Rue Passagère by Jean Dubuffet

While at the Pompidou museum I took many pictures of art that interested me. Now, after looking through my photos a few weeks later I came across a piece called Rue Passagère by Jean Dubuffet. I took a picture of this piece when I saw it because of its composition and how the shapes and colors intersperse in a way that makes the subject matter appear to be less recognizable as a whole. However, when you examine the piece closer you can make out that the shapes on the bottom half are people walking on the street. After some research on the artists, I found out that Jean Dubuffet established Art Brut an art movement that literally translates to “Raw Art.”

Raw Art is “Raw because it is 'uncooked' or 'unadulterated' by culture. Raw because it is creation in its most direct and uninhibited form. Not only were the works unique and original but their creators were seen to exist outside established culture and society.” Jean Dubuffet, along with others from this movement, were redefining what was seen as art by taking a humanistic approach, similar to the Renaissance artists,  yet they differed in that they were not mimicking other art pieces nor copying subject matter; instead they created authentic and pure work.

This piece, Rue Passagère, completed in 1961 was meant to illustrate a chaotic environment alive with people who have no power over their own movements. This Rue Passagère, or transient street, is not only a means of traveling from one place to another but a “living thing moving to its own beat, with its own laws and lapses.” Dubuffet communicates this idea in how the people portrayed in this piece blend into the street or rather the people are blending into the fabric of society. This piece also communicates the idea of the ephemeral as well as city life and how the people are walking through the street without any recognition of others on the street. This piece reminded me of DeCerteau’s Walking in City essay and how the city is the hero of modernity. Additionally, while researching this piece I came across a poem by Baudelaire that touches on modernism and industrialism which complements this art piece well. Who knew that there are so many philosophical implications hidden in this art piece!

Excerpt from Walking in the City: 

“The ordinary practitioners of the city live ‘down below,’ below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk---an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmanner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it. These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms…It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by their blindness. The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other.”

To a passer-by by Baudelaire:

The street about me roared with a deafening sound.

Tall, slender, in heavy mourning, majestic grief,

A woman passed, with a glittering hand

Raising, swinging the hem and flounces of her skirt;

Agile and graceful, her leg was like a statue's.

Tense as in a delirium, I drank

From her eyes, pale sky where tempests germinate,

The sweetness that enthralls and the pleasure that kills.

A lightning flash... then night! Fleeting beauty

By whose glance I was suddenly reborn,

Will I see you no more before eternity?

Elsewhere, far, far from here! too late! never perhaps!

For I know not where you fled, you know not where I go,

O you whom I would have loved, O you who knew it!