Lot Essay
From the summer of 1962 to the autumn of 1974, Dubuffet
was to remain totally wrapped up in a new sort of artistic
venture. Although it broke with the stylistic principles
and iconographic vocabulary he had developed so far, its
essential basis was not different: the invention of an
artificial world by means of a personal pictorial
handwriting. The cycle that resulted, which goes by the
name of Hourloupe, was characterized thus by Thomas M.
Messer in his introduction to the catalogue of the first
Dubuffet retrospective (1966) at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York:
"L'Hourloupe which, separated from the long lineage
of Dubuffet's previous work...constitutes a radical
break with the earlier modes and furnishes a
dramatic example of Dubuffet's capacity for self-
renewal. It is a phase that preoccupied the artist
longer and more intensely than any previous one,
allowing him to give expression to a rich diversity
of thought within the defined framework of a
particular formal premise."
To this phase--one truly complex in its diversity and
intensity-- Dubuffet gave the name "Hourloupe," a name,
he says, "invented just for the sound of it. In French
it calls to mind some object or personage of fairytale-
like and grotesque state and at the same time also something tragically growling and menacing. Both together."
With this definition one sees already staked out the whole
range of expression the artist explored during the twelve-
year period. In this far-reaching undertaking, drawings and
painting were something like stopovers and way stations on a
voyage into the third dimension. The Hourloupe principle was
given concrete form in objects and architectural works.
Perfectly consistent, it even assumed an urban quality in
which drawing, painting, and sculpture were fused into a
unity within spatial contexts. The Hourloupe cosmos-all-
embracing and incorporating all categories of the visual
arts--was finally endowed with movement to become living
active theater: between 1972 and 1973 the "spectacle"
titled Coucou Bazar set actors dressed and masked like
Hourloupe figures in to the midst of cutout shapes that were
movable, changeable, and in part electronically motored,
making an antitheater without plot or words whose subject
was no more and no less than the Hourloupe principle itself.
(A. Franzke, Dubuffet, New York, 1981, p. 159)
was to remain totally wrapped up in a new sort of artistic
venture. Although it broke with the stylistic principles
and iconographic vocabulary he had developed so far, its
essential basis was not different: the invention of an
artificial world by means of a personal pictorial
handwriting. The cycle that resulted, which goes by the
name of Hourloupe, was characterized thus by Thomas M.
Messer in his introduction to the catalogue of the first
Dubuffet retrospective (1966) at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York:
"L'Hourloupe which, separated from the long lineage
of Dubuffet's previous work...constitutes a radical
break with the earlier modes and furnishes a
dramatic example of Dubuffet's capacity for self-
renewal. It is a phase that preoccupied the artist
longer and more intensely than any previous one,
allowing him to give expression to a rich diversity
of thought within the defined framework of a
particular formal premise."
To this phase--one truly complex in its diversity and
intensity-- Dubuffet gave the name "Hourloupe," a name,
he says, "invented just for the sound of it. In French
it calls to mind some object or personage of fairytale-
like and grotesque state and at the same time also something tragically growling and menacing. Both together."
With this definition one sees already staked out the whole
range of expression the artist explored during the twelve-
year period. In this far-reaching undertaking, drawings and
painting were something like stopovers and way stations on a
voyage into the third dimension. The Hourloupe principle was
given concrete form in objects and architectural works.
Perfectly consistent, it even assumed an urban quality in
which drawing, painting, and sculpture were fused into a
unity within spatial contexts. The Hourloupe cosmos-all-
embracing and incorporating all categories of the visual
arts--was finally endowed with movement to become living
active theater: between 1972 and 1973 the "spectacle"
titled Coucou Bazar set actors dressed and masked like
Hourloupe figures in to the midst of cutout shapes that were
movable, changeable, and in part electronically motored,
making an antitheater without plot or words whose subject
was no more and no less than the Hourloupe principle itself.
(A. Franzke, Dubuffet, New York, 1981, p. 159)