Dubuffet PDF

Jean Dubuffet: The Butterfly Man
Author(s): Sarah K. Rich

Source: October, Vol. 119 (Winter, 2007), pp. 46-74
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40368458
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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.
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., Ulnformation, 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 "Demons et
merveilles" showcased veteran surrealists like Max Ernst, Joan Miro, 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., "Demons et merveilles," Llnformation (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 Prevert, "Sables Mouvants," in
which the phrase "Demons et merveilles, Vents et marees" is used several times to introduce different
metaphors for a lover. See Jacques Prevert, Paroles (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), p. 186. The exhibition was
curated by Rene Bertele, who had been pivotal in the publication of Prevert's Paroles.
OCTOBER 119, Winter 2007, pp. 46-74. © 2007 October Magazine, Ltd, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology
48 OCTOBER
Dubuff
Collection
Gerstenb
© 2007 A
York/AD
poor critter
pieces of pap
apparent den
Dubuffet had
studies and s
Three reviews condemned Dubuffet's contribution to the show as a "mas-
sacre," which suggests that the word might have buzzed around the exhibiti
opening reception as well. The critic writing for UExpress, for example, com
plained that works like Nez d 'Apollo Pap (1953) seemed a veritable harvest of de
as the artist "uselessly massacred hundreds of butterflies with which he cover
the faces of the monsters that haunt him." A critic in Medium going by the initial
J.-L. B. would see the collages as another of Dubuffet's experiments in abject
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
Dubuffet to Rudi Augustincic at the Rive Gauche Gallery for the "Demons et merveilles" show: Dame
Homme aux dents jaunes, Vache et vacher, Profit d'homme, Femme et chien, Homme au bouquet, Dame masque (B
regard. . . .),Jeux. The document is located in the Augustincic file at the Fondation Jean Dubuffet, Paris.
4. "Demons et merveilles," L'Express, no. 34 (January 9, 1954), p. 10. Reviews of this show w
omitted from the otherwise comprehensive bibliography provided by the recent retrospective ca
organized by Daniel Abadie, Dubuffet (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2001).
5. J.-L. B., "Les Papillons sont au-dessous de ca," Medium (February 1954), p. 22.
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 darin

the "massacre" in his review, though he came
regarding the uselessness of the slaughter:
Dubuffet has unleashed himself upon butterfl

and gluing them in a terrible mess. . . . One ca
butterfly wings - such marvels - are sufficient
form and beauty, and that the artist's process is u
This reviewer was a bit more explicit than the ot

offense of the collages. According to him, the carnag
less - and for a couple of reasons. The first was tie
critics perceived in the noninstrumental beauty of bu
such lovely creatures on their own, why bother tryin
as it was impossible to enhance a butterfly's beauty, t
degraded by a less noble kind of uselessness - that of
In their fancy for sweet little butterflies, and the
who had cut short their aesthetically pleasing live
happier with modernism's other treatment of the bu
one like J. A. M. Whistler. After all, the butterfli
signed his canvases and decorated his personal eff
6. "Demons et merveilles: Toiles surrealistes," Arts, no. 443
50 OCTOBER
pretty. Confe
unburdened b
eralized the f
their surface
dimensional s
flies was mo
two-dimension
wings were a
erated the a
butterflies w
decorative de
Part of the
weren't so m
process of squ
So if the con
modernist fa
lages (as did
facticity of t
sary for that
late forties a
into two dim
been "butterf
the front), th
ity. Pretty y
punctured the
Worse yet, a
no special res
insect corps
Dubuffet's p
intellectuals
compositiona
of naivete. A
portraits usu
and the overs
right arm is
the calculated
space he wou
So critics con
ness, and the
Dubuffet's a
questions ori
Why butterf
the work, or
scholar looking over Dubuffet's entire oeuvre tod

did the dead butterfly, that morbid medium,
Dubuffet would attempt to transform the very op
his work?
The artist himself assigned these collages a pivotal role in his artistic devel-
opment.7 He mentioned several times that he found the medium of butterfly
wings fascinating, and he would turn to it three times over the course of his
career (in 1953, 1955, and again in 1957). According to Dubuffet's published
memoir, the first collages quickened his termination of the high impasto Pates
battues with which he had busied himself for years.8 Then, from the play of veins
that capillarized the butterfly wings and, consequently, the very surfaces of the
collages themselves, Dubuffet gradually developed an interest in compositions
that pictured dispersal, rather than viscous accumulation.9 Subsequent to the col-
lages Dubuffet therefore began to gather wing-sized and shaped scraps of paper
with which he would construct Tableaux d' assemblages. Circulating what he called
"nervures" of ink around the assembled elements, Dubuffet further isolated and
partitioned the surface with venous lines deriving from butterfly anatomy. Those
works, in turn, eventually led to the increasingly atomized fields of the
Texturologies and Materiologies of the late 1950s. The collages thus established a ful-
crum point that shifted Dubuffet's oeuvre from figuration to abstraction, and
more important, from cohesive form to dispersal. They established a new pictor-
ial (anti) order of disintegration. All with a butterfly wing.
7. It is therefore remarkable that there has been virtually no scholarly discussion of them. For
reproductions and brief catalog entries, see Barbara Herzog, who describes the events leading up to
Dubuffet's creation of the collage Paysage aux argus (1955) in Andreas Franzke et ah, Jean Dubuffet: Trace
of an Adventure (London: Prestel, 2003), p. 98; Jessica Stewart, who offers an exhaustive description of
butterfly species appearing in Dubuffet's collage Jardin de Bibi Trompette (1955), in Judith Brodie and
Andrew Robinson, eds., A Century of Drawing: Works on Paper from Degas to LeWitt (Washington, D.C.:
National Gallery of Art, 2001), p. 207; the letters and artist commentary about the 1955 collages pub-
lished in Daniel Marchesseau, Dubuffet (Martigny: Fondation Pierre Gianadda, 1993), pp. 82-87; James
T. Demetrion, who quotes letters regarding Dubuffet's gift of Le Personnage en Axles des Papillon (1953)
to his collector Maurice Culberg in Jean Dubuffet 1943-1963: Paintings, Sculptures, Assemblages
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), p. 89. Daniel Abadie's formidable retrospec-
tive catalog, Dubuffet, provides many beautiful illustrations of the butterfly works (pp. 161-67) and use-
ful chronologies including the years of Dubuffet's butterfly hunts (pp. 376-81), though there is no dis-
cussion of the collages in the essays.
8. Dubuffet first argued that his "assemblages of butterfly wings determined the development of
[his] later works," when describing the second series of butterfly collages he made in 1955. See
Dubuffet's "Memoire sur le developpement de mes travaux a partir de 1952," in Prospectus et tous ecrits
suivants, ed. Hubert Damisch, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), p. 112.
9. Dubuffet, "Memoire," p. 112. Claude Esteban summarized the transition succinctly in 1968:
"With the advent of the butterflies came an entirely new order: from the playful contrasts of their nat-
ural partitions, their particularity as indivisible entities separate from each other, little trembling mon-
ads, the very discontinuity of matter was revealed." Claude Esteban, "L'Insecte et le topographe," La
Nouvelle revue francaise 16, no. 182 (February 1, 1968), p. 370.
52 OCTOBER
. Imitators
Though the collages enjoy a

privileged position in Dubuffet's
memoirs, the narrative surrounding
their first creation isn't terribly
heroic.10 In August of 1953, as
Dubuffet and his wife Lili were
returning to Paris from a vacation in

the Savoy, they drove alongside a
rushing mountain stream to which
Dubuffet decided to return later and
sketch. In a few weeks, Dubuffet was
eager to "capture the lively waters
and the movement of water running
over the stones," so he returned to
the spot and made several drawings
of the site upon which he would base
three paintings in Paris.11 He also
brought a traveling companion for
that second trip - author, publisher,
and artist Pierre Bettencourt.12
While Dubuffet drew, Bettencourt,
already an amateur lepidopterist,
chased the butterflies that prolifer- Dubuffet. Le Torrent aux papillons. 1953.
ated in the region. The author also Destroyed. © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS),
began producing collages by gluing New York/ADAGP, Paris.
their wings onto paper.

Dubuffet stayed busy with his drawings for a while, but he was unenthusias-
tic about the resulting compositions. While he did produce several "torrent"
paintings from those sketches, he stashed them in a corner of his studio and
eventually destroyed most of them.13 Perhaps Dubuffet was simply too distracted
10. The events are summarized by Dubuffet in "Le Torrent, les papillons: aout 1953 et mois suiv-
ants," a section of Dubuffet's "Memoire," pp. 93-94.
1 1 . Dubuffet, "Memoire," p. 94.
12. Born in 1917, Bettencourt is an author, artist, and printer who published several editions of his own
work as well as writings by French writers in the forties and fifties, including Antonin Artaud, Henri
Michaux, Paul Paulhan, and Francis Ponge. Bettencourt also printed some of Dubuffet's phonetic works,
most notably his Plu kifekler mouikon nivoua (1950). Dubuffet described his first encounters with
Bettencourt in letters to Jean Paulhan in 1945, and encouraged Paulhan to include Bettencourt in his
NNRF. See Julien Dieudonne and Marianne Jakobi, eds., Correspondance fean Dubuffet/fean Paulhan,
1944-1968 (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), esp. pp. 217, 399, and 433. Not long ago Bettencourt described his
relationship to Dubuffet and figures in an interview with Eric Dussert and Eric Naulleau, "Les Grandes
largeurs d'un fabuliste fantaisiste," Le Matricule des anges, no. 19 (March-April 1997), pp. 50-51.
13. Dubuffet, "Memoire," p. 94.
by the butterflies his companion was

putting to good use. In one of the
torrent paintings, Le Torrent aux
papillons (1953), three butterflies
hover at the periphery of the image
like annoying insects that Dubuffet
might have preferred to swat out of
the central composition. Barely dis-
tinguishable among the circles of
the streamscape, one butterfly rests
directly on the left edge of the
image just above center, another
suns itself on a cluster of rocks just
below the upper left corner of the
picture, and another seems to fly
just below the upper edge to the
right of the center.
Frustrated with his drawings and
paintings, Dubuffet finally yielded to
that source of distraction and began
producing collages of butterfly
wings. But while Dubuffet and
Bettencourt, armed with nets,
stalked their delicate prey, each pre-
Pierre Bettencourt. Le Bouddha. 1953. Collection ferred different techniques with
Fondation Dubuffet, Paris. © 2007 Artists Rights which to mount the trophies of their
Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo hunt. The plump, squat figures in
Archives Fondation Dubuffet. Bettencourt's collages like Le
Bouddha of 1953, tend to be much
more coherent according to hue and pattern, usually because a single species is
used: the central mass of the Buddha's body is wrapped in a rhythmic robe of
Emperor Moths, for example, all of which are positioned at an angle consistent with
a garment's drapery. The wings' placement also obeys a rule of symmetry that recalls
the biology of the insects proper. Bettencourt did not preserve the connection
between the wings as they had originally been linked on the body of the insect, of
course, but following the logic of organic bilateral symmetry, a wing on the left
side of a figure's composition always mirrors wing on the right. By contrast,
Dubuffet's figures pullulate with a variety of wings that are dwarfed by the larger
composite figures they produce. Juxtaposing wings of radically different species -
wings in varying patterns, colors, sizes, shapes, and reflective properties - Dubuffet
played up the spectacular contrasts among the shimmering fragments. Dubuffet's
wings also rarely maintain the symmetry of insect physiology, as they are infre-
quently applied in mirroring pairs. And as the wings have been pulled apart and
54 OCTOBER
distributed wi
repositioned w
arated, and wh
will likely und
not contribute
In spite of t
works were to
heavily upon
competition b
Prospectus, Be
after Dubuff
ness to him.14
writing that h
'Works by M.
later Dubuffe
some of Betten
collages were
soften Dubuf
Dubuffet wrot
I have been y
anxious; rega
sharing the
sense to me.
could particip
in which I w
While Dubuff
Bettencourt's
collages appea
Bettencourt's
gized to Bett
exhibition at
had received
Bettencourt's
1954, Bettenc
panying pam
that Dubuffe
14. Pierre Bettenc

Editions Lettres V
15. Ibid., p. 58. D
lished in Bettenco
16. Bettencourt a
tural works in w
his colors. He now rebutted that he was not an imitator, because he had included
organic found materials in his work long before having met Bettencourt, and, in
the end, their respective works were radically different:
I do not have the slightest awareness of any borrowing from my work by

you - certainly not, in any case, a borrowing for which you could be
blamed - but that you could reproach me for borrowing from you
seems a bit much. I hope you aren't seriously thinking that.17
The professional intercourse between the two men, and the artistic process by
which the collages came into being, thus took imitation as its chief trope. At first
condescending to claim that he was the mimic, Dubuffet doubled his disguise by
wearing the mask of an imitator. With a bit of false modesty, he pretended to be an
emulator unworthy of exhibiting by Bettencourt's side. After this diplomatic means
of escaping what he feared would be an inferior exhibition, however, he would
later remove the double mask when Bettencourt had accused him of plagiarism -
at that point Bettencourt became the imitator, the derivative one, but one that
could not be blamed. After all, Dubuffet thus implied (no longer quite so modestly)
Bettencourt could hardly be faulted for finding his powerful example irresistible.
This rhetoric of imitation, whether delivered in flattery or accusation,
arguably derived from the collages themselves, as it originated with the substantial
interest that both men shared in theories of butterfly mimicry. By the mid-fifties,
the two men were well read on the subject of adaptive imitation among insects,
and at the time of his death Dubuffet's library contained many important volumes
on the subject.18 And whenever Dubuffet claimed to be "the imitator" in his let-
ters, especially in the sunnier, untroubled days of their early relationship, it was
often a sort of inside joke that tapped their common knowledge of insect adapta-
tion: just as the spots on the Owl Butterfly imitate the eyes of an animal more
powerful than it, so Dubuffet could graciously claim to imitate the example of his
formidable partner-in-art.
Their shared preoccupation with mimicry also found expression in the col-
lages themselves, as both artists played with the metaphorical properties of insect
disguise. More specifically, the artists often exploited the effects of Batesian mimicry,
wherein the features of an insect have arguably evolved to imitate those of a less
palatable or more dangerous animal. Within Batesian mimicry, butterflies with
eyespots that convincingly imitate the eyes of a raptor, for example, will frighten
17. Ibid.
18. Dubuffet owned, for example, a late edition of Jean Henri Fabre's fanciful
behavior: Souvenir entomologiques: etudes sur Vinstinct et les moeurs des insectes (1
Delagrave, 1951). Other holdings in Dubuffet's library range from contemporar
Jacques-Francois Aubert's Papillons d'Europe (Lausanne: Delachaux et Niestle, 1
older butterfly studies, such as Etienne Berce, Album des Papillons de France (P
Deyrolle, ca. 1886). For an inventory of Dubuffet's library, see "Annexe: La b
Dubuffet," Les Cahiers du Musee national de I'art moderne 77 (Autumn 2001), pp. 112
56 OCTOBER
away predator
genes along to
Both artists c
mimicry in a
the evolution
however.19 D
attention to th
Batesian adap
in a willful m
Dubuffet shifted the antecedent term
that was to have been imitated by the
insect, as he turned eyespots into, say,
nostril-spots (which are decidedly less
intimidating to potential predators).
When lined up in a vertical row, eyespots
in a work like Le Personnage en ailes de
papillons (1953) become button-spots
cascading down the front of a figure's
otherwise indistinguishable shirt. Spots
are also sometimes referenced through
negation in areas where one expects
(but does not find) such maculae. In Le
Personnage en ailes de papillons the wings
that Dubuffet placed over that section of
the face that should represent the Dubuffet.
eyes Personnage et trois papillons. 1953.
have no ocelli at all. Eyespot-eyes©are
2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/
missing in La Belle au regard masque
ADAGP, Paris.
(1953) too, though her nipple-spots
return the viewer's gaze with maculae unblinking.
With clever visual punning and other metaphorical conceits, the mimicry
Dubuffet's collages could sometimes behave as a lure to seduce the cur
human viewer with the pleasure of decoding visual tropes. Let us associate t
sort of seductive property of the collages with what lepidopterists consider
"pseudepisematic" mimicry; that form of adaptation in which, like the false w
of an anglerfish, mimetic devices attract prey rather than repel predators.2
Dubuffet's puns that could attract such prolonged attention could ope
19. This form was named after nineteenth-century scholar Henry W. Bates, the first naturalis
describe the phenomenon. A canonical summary of mimicry to which many scholars (in Franc
elsewhere) looked in the 1940s and '50s was Hugh B. Cott, Adaptive Coloration in Animals (Lond
Methuen and Co., 1940). For example, Roger Caillois's book about mimicry, Meduse et cie (P
Gallimard, 1960), cites Cott as the definitive reference work on the subject.
20. This specific terminology was first developed by Edward B. Poulton, The Colors of Animals
York: D. Appleton and Company, 1890).
jean Dubuffet: The Butterfly Man 57
between title and work, as is the case of Nez d' Ap

suggests that this is a portrait of a fellow named "Ap
ure, however, derives from a certain kind of butte
as the apollon papillon?1 It is the orange macular s
that insect that have become nostrils. The preposi
twofold manner: it is the nose belonging to Mr. P
wings of an apollon butterfly. The intimacy betwe
nose and wing, effected by this pun is even enhan
species name has undergone. The common nou
become the proper name "Pap," just as the butter
fragmentary status.
It is important to remember, however, that the ve
to interpret puns takes place in the collages - the
nostril-spots - derive from an insect's adaptation
(rather than curious human one) through Batesia
shifts in meaning and playful realignment of co
and strategies originally given over to the anticip
off of death. The latter operation haunts the for
and interpretation only emerge through a mac
insect's (in this case unsuccessful) struggle for surv
Perhaps these competing drives - the attractive
activated in his collages can help explain a peculia
duced at the same time that he was working on his
trois papillons of October 1953 separates out the
lages would compress. The gouache pictures a
relationship to three aerial visitors. His hands may
may be attempting to catch or to fend them off.
his leg muscles and leans to his right either to mak
ready himself for retreat. But if this is a retreati
late, as his posture shows him succumbing to the
his hat have already begun to emulate the curving
ters, and his face is bubbling out as if pulled into
arms and legs stretch to the sides, striking a sprea
called a spread-butterfly pose.
In mimicking the insects' open position with h
the transformative effect that the butterflies inflict
He is in danger of becoming something else, of be
morphosing. It may even be that the butterflies' e
awakened the fellow to the general contingency o
singularity of his own subjectivity, the fellow learns (
21. The species name is Parnassius apollo.
58 OCTOBER
him most) th
Man can beco
The butterf
formation b
morphosis. A
the butterfl
Further, in it
suggests a de
the environm
momentary i
If we let th
gouache to b
Dubuffet was
ties of cont
alternative st
ously attemp
ethos of legib
ent way. Th
excrement,
Rather, the
itself would
would becom
cally its own.
The
My friend [
knows nothin
In Dubuffet
become a m
between human and insect, and this concern for inadvertent intimacies between
such disparate forms of life, was not by any means unique to Dubuffet and his hunt-
ing partner. Roger Caillois had been developing similar notions at about the same
time, particularly in respect to the human-insect relationship, though his argument
would travel in a slightly different direction. By the fifties Caillois was working on
22. For an excellent discussion of Dubuffet's early interest in the disruptive effects of such fecal
associations, see Rachel Eve Perry, "Retour a l'Ordure: Defilement in the Postwar Work of Jean
Dubuffet and Jean Fautrier" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2000).
23. Dubuffet, December 1953, as quoted in Bettencourt, Poirer le papillon, p. 145. Werner Schenk was
a banker who accompanied Dubuffet on his first trip to the Prinzhorn archive of art by the "insane."
the first full book-length work that he would devote

Meduse et cie, lobbed several arguments against ev
phenomenon.24 Noting that mimicry could somet
than fend it off, and noting that dissected predat
many camouflaged as uncamouflaged insect bodies
to be some reason for mimicry besides (or at least in
Caillois concluded that insect mimicry was p
among organic life forms to engage in exuberant
ade. Hoping to reconnect remote districts of the n
of mimicry, Caillois developed what he called a "d
he searched for common examples of imitation in
worlds. Thus, when questioning the tendency of
other for no perceivable evolutionary purpose, h
an explanation. At one moment, for example, he a
Why, then, are there these resemblances, these

to have no survival value . . . ? Everything seem
were following a fashion, to which each species
means at its disposal: it is a slow moving fa
changes take thousands of years, not a season,
with whole species and not with individuals. B
fashion is also a phenomenon of mimicry, of
fascination with a model which is imitated for no reason. It is then
rapid and freakish.25
In other words, noninstrumental disguise among insects follows the same impulse
as that of human sartorial trends wherein people feel compelled to dress like each
other. Both express the tendency common among all organisms to engage in exu-
berant imitation. Though human acts of imitation may develop at a more rapid
pace and depend more upon individual choice, both organisms nevertheless
yearn for gratuitous mimicry.
24. Roger Caillois, The Mask of Medusa (1960), trans. George Ordish (New York: Clarkson N. Potter,
Inc., 1964). Though I am not by any means arguing that Dubuffet or Bettencourt were consciously
putting Caillois 's theories to use in their writings or collage works, chances are good that Dubuffet and
Caillois were acquainted, as they shared a number of mutual friends, most notably Jean Paulhan.
Caillois was certainly familiar with Dubuffet's work; in October 1952, for example, Caillois referenced
Dubuffet in a postcard he sent to Paulhan. The recto of the card featured the reproduction of
Giovanni Francesco Caroto's (1480-1555) Portrait of a Child with Drawing, which Caillois had seen in
Italy. About the image, which depicts a smiling boy holding up a crude pencil drawing, Caillois joked,
"Here is a Dubuffet, which the delight of this young amateur introduced to the Verona Museum a long
time ago. It is, I believe, the first drawing of that school to have received such an honor." See Odile
Felgine and Claude-Pierre Perez, eds., Correspondance Jean Paulhan/ Roger Caillois, 1934-1967 (Paris: Edi-
tions Gallimard, 1991), p. 206.
25. Caillois, The Mask of Medusa, p. 75.
60 OCTOBER
For Caillois
between ma
even to imp
beings a pri
asserted tha
mythology
merged ento
human, esta
disguise lay
behave like
know it or not.
Dubuffet's works no doubt share in the sensibility of a "diagonal science,"

even literalize it.26 Dubuffet's butterfly-men compress the relationship between
human and insect, as the two sets of organisms become consubstantial. While evo-
lution would have no explanation for such a mutual imitation, to a diagonal
science such intercourse between species is presumed. And certainly the great
advocate of Art Brut would have little trouble embracing the de-evolutionary
emphasis of Caillois's paradigm. Indeed, Dubuffet's anticultural position, which
he articulated most explicitly in 1951, privileged "savages" (the quotation marks
were placed by the artist himself) over "civilized man," and suggested that art was
best served by traveling in a direction opposite from all such models of cultural
"progress."27 Arguing for a similar passage back in evolutionary time from human
forms of life to those of insects and plants, Dubuffet proceeded:
One of the principal characteristics of Western culture is the belief that

the nature of man is very different from the nature of other beings in
the world. Custom has it that man cannot be identified, or compared
in the least, with elements such as winds, trees, rivers - except humor-
ously, and for poetic rhetorical figures. The Western man has great con-
tempt for trees and rivers, and hates to be like them. On the contrary,
primitive man loves and admires trees and rivers, and has great plea-
sure to be like them. ... He has a very strong sense of continuity of all
things, and especially between man and the rest of the world.28
A little under two years later Dubuffet would implicitly add butterflies to that list of
beings with which humanity might enjoy such family resemblances. From
26. Though Hubert Damisch only briefly discussed the butterfly collages, he applied some ideas
from Caillois's recently published Meduse et cie to Dubuffet's interest in imagery emerging from natural
materials in his 1962 essay, "Retour au texte," reprinted in Fenetre jaune cadmium, ou les dessous de lapein-
ture (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1984), pp. 99-120.
27. Jean Dubuffet, "Anticultural Positions," lecture given before the Arts Club of Chicago,
December 20, 1951, reprinted in Jean Dubuffet: Retrospective (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, 1966),
pp. 3-6, 43.
28. Ibid., p. 4.
Dubuffet's perspective, such connections between ci

between humanity and other organisms (connections
tainly concur), could not even be considered a mov
time, as only Western cultures believed in such a li
of savage man was that his thinking circumvented s
and would instead level distinctions to allow for inte
Now, according to a treatise about butterflies tha
entitled Le Bal des ardents, the intimacy between h
assume a slightly different quality. Bettencourt's em
upon the arbitrariness of butterfly mimicry and h
metaphorical properties of mimicry in a model
authenticity.29 Bettencourt mocked humans who, ra
opens the door to a never-ending chain of signification
29. Pierre Bettencourt, Le Bal des ardents (1953); all quotations

Editions Lettres Vives, 1983). In correspondence between Dubuf
would often describe the swarms of Flambe butterflies native to C
alluded to a famous episode from the unfortunate reign of Charle
Mad." For a wedding celebration in 1393, Charles and several you
men," covering their bodies in pitch-soaked linen and flax. When o
group, the costumes went up in flames, killing four members of
the conflagration by hiding under the Duchess of Berry's skirt, a
chroniclers as the "Bal des ardents," only stoked his reputation as
handle the responsibilities of his station. To Dubuffet and Bett
medieval story (masquerade, madness, and the collapse of authorit
tive effects of insect mimicry. For a thorough discussion of the ev
Lorraine Kochanske Stock, "Froissart's Chroniques and Its Illustr
Verbal and Visual Imaging of Charles VTs Bal des Ardents," Studies
Dubuffet. Cover Image for Pierre Bettencourt sL

© 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ AD
62 OCTOBER
insect adapta
believe that
butterflies have false eyes "for" frightening birds. It is in such a relation

of cause and effect that we even place the intervention of God. But it is
a cerebral mechanism that is perhaps only particular to man, quick as
he is to attribute an explanation, a sense, to every sensation.
Bettencourt continues,
The relation of cause and effect, of question and response, was invented
by man to reassure himself in establishing a link, a coherence between
the world and himself.30
According to Bettencourt's description, mimicry seems to result from a causal sys-

tem of evolutionary pressures, though it is but a figment of man's imagination - an
arbitrary operation contingent upon human tendencies to develop meaning.
Anyone assigning a transparent sign/referent relationship to mimicry (the macula
"is" an eye) thus falls victim to a trap of believing in a rational God who assigns
meaning to the world. To believe that ocelli "are" eyes is to believe that the world
works upon intentionality, rather than arbitrariness - that there is a divine cause
and effect governing the cosmos.
Bettencourt thus concluded that mimicry is, if anything, directed toward the
seduction of human associative thinking. It is "for" luring faith in natural signs
because it pretends to be "for" frightening animals - but only to the human
observer. Butterflies therefore wear a double mask of mimicry, in pretending to
pretend. In appearing to emulate other animals, they mimic human desire for nat-
ural antecedents and causality in the world of signs - only to flutter away into
arbitrariness at the last minute.
The seven drawings that Dubuffet supplied for Bettencourt's book per-
formed a reciprocal operation in respect to the collages that he was constructing
at the same time. For the collage works, many dismembered insects constitute one
brilliant composite figure. In the book illustrations, by contrast, one insect con-
jures the body parts of what would be provided by a single human being. On the
butterfly-woman used for the book's cover, the thorax droops with pendulous
breasts, the posterior wings have developed toes, the antennae terminate in wig-
gling fingers, and giant human eyes on the wings stare back at the viewer from
beneath impressively long lashes. Even the emotive state of the butterfly imitates
that of a person. In an operation of mimicry that is a bit tautological, the pen-and
-ink butterfly mimics human pride, grinning at her capacity to emulate humanity
with her body.
30. Bettencourt, Le Bal des ardents, p. 13.
Dubuffet's drawings rework Batesian mimicry

explained by theories of adaptation. While an ins
birds or other animals for self-protection, there is
a butterfly to imitate a person - no hunter was ev
butterfly because the insect so effectively resembled
drawings do not illustrate scientific models of ada
the larger predicament that Bettencourt descr
embody a human craving for meaning that is "for"
trated butterflies had simply mimicked the attrib
to Batesian theories of adaptation (looking to the
instead of breasts and toes), those drawings woul
indulge his theological faith in authentic, transparent
the viewer would have been able to appreciate, fro
icry system, the supposedly purposeful associa
disguises. Instead, Dubuffet's drawn butterflies im
turn mimicry into an index of human (doomed) d
words, these butterflies are hunters, as they lure a v
nature that preexisted human intention - and mimicr
Bettencourt's butterflies never perfectly follow
ence, and there are important features in Bettenc
cannot explain. While the two men would agree t
explaining mimicry, and both would argue that i
intertwined, they would describe insect/human hiera
eled distinctions between insect and human, such t
exempt from the dynamic of imitation to which in
contrast, elevated the human viewer to a slightly
butterfly would become a mere vehicle for huma
would no doubt accuse Caillois of anthropomorph
assigning too metaphysical a role to insect di
Bettencourt of a provincial anthropocentrism
obeyed arbitrary divisions among species, and thus
at work in the natural world.
Most important, Bettencourt's debate regarding the theological fantasy of
authentic signs within insect mimicry found no companion in Caillois's text.
Indeed, Caillois was not much interested in humans as viewers of mimicry at all;
rather, he remarked only upon the ways in which insects and humans might
engage in parallel behaviors. The portion of Bettencourt's treatise in which
humans look at butterfly mimicry derived from a different trend in lepidopterol-
ogy at mid-century, such as that most famously described by novelist and butterfly
connoisseur Vladimir Nabokov.
Like Bettencourt and Caillois, Nabokov dismissed evolutionary explanations
for mimicry, though for different reasons. Attempting to discredit evolutionary
models of mimicry, Nabokov developed three main objections (most of which
64 OCTOBER
have now, in
First, he arg
the case whe
in order to c
time for butt
Because of th
the differen
expected to d
insect could
changed, in
model, migh
every trait,
which the m
Third, Nabok
in excess of
develop spot
notice. Such d
purpose. Nab
intentionality
of flora and f
Certain whi
noticed only
sense of the
they are acc
no other mi
fantastic ref
an appointe
and humor,
ume of Shak
While the re
not sufficien
tion of wit in
the capacity t
31. Many scient

evolutionary exp
have been so dub
appreciation of g
contradict Nabok
The Scientific Od
32. Vladimir Na
and Robert Mic
33. Nabokov, "F
As soon as a creature capable of appreciating th

blance, its poetry and magical antiquity, had m
this phenomenon was proffered to him by natu
amusement, as a precious symbol of the homog
which [Nature] had once found the prime com
of the first denizens of her kindergarten.34
Today Nabokov's theories of mimicry are, not su

among scientists - particularly in an age of indis
ports evolution to all but the most slavish followers o
impulse behind his arguments was not necessar
sought to invigorate human understanding of natu
ence into poetry. To an author for whom the del
was superior to banal positivism, the cleverness of
than any mechanistic explanation for it.
And Nabokov's argument could almost be shr
from the perspective of the humanities, so neatl
Western aesthetic theory. The notion that mimicr
nature's pencil to please human perception is thor
such a scenario, beautiful butterfly markings are n
ration - rather, they embody a purposiveness
intentionality wherein pleasing forms and the ca
given to human beings. With such a formulation, h
up against the same dilemma encountered by the p
problematic role of theology as the means of medi
and object in aesthetics. Like Kant, Nabokov woul
fined omnipotent presence that grounded subje
would assume a theological aura.
Bettencourt was selective in his borrowings fro
Nabokov, Bettencourt dismissed evolutionary e
regarded human beings (not other predators) as t
phenomena. Nabokov's intimation of an intention
tionality verging on a theological presence), woul
Bettencourt's position. The magical intentionality
ished was entirely distasteful to a figure like Bet
Parisian existentialism. Indeed, Bettencourt often
when refuting theology in his Le Bal, arguing that th
A nothing that is almost SOMETHING . . . From

terrible activity of the Zero and of this Nothi
something, there is a step that we almost cann
34. ibid., p. 227.
66 OCTOBER
make. To ter
power of th
the very sou
Bettencourt
of divinity i
ingness - a
epistemology
beauty, no s
maculae give
upon an ext
Psyche
This seeming-to-be within mimicry evoked, for Bettencourt, the much larger
problem of a Look that governs or watches every human look. To the human gaze,
mimicry seems to confirm another Gaze that is more authoritative and external to the
view a human being might cast upon any butterfly. This was Bettencourt's primary
insight and his preoccupation with butterfly mimicry - it always gives one the feel-
ing that some willful agency lurks behind the mask of nature, guiding our gaze.
It is this special property of ocelli in butterfly mimicry that has made that
insect so appealing to theorists of the gaze. It is why even Jacques Lacan claimed
the butterfly as his own signature insect at one of the most important passages of
his Eleventh Seminar.36 To explain his theory of the gaze, Lacan summarized a
famous dream in which Chinese philosopher Choang-tsu became a butterfly. Here
is Lacan 's own version of the diagonal science through which man becomes insect
and insect becomes man:
In a dream, [Choang-tsu] is a butterfly ... he sees the butterfly in his

reality as gaze. What are so many figures, so many shapes, so many
colours, if not this gratuitous showing, in which is marked for us the
primal nature of the essence of the gaze. Good heavens, it is a butterfly
that is not very different from the one that terrorized the Wolf Man . . .
When Choang-tsu wakes up, he may ask himself whether it is not the
butterfly who dreams that he is Choang-tsu. Indeed, he is right, and
doubly so, first because it proves he is not mad, he does not regard
himself as absolutely identical with Choang-tsu and, secondly, because
he does not fully understand how right he is. ... [H]e is a captive but-
terfly, but captured by nothing, for, in the dream, he is a butterfly for
35. Bettencourt, Le Bal des ardents, p. 15.

36. Jacques Lacan, "The Split between the Eye and the Gaze," in Four Fundamental Concepts o
Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), p. 75.
nobody. It is when he is awake that he is Choang

caught in their butterfly net. This is why the butt
ject is not Choang-tsu, but the Wolf Man - insp
terror of recognizing that the beating of the litt
far from the beating of causation, of the prim
being for the first time with the grid of desire.37
Two different butterflies dart through Lacan's syno

became the key with which Freud would unlock me
rosis.38 Flitting and tumbling, the wings of a swallo
and closing her legs; the stripes of the swallowtail b
"grusha," which was also the name of the nursery
tute) who threatened the Wolf Man with castratio
Grusha, on her hands and knees scrubbing the floo
sexual posture struck by his mother in the famous
dreamed of exacting revenge by tearing off the wi
insect - the butterfly then became the espe, which bec
became the analysand himself. Through dream wo
eventually marked the "beating of causation," became t
very process by which the self is continuously defe
Freud led his patient on a chase after himself throu
of desire through which the patient's very identity
hunt, Freud tracked the different landing points of
followed its drunken flight.
But if the first butterfly revealed the particular
rosis, it was the second butterfly in Lacan's story w
of scopic drives within human subjectivity. Choang
general condition of the gaze. With its piercing ey
fies that dynamic wherein the world looks back at
stare. The butterfly bodies forth the gaze of the w
the human subject represents himself and is mediat
also provokes an unusual feeling of strangeness beca
the otherwise implicit character of the gaze on ex
camouflaged (as a butterfly could be masked by it
become conspicuous in the very exhibitionism of
ment. Marking the finitude of the subject - the f
perceives himself as a limit, in which he knows th
desire, and that his very selfhood is contingent up
others - the gaze-as-butterfly terrifies precisely
shameless display of that finitude.
37. Ibid., p. 76.

38. Sigmund Freud, Three Case Histories, trans. James Strachey (New York: Collier Books, 1963), p. 198.
68 OCTOBER
Dubuffet. Paysa
Artists Rights So
Upon waking
ing of being
understands t
vice versa. Ch
instead comes
side, he is su
self-display, a
thus doubly c
as subject to
Choang-tsu c
subject-for-o
stare - he is t
(is subject to
dream space, t
no one but himself."
Dubuffet's intuitive understanding of the gaze would find confirmation in

Lacan 's description, as the artist produced several works showing a world that, like
the butterfly-as-gaze in Choang-tsu 's dream work, is both all-seeing and exhibition-
istic. Just look at his 1955 Paysage aux argus - a work that, like most butterfly pieces
made after 1953, is a laterally oriented, uninhabited landscape. For his shimmer-
ing landscape, Dubuffet made good use of the contrasting effects that wings of the
DubuffeL 7ty: Dead Butterfly. 1953. Bottom: Vache et Personnage. 1953.
© 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.
70 OCTOBER
Argus butterf
electric blue t
the other win
sides. So Dubu
just as it lock
seems given o
guardian fro
scape that ar
imitations. Sc
of the image
scape into wh
Dubuffet's b
They swarm w
pores and a f
causation - the
eyes peering
beneath this
black ground
papillotage - a
the rhythm
force of the
scatter all tog
The D
As the last i
of a butterfl
lages, Dubuff
Bettencourt in
I've transfor
wings havin
the death of
It is unclear w
from formal
the organic m
"Demons et m
out singling
39. The French te

40. There is no s
1953," in Bettenco
collages are, as critics agreed, funereal because the

things. The bodies of those once-living insects a
degrading ends too, as their hapless corpses are mad
and bouquets of flowers.
However, some of the early collages exemplify
mimicry in a different way - through the relationship
surroundings. These works, such as Vache et perso
tions of landscape.41 Unlike the "portrait" collages
paperboard features solitary figures against contras
horizontally arranged landscapes of 1953 allow for
between figure and ground. Neither do they offer
could be distinguished from sky. No India ink was
the entire surface is plastered with butterfly wing
ing the v ache from the personnage, and one almost ha
it that a cow and person truly inhabit the picture. R
top third of the image betray the location of
personnage-eyes) , but the bodies are hard to find. P
wings constituting the two animals (clouded yellow
appear haphazardly among wings of the surroundi
the pictorial field with insects of similar species a
blend into everything else, and the two figures fl
indistinct. Human being and animal seep into ea
ings. This is in many ways a reversion - the butterf
ground, in their original context, had performed a
before they were made to imitate a cow and perso
them, they had imitated the bark of trees, leaves o
tics of the environment.
This is an entirely different order of mimicry. This is not Batesian imitation,

but camouflage. The subject does not show. It disappears. It merges. In the process
the figures and their pictorial context surrender their respective boundaries.
Human and animal figures, composed of butterfly wings, verge on dissolving into
the landscape - a landscape that is itself always already dissolving. It is in these
works that Dubuffet would exceed the preoccupations of Bettencourt, who was
primarily interested in Batesian mimicry as perceived by the human subject.
Rather, in those last collage works, Dubuffet explored mimicry as a means by
which the camouflaged entity succumbs entirely to the ubiquitous gaze, and
finally dissolves beneath its stare.
Again, it is Caillois's diagonal science that would prevail here. In an early ver-
sion of the arguments that he would develop in his Meduse, Caillois addressed
camouflage. In his 1935 essay "Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia," a discussion
41. I believe this work was shown at "Demons et merveilles" under the title Vache et vacher, men-
tioned in Dubuffet's 1953 list of works for the Rive Gauche Gallery, note 3.
72 OCTOBER
that would fa
the character
drive to whic
body to the p
manner simil
surround,
the organism
tem but is si
it quite literal
ditions, one'
between org
mind and a s
Lacan 's discu

upon Caillois'
through the
revealing of
Eleventh Sem
dissolves bene
Drawing par
from certain
when engage
behavior whe
like to play d
alongside the
the creature t
renunciation that orients it toward a mode of reduced existence, which
in the end would no longer know either consciousness or feeling - the
inertia of the elan vital, so to speak.44
Through camouflage, the organism yearns for a post-mortem state.

Counterintuitively, it yields to the death drive even in that moment in which it
seems to be avoiding capture by predators. It lies still, loses itself, and in melding
its subjectivity with the Other of its own existence, it behaves as if it has already
returned to the dust.
42. Roger Caillois, "Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia," first published in Minotaure (1935),
reprinted in The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, ed. Claudine Frank (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 2003), pp. 89-103. Rosalind Krauss has famously demonstrated the importance of
Roger Caillois's theories of mimicry to both Surrealism and the writings of Jacques Lacan in "Corpus
Delicti," in Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston, IJAmour Fou: Photography and Surrealism (New York:
Abbeville Press, 1985), pp. 55-1 12.
43. Caillois, "Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia," pp. 99-100.
44. Ibid., p. 103.
Dubuffet. Paysage aux demi-

1953. © 2007 Artists Rights So
(ARS), New York/ADAGP, Par
It is important, then, that in later years figure

butterfly collages almost entirely, as Dubuffet tur
landscape motifs similar to that of Vache et personnag
one landscape work, while the following two se
Some of those later landscapes turn rolling hills, w
into the distance, into flattened patterns in which
dissimulating, merging and disintegrating. The fig
the ground. Much more than Batesian mimicry, it
that would govern the direction of Dubuffet's work
Indeed, among the last butterfly works that D
scapes" that defy the very definition of that genr
"landscape in half mourning" - there is no horizon,
tion of gravity that might help the viewer decide t
in fact, the bottom of a scene.45 The lack of gravity m
45. Once again, Dubuffet was punning upon a species name. Th

ing in the landscape is commonly called the demi-deuil in French,
landscape are played upon by the name of the butterfly species u
74 OCTOBER
certain figur
petals of flow
in other sect
there is one su
picture plane
us to a differ
the figure, se
to that relati
ized landscape
the absence o
perhaps, has
of the subject
Why does Du
How could an
with pictoria
liant, fatal a
properties of
of mortal fini
us so long to

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Jean Dubuffet: The Butterfly Man

Author(s): Sarah K. Rich

Why does he massacre butterflies to evoke effects he would better

Poor Dubuffet who, with a hundred massacred butterflies, only knows

Dubuffet. Personnage en ailes de

An anonymous critic writing for Arts was so darin

Dubuffet has unleashed himself upon butterfl

This reviewer was a bit more explicit than the ot

6. "Demons et merveilles: Toiles surrealistes," Arts, no. 443

scholar looking over Dubuffet's entire oeuvre tod

Though the collages enjoy a

returning to Paris from a vacation in

their wings onto paper.

by the butterflies his companion was

14. Pierre Bettenc

I do not have the slightest awareness of any borrowing from my work by

between title and work, as is the case of Nez d' Ap

21. The species name is Parnassius apollo.

the first full book-length work that he would devote

Why, then, are there these resemblances, these

Dubuffet's works no doubt share in the sensibility of a "diagonal science,"

One of the principal characteristics of Western culture is the belief that

Dubuffet's perspective, such connections between ci

29. Pierre Bettencourt, Le Bal des ardents (1953); all quotations

Dubuffet. Cover Image for Pierre Bettencourt sL

butterflies have false eyes "for" frightening birds. It is in such a relation

According to Bettencourt's description, mimicry seems to result from a causal sys-

30. Bettencourt, Le Bal des ardents, p. 13.

Dubuffet's drawings rework Batesian mimicry

31. Many scient

As soon as a creature capable of appreciating th

Today Nabokov's theories of mimicry are, not su

A nothing that is almost SOMETHING . . . From

34. ibid., p. 227.

In a dream, [Choang-tsu] is a butterfly ... he sees the butterfly in his

35. Bettencourt, Le Bal des ardents, p. 15.

nobody. It is when he is awake that he is Choang

Two different butterflies dart through Lacan's syno

37. Ibid., p. 76.

Dubuffet's intuitive understanding of the gaze would find confirmation in

39. The French te

collages are, as critics agreed, funereal because the

This is an entirely different order of mimicry. This is not Batesian imitation,

Lacan 's discu

Through camouflage, the organism yearns for a post-mortem state.

Dubuffet. Paysage aux demi-

It is important, then, that in later years figure

45. Once again, Dubuffet was punning upon a species name. Th

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