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Lot Essay
'There is no art without intoxication. But I mean a mad intoxication! Let reason teeter! Delirium! The highest degree of delirium! Plunged in burning dementia! Art is the most enrapturing orgy within man's reach. 'Art must make you laugh a little and make you a little afraid. Anything as long as it doesn't bore' (J. Dubuffet, 1959, quoted in Jean Dubuffet 1943-1963: Paintings Sculptures Assemblages, exh. cat., Washington D.C., 1993, p. 8).
Homme au béret forms a part of Dubuffet's series Personnages peu corporels (or 'Barely Corporeal People') a rare group comprising only a few works which sprung up in September 1959. Max Loreau explained in his catalogue raisonné of Dubuffet's work that these paintings came about when the artist took recourse to oil on canvas during a period when he was focussing on pictures and sculptures made from a variety of other materials. Indeed, some of his paintings of this period, which saw the Barbes, made of collaged prints, and the Eléments botaniques, made of vegetal matter, involved preparation time: Loreau links the Personnages peu corporels of September to the drying of the leaves that Dubuffet was using in some of his pictures. However, as is clear from a glance at the large canvas of Homme au béret, this is more than a side-effect: Dubuffet has brought into existence a striking character who clearly fulfils the criteria that the artist himself discussed during the same year in the quote above.
This highly textured painting has a deliberately limited, earthen overall palette, yet closer inspection shows a wealth of variety within the confines of this self-imposed restraint. That variety is in part the product of Dubuffet's purposeful use of chance, embracing the marks and effects caused by different interactions with the oil, the canvas and indeed with the outside world and other objects. This helps to bridge the gap between image and viewer, to create a painting that is filled with a vivid immediacy.
Homme au béret forms a part of Dubuffet's series Personnages peu corporels (or 'Barely Corporeal People') a rare group comprising only a few works which sprung up in September 1959. Max Loreau explained in his catalogue raisonné of Dubuffet's work that these paintings came about when the artist took recourse to oil on canvas during a period when he was focussing on pictures and sculptures made from a variety of other materials. Indeed, some of his paintings of this period, which saw the Barbes, made of collaged prints, and the Eléments botaniques, made of vegetal matter, involved preparation time: Loreau links the Personnages peu corporels of September to the drying of the leaves that Dubuffet was using in some of his pictures. However, as is clear from a glance at the large canvas of Homme au béret, this is more than a side-effect: Dubuffet has brought into existence a striking character who clearly fulfils the criteria that the artist himself discussed during the same year in the quote above.
This highly textured painting has a deliberately limited, earthen overall palette, yet closer inspection shows a wealth of variety within the confines of this self-imposed restraint. That variety is in part the product of Dubuffet's purposeful use of chance, embracing the marks and effects caused by different interactions with the oil, the canvas and indeed with the outside world and other objects. This helps to bridge the gap between image and viewer, to create a painting that is filled with a vivid immediacy.