Angry and Ridiculous

A Man for Our Time

Milord la Chamarre, outside, 1993.

Years ago a kindly and well-informed docent at the Philadelphia Museum of Art explained cubism to me. Basically, she said, cubism disarticulated the surfaces of a cube and rearranged them in a novel fashion, and I think you can see that in Jean Dubuffet's Milord la Chamarre. Body parts have been separated, flattened and sometimes crumpled, and then (tentatively) reattached. I sometimes think he looks like he's in the initial stages of exploding. Sometimes I think he's just about to fall apart. And sometimes I think he's just angry.

I was not prepared for my first encounter with Milord la Chamarre. The first Dubuffet sculpture I remember seeing was in New York City, in front of the Chase Manhattan Bank headquarters near Wall Street. It's called Four Trees, it was installed in 1972, and I thought it looked like a group of gigantic, marshmallowy mushrooms. It made me happy just to look at it.  

When I first saw Mr. Milord, he was glaring off into space, or perhaps glaring down at me. He was standing on an elevated platform attached to an exterior wall of the Centre Square development, across the street from Philadelphia's City Hall. 

He looked odd. And he looked angry. I found it unsettling to be in his presence.

The Peripatetic Mr. Milord

It turns out that I have not been alone in finding him a bit unnerving. 

Milord la Chamarre was first installed on New York City's Park Avenue, in front of the Seagram building, in 1974. One observer told the Times that it looked a "giant version of the Tin Man in the 'Wizard of Oz.'" Another said he looked like "the Frankenstein monster in a suit of armor."  

Philadelphia developer Jack Wolgin thought the statue looked like a Mummer, so he brought Mr. Milord home and set him up in the Centre Square atrium in 1976. He was moved outside, where I first saw him, in 1990, and then back inside in 2019. (There's still a plaque outside, which helpfully summarizes some of his travels.)

A lot of Philadelphians just call him the Mummer. I think it's a valid way of looking at him, although I sincerely doubt that Jean Dubuffet ever saw a Mummer, or had one puke on his shoes.

Here he is, back inside the atrium.

Mr. Milord is 24 feet tall and weighs 5,000 pounds. He's made out of stainless steel and was fabricated by Lippincott, Inc. 

And he's still angry.

Right shoulder. A complicated bit.

Left hand. I think this is the only part of the statue that makes me feel comfortable. I don't know why. And no, I have no way to relate this hand to human anatomy.

Here's a detail of the lower right leg. This plate, just above the foot, reminds me of a soccer shin guard. If you think it's armor, call it a greave. Note the rivets. (They're in the black.)

What Does Chamarre Mean? 

So what was Dubuffet intending when he created Mr. Milord? I think we can learn a bit more about the artist's thinking if we have a look at the word chamarre. Usually Milord La Chamarre is translated as My Lord of the Fancy Vest. I looked in my French dictionaries, and found the verb chamarrer, which means "to bedizen." Bedizen, in turn, means to dress or adorn with gaudy finery. 

I did eventually find the noun chamarre online, where it has several meanings. One is embroidery. (This was in the French-language division of Wiktionary-land. To follow along, click here.) 

Both noun and verb derive from the Spanish noun zamarra, which is a sheepskin coat worn by Spanish shepherds. 

So how does a working-man's coat in Spain (admittedly a very warm coat) father a French word for gaudy adornment? I don't know. Is our statue a milord - that is, a nobleman - in a suit of armor or perhaps a fancy vest? Or is he a blue-collar Mummer? I don't know. I've decided he's both - or all three, depending on how you're counting.

In any event, there he is, gaudily dressed, clearly malevolent under the comedy, striding forward as if he owns the place.

Art Brut 

Where does the anger come from?

Dubuffet was one of the spark plugs behind the Art Brut movement, which got its start in the late 1940s. In the words of the Tate, "Art brut is a French term that translates as 'raw art', invented by the French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art such as graffiti or naïve art which is made outside the academic tradition of fine art." The Tate adds that, in addition to graffiti, art brut includes "the work of the insane, prisoners, children, and primitive artists." It was "the raw expression of a vision or emotions, untramelled by convention." Dubuffet tried "to incorporate these qualities into his own art." 

I have decided that Four Trees is channeling children and Mr. Milord is channeling crazy people.

But, in addition to the anger, there is a brittle quality, a fragility. The way his body has been assembled, he appears to be in imminent danger of collapse, possibly held together only by his anger.

To see how Dubuffet pulls this off, we need to look at something called the Hourloupe Cycle.

The Hourloupe Cycle 

When you look at Mr. Milord or the Four Trees, it's hard not to notice the black outlines of the various segments. And then I find myself thinking of Keith Haring. Haring has a mural in the Point Breeze section of Philadelphia. Here's a photo of We the Youth (1987, restored 2013). 

(For a story and pictures by Mural Arts Philadelphia, click here.)

It turns out that Mr. Milord and the Four Trees, in addition to being influenced by Art Brut, also came along in the middle of what is called Dubuffet's Hourloupe Cycle. (Just so you know, the word hourloupe doesn't seem to have any meaning.)

I think that a basic idea behind hourloupe was radical simplification. Dubuffet wanted his hand to connect directly with - something - without the intervention of his conscious brain. Here again, as with Art Brut, Dubuffet, a sophisticated Frenchman to his fingertips, was attempting to escape the clutches of the French Academy.

The National Gallery of Australia reports that the hourloupe cycle "was inspired by doodles that Dubuffet made with a ballpoint pen while talking on the telephone in July 1962." 

His hourloupe studies began with drawings and paintings, but in due course he started exploring his ideas in three dimensions, and eventually we get to Mr. Milord. 

So if parts of Mr. Milord look like crumpled paper to you, I wouldn't disagree. And if you think some of his armor plates may have gotten started as post-it notes, I'd tell you that Post-It notes weren't introduced until 1980, and then I would agree with you on the general proposition, maybe with Elmer's glue or - better - pushpins that eventually get turned into rivets. Just guessing.

Disintegration

It is worth remembering that Dubuffet was French and not American. Let's have a look at some of what France went through while he watched. First there was World War II, an experience of defeat, occupation, and eventual liberation by foreign powers. Then France had not one but two Vietnams. The first was actually in Indochina. The second was in Algeria, and it brought down the Fourth Republic. Then, in May 1968, students began their famous revolt, many others joined in, the government and the economy came to a halt, and it seemed briefly that the new Fifth Republic might fall in turn. (It didn't.) And, shortly thereafter, Dubuffet created Mr. Milord. I think this statue is basically about the ever-present possibility of disintegration, and what that might look like. 

Angry and ridiculous.

So what can we Americans learn from Mr. Milord? I think we are rounding out a long historical circle that began in the middle of the last century, with the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War and Watergate (for me the turning point was the Tet offensive in 1968). Will we fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as amended, or will we continue down the path to a military state under autocratic rule, similar to eighteenth-century Prussia? These issues were raised pointedly at mid-century, and I think we will see the answers in the relatively near future.

As I suggested earlier, I think Milord la Chamarre, with all his aggressive fragility, speaks to our time. Will he destroy everything around him, or will he finish disintegrating first? I think it's an open question.

Closing with a shot of Claes Oldenburg's 1976 Clothespin sculpture, which stands outside at Centre Square, perhaps 100 feet from Mr. Milord.

1993.

Special thanks to Chris Murtha for guiding me to sources I would not otherwise have found. Needless to say, we will not blame him for the many zany opinions I have expressed in this story. 

See also What the Greeks Knew, Little Karl, The 800-Pound Gorilla in the Oval Office.