Lot Essay
Dubuffet completed Affaires et démarches in Paris in December, 1961. One of the largest of the Paris Circus complex, the painting depicts six travelling salesmen in animated conversation on the street, with façades of buildings and doorways surrounding them during their meeting. The brilliant, saturated hues of their clothing add to the cacophony of their surroundings and further animate their wild gesticulations as they brag to one another of their triumphs of the day.
To create Affaires et démarches, Dubuffet first doused the canvas with red and then freely covered it with broad strokes of pastel colors. These early layers were subsequently painted over with a mixture of thick and thin black lines expressively contouring the outline of the figures. This method of isolating the figures becomes more fully developed in Dubuffet's next series, L'Hourloupe. Here, the jagged contours of the figures and the energetic paint handling add to the overall volume of the scene, and thus the painting becomes a vivid portrayal of life in a modern city. Max Loreau has described the visual experience of the Paris Circus pictures as follows:
The eye is in constant drift: shifted, swept toward a neighboring form which tends to agglutinate itself to one before it; weaving an invisible fabric over the alveolus dispersed in the picture. In the canvases articulated on the basis of shop windows, the cells that fit one into the other are completed, but each line serving to delimit one of them is prolonged in another, depends on a neighboring cell, engaging the viewer in a movement of continuous sideslipping (A. Franzke, Dubuffet, New York 1981, p. 151).
The Paris Circus group was begun in February 1961 and completed by July of 1962. Dubuffet was sixty years old when he began them, and had been painting for over twenty-five years. All of the artist's accumulated knowledge of the medium was used in their creation. "The Paris Circus paintings represent a step back from the microscopic view of 1957 to 1959 as [Dubuffet] again considered his surroundings-- the city of Paris, its inhabitants, and most important, its vitality. The myriad sources in his work for these paintings include the Façades of 1946, the Paysages grotesques, the Charretts (Carts) and Jardins (Gardens) of 1955, the Legendes of 1961, as well as the Art Brut artist Paul End" (M. Glimcher, Jean Dubuffet; Towards an Alternative Reality, New York 1987, p. 14). It is as if the artist received an enormous burst of energy from the dynamism of Paris as it emerged from post-war depression to become the sparkling cultural capital of the 1960s. The films of Goddard and Truffaut that reinvented the French cinema, the new high rise apartments and offices of steel and glass that replaced the old city, the influx of new consumer goods and subsequent rise in the standard of living all contributed to the revitalization both of the city and the artist. The Paris Circus pictures stand forever as markers of that time of transition in France's cultural life.
To create Affaires et démarches, Dubuffet first doused the canvas with red and then freely covered it with broad strokes of pastel colors. These early layers were subsequently painted over with a mixture of thick and thin black lines expressively contouring the outline of the figures. This method of isolating the figures becomes more fully developed in Dubuffet's next series, L'Hourloupe. Here, the jagged contours of the figures and the energetic paint handling add to the overall volume of the scene, and thus the painting becomes a vivid portrayal of life in a modern city. Max Loreau has described the visual experience of the Paris Circus pictures as follows:
The eye is in constant drift: shifted, swept toward a neighboring form which tends to agglutinate itself to one before it; weaving an invisible fabric over the alveolus dispersed in the picture. In the canvases articulated on the basis of shop windows, the cells that fit one into the other are completed, but each line serving to delimit one of them is prolonged in another, depends on a neighboring cell, engaging the viewer in a movement of continuous sideslipping (A. Franzke, Dubuffet, New York 1981, p. 151).
The Paris Circus group was begun in February 1961 and completed by July of 1962. Dubuffet was sixty years old when he began them, and had been painting for over twenty-five years. All of the artist's accumulated knowledge of the medium was used in their creation. "The Paris Circus paintings represent a step back from the microscopic view of 1957 to 1959 as [Dubuffet] again considered his surroundings-- the city of Paris, its inhabitants, and most important, its vitality. The myriad sources in his work for these paintings include the Façades of 1946, the Paysages grotesques, the Charretts (Carts) and Jardins (Gardens) of 1955, the Legendes of 1961, as well as the Art Brut artist Paul End" (M. Glimcher, Jean Dubuffet; Towards an Alternative Reality, New York 1987, p. 14). It is as if the artist received an enormous burst of energy from the dynamism of Paris as it emerged from post-war depression to become the sparkling cultural capital of the 1960s. The films of Goddard and Truffaut that reinvented the French cinema, the new high rise apartments and offices of steel and glass that replaced the old city, the influx of new consumer goods and subsequent rise in the standard of living all contributed to the revitalization both of the city and the artist. The Paris Circus pictures stand forever as markers of that time of transition in France's cultural life.