Lot Essay
Jean Dubuffet's paintings were first exhibited in a one-man show in 1944 at the Galerie René Drouin in Paris. Although as a young man Dubuffet had trained to be an artist, two prior attempts to launch a professional art career were abandoned by him as fruitless. He had settled into his family's wine business and successfully pursued a career as a wine merchant. In 1942, however, he once again began to paint, intitially for pleasure, but by the following spring he exhibited one painting in a group show on the theme of the nude at the Galerie Drouin.
Dubuffet's first paintings from the mid-1940s used vivid, unified colors applied thickly to the canvas. His early subjects included scenes from the Paris metro as well as urban street scenes.
The facade paintings of 1943-1944 are the direct precedents for Façades d'immeubles, one of three monumental versions of this subject painted in July, 1946. Unlike many of his works from the mid-forties, in these three large pictures Dubuffet rejects both the vivid colors and the thick texture he had often used to such advantage. In Façades d'immeubles, he strongly emphasizes the detailed linear articulation which is so starkly set off against the lacquer-black paint applied relatively evenly on the canvas. His animated graffito scratched into the black surface creates a row of buildings, packed up against the picture plane with only a narrow margin of sky at the top edge. Shop signs proclaim "opticien," "parfums," "modes," "coiffeur," "journaux," and "primeurs" across the bottom where smiling Parisians stroll beneath their neighbors who peer out from the windows and cast-iron balconies.
Façades d'immeubles certainly is a major precursor for his highly regarded Paris Circus paintings of the early 1960s. Those later works share the sense of compressed space and exuberant celebration of urban life of the 1946 painting, but the later works tend to utilize a far greater variety of texture, more complex space and deployment of figures.
Shortly after the creation of Façades d'immeubles in January 1947, at his New York Gallery, Pierre Matisse exhibited the first three paintings by Dubuffet to be shown outside of France. The reception was highly enthusiastic and the influential American critic Clement Greenberg hailed Dubuffet as one of the decisive artists of the century. Unlike the positive response to his work in France which had been confined to a small circle of intellectuals, American collectors and museums were receptive to Dubuffet's work and major paintings entered American collections, initially from the ongoing exhibitions of his works at the Pierre Matisse Gallery.
The enthusiastic American response to his work was one impetus that brought Dubuffet to live and work in New York in 1951-1952. During this period the Arts Club of Chicago mounted a retrospective of his work and Dubuffet delivered a talk on his "anticultural positions." The ideas the artist expressed in conjunction with this exhibition reveal artistic goals of his work which remained constant and to which he remained loyal throughout his lifetime.
Art addresses itself to the mind, and not to the
eyes. It has always been considered in this way by
primitive peoples, and they are right. Art is a
language, instrument of knowledge, instrument of
expression.... Painting is a language much more
immediate, and, at the same time, much more charged
with meaning. Painting operates with signs which are
not abstract and incorporal like words. The signs of
painting are much closer to the objects themselves.
Further, painting manipulates materials which are
themselves living substances. That is why painting
allows one to go much further than words do, in
approaching things and conjuring them.... Painting
now, using these two powerful means, can illuminate the
world with wonderful discoveries, can endow man with
new myths and new mystics, and reveal, in infinite
number, unsuspected aspects of things, and new values
not yet perceived. (J. Dubuffet, "Anticultural Positions,"
as reprinted in Dubuffet and the Anticulture, Richard
L. Feigen & Co., New York, 1970)
Dubuffet's first paintings from the mid-1940s used vivid, unified colors applied thickly to the canvas. His early subjects included scenes from the Paris metro as well as urban street scenes.
The facade paintings of 1943-1944 are the direct precedents for Façades d'immeubles, one of three monumental versions of this subject painted in July, 1946. Unlike many of his works from the mid-forties, in these three large pictures Dubuffet rejects both the vivid colors and the thick texture he had often used to such advantage. In Façades d'immeubles, he strongly emphasizes the detailed linear articulation which is so starkly set off against the lacquer-black paint applied relatively evenly on the canvas. His animated graffito scratched into the black surface creates a row of buildings, packed up against the picture plane with only a narrow margin of sky at the top edge. Shop signs proclaim "opticien," "parfums," "modes," "coiffeur," "journaux," and "primeurs" across the bottom where smiling Parisians stroll beneath their neighbors who peer out from the windows and cast-iron balconies.
Façades d'immeubles certainly is a major precursor for his highly regarded Paris Circus paintings of the early 1960s. Those later works share the sense of compressed space and exuberant celebration of urban life of the 1946 painting, but the later works tend to utilize a far greater variety of texture, more complex space and deployment of figures.
Shortly after the creation of Façades d'immeubles in January 1947, at his New York Gallery, Pierre Matisse exhibited the first three paintings by Dubuffet to be shown outside of France. The reception was highly enthusiastic and the influential American critic Clement Greenberg hailed Dubuffet as one of the decisive artists of the century. Unlike the positive response to his work in France which had been confined to a small circle of intellectuals, American collectors and museums were receptive to Dubuffet's work and major paintings entered American collections, initially from the ongoing exhibitions of his works at the Pierre Matisse Gallery.
The enthusiastic American response to his work was one impetus that brought Dubuffet to live and work in New York in 1951-1952. During this period the Arts Club of Chicago mounted a retrospective of his work and Dubuffet delivered a talk on his "anticultural positions." The ideas the artist expressed in conjunction with this exhibition reveal artistic goals of his work which remained constant and to which he remained loyal throughout his lifetime.
Art addresses itself to the mind, and not to the
eyes. It has always been considered in this way by
primitive peoples, and they are right. Art is a
language, instrument of knowledge, instrument of
expression.... Painting is a language much more
immediate, and, at the same time, much more charged
with meaning. Painting operates with signs which are
not abstract and incorporal like words. The signs of
painting are much closer to the objects themselves.
Further, painting manipulates materials which are
themselves living substances. That is why painting
allows one to go much further than words do, in
approaching things and conjuring them.... Painting
now, using these two powerful means, can illuminate the
world with wonderful discoveries, can endow man with
new myths and new mystics, and reveal, in infinite
number, unsuspected aspects of things, and new values
not yet perceived. (J. Dubuffet, "Anticultural Positions,"
as reprinted in Dubuffet and the Anticulture, Richard
L. Feigen & Co., New York, 1970)