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, white, and blue “jigsaw” paintings of the years of Dubuffet’s greatest fame, the curators seemed to abdicate choice in favor of quantity. (Was this an effort to please the often distinguished owners of these formulaic, mannered pictures?) The curators seemed similarly uncritical of the sculptures, those essentially unsculptural, overscaled cookie-cutter shapes imprinted with the artist’s characteristic interlocking black lines. The show revived a bit at the end, since in his last, rough, composite paintings, Dubuffet seemed once again to address the issues of touch, surface, and simplified image-making that had animated the best of his early pictures, but by the time you reached this section, the vast amount