadcast to occupied Europe) as well as love-hearts, drawings of men pissing in the street, piano players and a couple eating birds. He drew and painted portraits of friends and acquaintances, including poet Henri Michaux and a little caricature of Antonin Artaud (nothing like as lacerating as Artaud’s own self-portraits), before embarking on his often glutinous painted figures, in all their comical, cartoonish, wonky-nostrilled vulnerability. Sophisticated yet faux-naive, Dubuffet’s figures are all stuck in a mire of paint as well as life, looking at the world with gritted teeth, their eyes and ears driven into their painted flesh like a stick through mud, their bulging hands like severed stumps or hacked-about branches.

Then, at about the same time as Willem de Kooning was painting his ferocious Woman I, Dubuffet embarked on his own group of alarming, curdled, oozing women (he called them ladies), tiny-handed with ham-like thighs, scribbled pubes and pert smiles. They have the air of neolithic fertility gods, and I can’t say they are treated any more grotesquely than he treats his male figures.

One of the pleasures of this exhibition is its constant variety. Figures give way to terrific black and white ink terrains of quivering, lava-like crystalline matter, painted landscapes of heaving viscous globs, topped by precarious buildings and villages, then gorgeous gardens and figures assembled using butterfly wings, and more figures sculpted from dross, one with bits of tree-root and branches poking out of its skull. Empty and amorphous painted heads (influenced in all probability by Jean Fautrier, painter of thick, crumbly heads depicting victims of the German occupation) stare back at us bleakly, consumed by their own materiality.

Constantly shuttling between the animal, the vegetal and the mineral, and between image-making and what might be seen as a kind of abstraction – one series of paintings from the late 1950s consist of nothing but undifferentiated textured flecks of near monochrome, like weathered surfaces of aggregate or stone – and the next minute we are plunged into Parisian street life, the pleasures of a crowded lunchtime restaurant, and boarding a bus to the Porte des Lilas.

Everything is honking and blaring in Dubuffet’s everyday scenes of Paris. The streets are full of life and noise, clamour and confusion. Even with their scrawled-on number plates and steering wheels, the cars in his street scenes are as amorphous as jellyfish, floating between the pedestrians and the signage. Waiters heave trays and balance plates as they pass between the marshalled rows of tables in the restaurant, the place brimming with activity, made more busy by the mirrors on the walls, reflecting the innumerable diners, open-mouthed as they eat and drink and chat. I want to be there now, in Restaurant Rougeot, on a day towards the end of March in 1961. There’s real joy here, a savouring of the ordinary moment, which Dubuffet amplifies into something both familiar and extraordinary.

Dubuffet was a complicated and paradoxical character, and one not quite so benign as his image, or his art, might make him out to be. A slippery customer, then, but a man of his time. He championed the novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline (and in private at least, espoused some of the author’s odious antisemitic prejudices) and drove him around like an unofficial chauffeur. He was also a friend to resistance chief Jean Paulhan, and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan once came round and drank all his cognac.

He took trips with Le Corbusier to Switzerland where, in 1945, they visited asylums and psychiatric hospitals, studying the collections of art made by their patients. Long interested in the work of untrained artists, which Dubuffet called art brut or raw art, he began to collect their work, which also in various ways informed his own, and organised several exhibitions in Paris of their work, his collection eventually travelling to the US, where for several years it was kept in a house in the Hamptons.

A section of the Barbican show is devoted to the artists he collected, including visionaries and isolated artists who worked from some unbidden inner compulsion, mystics and neurodiverse artists, and outsiders whose works Dubuffet rescued from oblivion. Here he found intensity, and a kind of unfettered creativity that his own work also profited by. These artists were often driven to work in ways that communicated their inner, insistent and repetitive cosmologies via the most limited means and the poorest materials.

During the 1960s, Dubuffet’s own work seemed to undergo a kind of pressurisation, and, beginning with some unconsidered ballpoint pen telephone doodles, he began making networks of interconnecting, rhythmic shapes, organic, biomorphic, outlined clusters, their topologies differentiated by regular hatchings of red, white, black and blue. These pleasurable jumbles grew and grew, they bred and proliferated, became three-dimensional, turned into theatrical costumes (a whole parade of these larger-than-lifesize freestanding sculptures writhes on a stage in one of the last galleries) whose organic tessellations have an air of explosive convulsion.

If his earlier work was earthy and primal, these later works looked flat, eye-popping and somehow very French. They have left their stamp on French comics and graffiti, which I think would have pleased Dubuffet a lot. He went on to mix it all up again in his last years, drawing and painting untethered jumbles of flat graphic signs and cartoon figures, scrawls and scribbles, daft people and dafter animals, rhythmic splurges and racing brushstrokes. It was all a hectic, energetic visual noise not so unlike the atmosphere of his street scenes from the early 60s, but with the energy ramped up, just as the rhythm of life in the last quarter of the century was itself accelerating.

Little wonder Dubuffet was admired by artists spanning several generations – Jackson Pollock and the young Eva Hesse, Claes Oldenburg, Yves Klein, Leon Golub, Robert Smithson, a teenage Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Generative to the last, by the time of his death in 1985, Dubuffet looked modern all over again.

• Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty is at the Barbican, London, from 17 May to 22 August.