Lot Essay
In 1961 Dubuffet returned to Paris after a six year retreat in the French countryside. He found a changed city. Gone was the repressive grimness and angst that had resulted from post-war shortages and rationing. Paris of the 60s was revitalised and swinging with the same headiness and prosperity that would bring about the Pop revolution in London and New York.
Dubuffet similarly revelled in the jazzy bustle and conspicuous consumerism of the urban landscape and the frenetic pulse of the city seemed to energise his art with a new vigour and enthusiasm. The result was the Paris Circus paintings, which today rank as his most popular and acclaimed series. Of these, Paris-Montparnasse is one of the largest and certainly the most archetypical example.
The Paris Circus pictures were a complete contrast to the previous Texturology and Materiology series and the latters' obsession with the microscopic textures of nature. Dubuffet wrote in 1961, "They are in every way the opposite. I believe more and more that my paintings of the previous years avoided in subject and execution specific human motivations. To paint the earth the painter tended to become the earth and to cease to be man - that is, to be a painter. In reaction against the absenteeist tendency my paintings of ...[1961] put into play in all aspects a very insistent intervention. The presence in them of the painter now is constant, even exaggerated. They are full of personages, and this time their role is played with spirit."
The subject of Paris streetlife inevitably recalls Dubuffet's earlier city series of 1943-44 entitled Les Vues de Paris. Again the artist shows himself to be an astute and witty social observer, but this time he takes a bird's-eye view of the teeming boulevards. Peter Selz could just as well been describing Paris-Montparnasse when he wrote, "He portrays his fellow humans eating in cavernous restaurants, walking in streets with purposeless hurry, displaying themselves in department stores, driving in octopus-shaped little Fords and Citroens with the compulsive anxiety of trapped animals... These people, generally without arms, are presented either in a schematic front view or in a conspicuous profile... These figures move in fantastic relationships to one another. Some are upright; others are on their side or upside down and piled on each other without clear spatial structure of any sort... Dubuffet's new cityscapes seem to track man's voyage through modern life." (P. Selz, The Work of Jean Dubuffet, New York 1971, p.160).
You can almost hear the toot-tooting of the traffic and smell the petrol fumes as it rumbles bumper-to-bumper along the broad boulevard in Paris-Montparnasse. The exhaust-fumed cacophony is reflected in the smoggy coloration of the painted surface which actually conceals a rainbow of underpaint beneath its encrusted layering. Pancake-flat cars jostle with each other for room within the constricted space, while the bus seems to stretch the confines of the road with its bulbous girth. The jumble of pedestrians and commuters appear so vital as to defy the laws of gravity and they float as though lifted by their balloon-like heads. Everyone seems to scurry with conscientious resolve, but without any real direction or purpose. This is indeed a portrait of modern human existence.
The scale of Paris-Montparnasse is panoramic in its monumentality and not surprisingly, it ranks as one of the five largest Paris Circus paintings in the series. Three of these are owned by major institutions: Rue Pfifre is in the Fukuoka Museum; Le commerce prospere is in New York's Museum of Modern Art and Le Plomb dans l'aile belongs to The Detroit Institute. Only two remain today in private hands: Paris Polka and Paris-Montparnasse.
Dubuffet similarly revelled in the jazzy bustle and conspicuous consumerism of the urban landscape and the frenetic pulse of the city seemed to energise his art with a new vigour and enthusiasm. The result was the Paris Circus paintings, which today rank as his most popular and acclaimed series. Of these, Paris-Montparnasse is one of the largest and certainly the most archetypical example.
The Paris Circus pictures were a complete contrast to the previous Texturology and Materiology series and the latters' obsession with the microscopic textures of nature. Dubuffet wrote in 1961, "They are in every way the opposite. I believe more and more that my paintings of the previous years avoided in subject and execution specific human motivations. To paint the earth the painter tended to become the earth and to cease to be man - that is, to be a painter. In reaction against the absenteeist tendency my paintings of ...[1961] put into play in all aspects a very insistent intervention. The presence in them of the painter now is constant, even exaggerated. They are full of personages, and this time their role is played with spirit."
The subject of Paris streetlife inevitably recalls Dubuffet's earlier city series of 1943-44 entitled Les Vues de Paris. Again the artist shows himself to be an astute and witty social observer, but this time he takes a bird's-eye view of the teeming boulevards. Peter Selz could just as well been describing Paris-Montparnasse when he wrote, "He portrays his fellow humans eating in cavernous restaurants, walking in streets with purposeless hurry, displaying themselves in department stores, driving in octopus-shaped little Fords and Citroens with the compulsive anxiety of trapped animals... These people, generally without arms, are presented either in a schematic front view or in a conspicuous profile... These figures move in fantastic relationships to one another. Some are upright; others are on their side or upside down and piled on each other without clear spatial structure of any sort... Dubuffet's new cityscapes seem to track man's voyage through modern life." (P. Selz, The Work of Jean Dubuffet, New York 1971, p.160).
You can almost hear the toot-tooting of the traffic and smell the petrol fumes as it rumbles bumper-to-bumper along the broad boulevard in Paris-Montparnasse. The exhaust-fumed cacophony is reflected in the smoggy coloration of the painted surface which actually conceals a rainbow of underpaint beneath its encrusted layering. Pancake-flat cars jostle with each other for room within the constricted space, while the bus seems to stretch the confines of the road with its bulbous girth. The jumble of pedestrians and commuters appear so vital as to defy the laws of gravity and they float as though lifted by their balloon-like heads. Everyone seems to scurry with conscientious resolve, but without any real direction or purpose. This is indeed a portrait of modern human existence.
The scale of Paris-Montparnasse is panoramic in its monumentality and not surprisingly, it ranks as one of the five largest Paris Circus paintings in the series. Three of these are owned by major institutions: Rue Pfifre is in the Fukuoka Museum; Le commerce prospere is in New York's Museum of Modern Art and Le Plomb dans l'aile belongs to The Detroit Institute. Only two remain today in private hands: Paris Polka and Paris-Montparnasse.