Going to exhibitions this winter in Paris was not for the fainthearted. It required a willingness to endure the overblown, the repetitive, and, at times, the downright disgusting, although fortunately there were occasional alternatives to the hard stuff. In the overblown and repetitive category, the Centre Georges Pompidou offered an obsequious retrospective of Jean Dubuffet (September 13–December 31, 2001) organized on the principle that if two or three works of a given period were worth looking at, then fifteen—whatever their merits—were even better.

It began well enough, with his seldom-seen earliest works and a selection of the faux-naïf paintings that established his reputation: charming snub-nosed cows, raunchy nudes, and crowded street scenes with irrational perspectives, sophisticated images masquerading as the work of a gifted outsider or a shrewd child. But once the exhibition began to deal with the signature red, ...

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