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Lot Essay
Executed in 1950 Mademoiselle Bois de Rose(Miss Rosewood) is an outstandingly raw portrait of a woman that relates closely to Dubuffet's celebrated Corps de Dame series but also reflects the artist's belief in Art Brut. An imposing and powerful work of great presence, Mademoiselle Bois de Roseis a work whose surface vibrates and resonates with raw energy looking more like a piece of street graffiti than an oil portrait. Every indication of skill or craftsmanship has been subordinated in order to assert the raw primal force and energy of expression that Dubuffet believed was only to be found in areas away from the hallowed halls of the art gallery. "Real art is always lurking where you don't expect it. Where nobody's thinking about it or mentions its name," Dubuffet had written proudly the previous year asserting his belief in the supremacy of Art Brut. "Art loathes being recognized and greeted by name. It hurries off straight away. Art is a somebody who adores being incognito. As soon as you discover him, point a finger in his direction and he escapes, leaving his place to a figure with a laurel wreath , who carries a big signboard on his back marked 'Art' whom everyone toasts with champagne, and whom the conference people lead from town to town with a ring in his nose. That's the fake Mr Art. He's the one the public know because he's the one with the wreath and the signboard. There's no danger that the real Mr Art will go and squash himself between signboards! So nobody recognises him. He walks around everywhere, everyone's, met him on his path, and has bumped into him twenty times a day on the street corner, but no-one has an inkling that 'that' could be the Mr Art that everyone says such nice things about. Because he doesn't look like that at all. You understand of course, it's the fake Mr Art who has the right air, and it's the real one who doesn't look the part! That means you get it wrong! Lots of people get it wrong!" (Jean Dubuffet L'Art Brut préfaeré aux Arts Culturels exhib.cat. Galerie René Drouin, 1949)
Seeking an art that connected directly with the common man, Dubuffet valued most highly the untutored art of children, of street graffiti and of mental patients whose art had greatly impressed him on seeing it reproduced in Dr H. Prinzhorn's 1922 book Bildnerei der Geisteskranken . In the portraits he began to paint in the spring of 1950, Dubuffet deliberately sought to bring to the fore the expressive power of raw, crude and untutored gestures; to celebrate their assault on the delicate niceties of conventional notions of peinture and of the artist as a master craftsman by assaulting the canvas and presenting upon it the raw earthy reality of everyday life. In choosing the female figure with which to express these ideas, he at once created images that seemed to display a physical assault on the woman's body - not unlike Willem de Kooning's roughly contemporaneous series of Women paintings. At the same time, through their imposing physical bulk and the earthiness of their texture Dubuffet's figures of women seem to emulate the primeval adulation of the female as an earth-mother, and in this they asserted a new sense of feminine identity. This disparity was taken to an extreme in the Corps de Dame series where Dubuffet essentially flattened the form of the woman to such a point that her body became merely a scarred textured landscape.
"In the forty or fifty pictures I painted between April 1950 and February 1951 there was good reason not to take the drawing seriously. It was always outrageously crude and careless, enclosing the figure of the nude woman in a way which, taken literally, would suggest abominably obese, deformed creatures. My intention was that the drawing should deny the figure any particular shape; that on the contrary, it should prevent the figure from assuming this or that particular form, that it should keep it on the level of a general concept, of something immaterial. It amused me (and I believe this propensity to be almost constant in my paintings) to juxtapose brutally in these female bodies the most general and the most particular, the most subjective and the most objective, the metaphysical and the grotesquely trivial. As far as I believe, one finds itself considerably reinforced by the presence of the other. This same tendency gives rise to apparently illogical relationships between textures suggesting human flesh (to the extent of offending one's sense of decency a bit sometimes, but that seems very effective too, to me), and other textures which have nothing more to do with anything human but instead suggest earth, or all sorts of things like bark, rocks, botanical or geographical phenomena. I must admit I experience a certain pleasure in jumbling up facts like this which belong to completely different spheres. It seems to me that it provokes all sorts of transformations and polarisations which throw objects into an unusual light, and can give them new and unknown meanings." (Jean Dubuffet in L'Art Brut de Jean Dubuffet Tableau bon levain à vous de cuire la pte, exhib cat, New York, 1953.)
Although similar in many respects, Mademoiselle Bois de Rosediffers from these works in that here Dubuffet clearly presents a portrait of an individual. Given a clear personality with her curly hair and smiling face scrawled into the heavy earthy surface of the work, Dubuffet's emphasis here is on the graphic power of his raw incisions into the textured surface of the work and their ability to carve the outlines of a distinct personality. The thick texture of work bestows a sense of universality, but out of this an individual human presence emerges. Dubuffet's loose scrawls do not just delineate the form of Mademoiselle Bois de Rose but they also capture a trace of her prescence. Like the scratch marks that show the ravages of time on the walls and doors of a busy street, they mark a living presence and it is in this respect that Mademoiselle Bois de Rose clearly exemplifies the highest aims of Art Brut.
Seeking an art that connected directly with the common man, Dubuffet valued most highly the untutored art of children, of street graffiti and of mental patients whose art had greatly impressed him on seeing it reproduced in Dr H. Prinzhorn's 1922 book Bildnerei der Geisteskranken . In the portraits he began to paint in the spring of 1950, Dubuffet deliberately sought to bring to the fore the expressive power of raw, crude and untutored gestures; to celebrate their assault on the delicate niceties of conventional notions of peinture and of the artist as a master craftsman by assaulting the canvas and presenting upon it the raw earthy reality of everyday life. In choosing the female figure with which to express these ideas, he at once created images that seemed to display a physical assault on the woman's body - not unlike Willem de Kooning's roughly contemporaneous series of Women paintings. At the same time, through their imposing physical bulk and the earthiness of their texture Dubuffet's figures of women seem to emulate the primeval adulation of the female as an earth-mother, and in this they asserted a new sense of feminine identity. This disparity was taken to an extreme in the Corps de Dame series where Dubuffet essentially flattened the form of the woman to such a point that her body became merely a scarred textured landscape.
"In the forty or fifty pictures I painted between April 1950 and February 1951 there was good reason not to take the drawing seriously. It was always outrageously crude and careless, enclosing the figure of the nude woman in a way which, taken literally, would suggest abominably obese, deformed creatures. My intention was that the drawing should deny the figure any particular shape; that on the contrary, it should prevent the figure from assuming this or that particular form, that it should keep it on the level of a general concept, of something immaterial. It amused me (and I believe this propensity to be almost constant in my paintings) to juxtapose brutally in these female bodies the most general and the most particular, the most subjective and the most objective, the metaphysical and the grotesquely trivial. As far as I believe, one finds itself considerably reinforced by the presence of the other. This same tendency gives rise to apparently illogical relationships between textures suggesting human flesh (to the extent of offending one's sense of decency a bit sometimes, but that seems very effective too, to me), and other textures which have nothing more to do with anything human but instead suggest earth, or all sorts of things like bark, rocks, botanical or geographical phenomena. I must admit I experience a certain pleasure in jumbling up facts like this which belong to completely different spheres. It seems to me that it provokes all sorts of transformations and polarisations which throw objects into an unusual light, and can give them new and unknown meanings." (Jean Dubuffet in L'Art Brut de Jean Dubuffet Tableau bon levain à vous de cuire la pte, exhib cat, New York, 1953.)
Although similar in many respects, Mademoiselle Bois de Rosediffers from these works in that here Dubuffet clearly presents a portrait of an individual. Given a clear personality with her curly hair and smiling face scrawled into the heavy earthy surface of the work, Dubuffet's emphasis here is on the graphic power of his raw incisions into the textured surface of the work and their ability to carve the outlines of a distinct personality. The thick texture of work bestows a sense of universality, but out of this an individual human presence emerges. Dubuffet's loose scrawls do not just delineate the form of Mademoiselle Bois de Rose but they also capture a trace of her prescence. Like the scratch marks that show the ravages of time on the walls and doors of a busy street, they mark a living presence and it is in this respect that Mademoiselle Bois de Rose clearly exemplifies the highest aims of Art Brut.