(Le Havre 1901–1985 Paris)
Bon Espoir (Paysage avec personnages), 1955, signed and dated 55; titled, signed and dated Vence août 1955 on the reverse, oil on canvas, 88 x 115 cm, framed

We are grateful to Fondation Dubuffet, Paris for the assistance with cataloguing this work

Provenance:
Galerie René Drouin, Paris
European Private Collection (from the late 1970s)

Exhibited:
Vence, Vingt tableaux peints récemment à Vence par Jean Dubuffet, Galerie les Mages, 1–3 October 1955, exh. cat. no. 5

Literature:
L. Trucchi, Jean Dubuffet, De Luca Editore, Rome 1965, p. 211,
no. 180 with ill.
M. Loreau, Catalogue des Travaux de Jean Dubuffet, Fascicule XI: Charrettes, jardins, personnages, monolithes, Weber Editeur, Switzerland 1969, p. 65, with ill. no. 77

With respect to the use of this sparkling coloured material [butterfly wings, around 1955] – the constituent parts of which remain indistinguishable – with the aim of producing a very vivid effect of scintillation, I realised that, for me, this responds to needs of the same order as those that formerly led me, in many drawings and paintings, to organize my lines and patches of colour so that the objects represented would meld into everything around them, so that the result would be a sort of continuous, universal soup with an intensive flavour of life.
Jean Dubuffet

Three Works by DUBUFFET from an important Private Collection

Jean Debuffet was born in Le Havre in 1901, and made the journey from wine producer to artist. A move to Paris and acquaintance with Suzanne Valadon and Fernand Léger stimulated an interest, from the early Twenties on, in primordial, unconstrained forms of expression, like the language of children, of primitive peoples, or psychiatric patients.

Those who try to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy art, and who try to describe the characteristics of approaches to the creation of art judged to be pathological, will never find a conclusive formula. Many years later, this interest would bring him to create a new graphic code, which takes the concept of iconographic expressionism free from rational conditioning from these very forms of communication.

The expression Art Brut, literally ‘raw art’, coined by the artist in 1945, evokes the concept of art far removed from traditional ideals of beauty. It is a type of art which even before being an aesthetic exploration is an anthropological one, born in reclusive environments, and which investigates the relationship between social marginalisation and artistic expression.

The artist’s task is to free, through the creative process, the expressive qualities intrinsic to the different materials employed, humble materials that are similarly marginal to those social groups whose languages Dubuffet reinterprets.

Material is thus the indisputable protagonist of Dubuffet’s work, rough and brutal material, often exceeding the limits of the canvas, appearing almost sculptural. This density, typical of the artist’s work, is the result of a pictorial technique that employs spatulas and instruments that cut or model the mixture on the canvas, in a continuous process of addition and subtraction. The figures which Dubuffet creates on the canvas, cutting into the material, are only roughly sketched, and often combine with the background, creating grotesque forms or shapes which evoke incompleteness.I want portraits in which description makes use of the same mechanisms as those used in a landscape; here wrinkles, there ravines or paths; here a nose, there a tree; here a mouth, there a house.

In „Bon Espoir“ (Paysage avec personnage), Dubuffet moves between abstraction and figuration. The figures, flattened against the background, fluctuate freely without a specific position in space, and are simultaneously visible from more than one point of view, a technique borrowed from Picasso and Braque, creating an optical effect of irregularity that at times appears to exceed the limits of the canvas. Detail in this work is purposefully elusive, the fusion between the human figure and the background responding to the need of the artist to explore the ambiguous relationship between the earth and its inhabitants.

A figurative rendering bereft of detail also characterises the drawing „Tête“, where the face depicted is rendered in a simplified manner, barely sketched. The subject is the everyman, the anthropological study of whom is at the core of Art Brut and the artistic experimentation of Dubuffet. As far as I’m concerned, the ‘exceptionnel’ interests me little, wherever it is. My sustenance is the ‘commun’. The more ordinary it is, the better. Luckily I don’t feel at all out of the ordinary; I would like to rediscover in my paintings the viewpoint of an average, ordinary man. Jean Dubuffet

In the series Matériologies, of which „Buisson au papillon“ is an example, Dubuffet places the emphasis on the materials used: botanical elements, applied to the canvas by the artist, celebrate the organic world as a “place where everything is possible, where one gathers a dry leaf which is a camouflaged butterfly, where one believes oneself to be touching a dolmen which is in fact a termite mound. The fantastic is found in our garden.” G. Celli