Lot Essay
In February 1961 Jean Dubuffet returned to Paris after spending the previous six years in Vence in the Alpes Maritimes. Dubuffet now reclaimed the role of social observer and commentator, taking as his subject the dynamism of the urban landscape and its inhabitants. He expressed his desire to concentrate on the outside world in a letter to Hubert Damisch: "I want to fill the site of the painting with magic...I want my street to be crazy, my pavements, shops and flats to enter in a mad dance which is why I transform the shapes and colours..." (Max Loreau, Catalogue Integral des Travaux de Jean Dubuffet: Paris Cirque, fasc. XIX, Paris 1969, p.57)
Such a desire inspired the "Paris Circus" paintings. These works, packed with colour and vitality, showed the bustling, colourful, urban jungle that was Dubuffet's Paris. Brightly painted city scenes offered panoramic vistas of streets where people, cars and lettering all made up a wild, flat pattern - not unlike a mosaic or a jigsaw puzzle.
Executed at the same time, "Cortège" has the jazzy vitality and charm of the "Paris Circus" series. The animated picture surface, the sugar-candy colours, and the lively brushwork all testify to their close relationship. In this respect Glincher's words on Dubuffet's technique in these years are enlightening: "The intense and often jarring colours are fragmented and woven together on the surface of the canvas using the palette knife, sponge, fingers or a dry brush. These colours that activate and fracture the surface, cultivating a riot of excess are familiar from earlier paintings that portray the exterior world." (M. Glincher, Jean Dubuffet towards an Alternative Reality, New York 1987, p. 15)
Dubuffet was clearly exhilarated by this fresh approach: "I feel a need that every work of art should in the highest degree lift one out of context, provoking a surprise and a shock. A painting does not work for me if it is not completely unexpected. Hence my new concern, which gives me the satisfaction of being taken to territory where no-one else has been." (Jean Dubuffet, in a letter to Peter Selz, December 21, 1961)
Such a desire inspired the "Paris Circus" paintings. These works, packed with colour and vitality, showed the bustling, colourful, urban jungle that was Dubuffet's Paris. Brightly painted city scenes offered panoramic vistas of streets where people, cars and lettering all made up a wild, flat pattern - not unlike a mosaic or a jigsaw puzzle.
Executed at the same time, "Cortège" has the jazzy vitality and charm of the "Paris Circus" series. The animated picture surface, the sugar-candy colours, and the lively brushwork all testify to their close relationship. In this respect Glincher's words on Dubuffet's technique in these years are enlightening: "The intense and often jarring colours are fragmented and woven together on the surface of the canvas using the palette knife, sponge, fingers or a dry brush. These colours that activate and fracture the surface, cultivating a riot of excess are familiar from earlier paintings that portray the exterior world." (M. Glincher, Jean Dubuffet towards an Alternative Reality, New York 1987, p. 15)
Dubuffet was clearly exhilarated by this fresh approach: "I feel a need that every work of art should in the highest degree lift one out of context, provoking a surprise and a shock. A painting does not work for me if it is not completely unexpected. Hence my new concern, which gives me the satisfaction of being taken to territory where no-one else has been." (Jean Dubuffet, in a letter to Peter Selz, December 21, 1961)