Dubuffet, Fautrier and Ponge: Recognition of the ‘Other’ as Intellectual Resistance in Art and Poetry in the War against Fascist Oppression

The 1940s in France were marked by a constant tension between notions of ‘self and other’. While during the war, all enemies of fascist ideology were constructed as threatening ‘others’, at the liberation, ex-collaborators were subjected to the excesses of the épuration which further divided the French population. It is argued in this essay that Dubuffet and Fautrier — and Ponge, one of the Resistance intellectuals with whom both artists were closely affiliated during that time — transgressed this dualistic categorisation by making an explicitly experimental use of their respective media. To illustrate this point, a comparison is drawn between Fautrier’s Objets series (1942—9), Dubuffet’s Mirobolus, Macadam et Cie: hautes pâtes series (1945—6), and the poetry collection of Ponge’s Parti pris des choses (1942). In these works, it is contended, the artistic matter became the recipient for the active intellectual and sensitive engagement of the beholder, which, in the historical and political context of the period, came to signify the ‘other’ in all its forms. Such a recognition would become an essential component of the discourse of the Resistance intellectual network around Dubuffet and Fautrier for the democratic reconstruction of French society after the war.