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Lot Essay
In 1974, Jean Dubuffet painted what would be the last works of his groundbreaking Hourloupe series, of which the present lot, Untitled, is a paradigmatic example. Underpinned by a critical intellectual rigor, the Hourloupe series is a product of Dubuffet's philosophical investigations into the possibility of representing utopic worlds and absolute truths through painting, and his radical conclusion that these things existed outside of the normal categories of western humanist thought.
In Untitled, Dubuffet has unleashed a fantastically energetic style marked by intricate patterns that teeter between abstraction and figuration. Flattened human figures appear to float on a dense background of alternating irregular fields of pristine white and striated lines that threaten to take over the canvas, but are reined in at the last moment by Dubuffet's masterful control. Several of the artistic strategies used by Picasso and Braque in their Synthetic Cubist masterpieces are further developed by Dubuffet. Figures are visible from multiple viewpoints simultaneously, accentuating the shifting quality of the painting. The palette of Untitled has also been restricted to mostly black and white and blue, a signature characteristic of the Hourloupe series in order to disarm the historical values of color.
While the shapes on the canvas are evocative of real form, their details remain deliberately elusive. The figures of Untitled exist free of any specific location in time or space: they could be anyone in any type of landscape, and yet they bear little resemblance to anything we are familiar with in our world. All sense of depth has been erased, as well as any sense of hierarchy of form within the image. In this way, Dubuffet claimed to have "abolish[ed] all particularities, all categories (by which I mean the usual classifications adopted by our reflexive mind which makes distinctions between one notion and another: between the notion of chair for example and that of tree, that of human, figure, cloud, ground, landscape, or anything else) so that this consistently uniform script indifferently applied to all things (and it should be emphasized, not only visible objects but also invisible inventions of our thoughts, imagination or fantasy; mixed together without discrimination) will reduce them all to the lowest common denominator and restitute a continuous undifferentiated universe; it will thereby dissolve the categories which our mind habitually employs to decipher (better to say cipher) the facts and spectacles of the world" (Jean Dubuffet, quoted in Margit Rowell, "Jean Dubuffet: An Art on the Margins of Culture," pp. 15-34, in Jean Dubuffet: A Retrospective, New York, 1973, p. 26).
While serious in its existential investigations, the Hourloupe series was in fact the result of an accidental discovery, drawn from doodles that Dubuffet made while on the phone one day: a fitting source for an artist who sought to turn the conventions of painting upside down while working within the medium's conventions. The seeming spontaneity of Dubuffet's lines, as well as his use of chance in his composition, draws comparison with the automatic drawings of the Surrealists.
As part of a generation of post-World War II artists, Dubuffet understood the unfixed nature of reality, and the always present possibility that everything can change in an instant. Through his experimentations with form, color, and perception, Dubuffet challenged the traditional values that we assume to exist in the world around us. Emblematic of the Hourloupe series, Untitled leads us to question our own interpretation of reality - a questioning that is reflected back to us in the uneasy ambiguity of the figures' expressions.
In Untitled, Dubuffet has unleashed a fantastically energetic style marked by intricate patterns that teeter between abstraction and figuration. Flattened human figures appear to float on a dense background of alternating irregular fields of pristine white and striated lines that threaten to take over the canvas, but are reined in at the last moment by Dubuffet's masterful control. Several of the artistic strategies used by Picasso and Braque in their Synthetic Cubist masterpieces are further developed by Dubuffet. Figures are visible from multiple viewpoints simultaneously, accentuating the shifting quality of the painting. The palette of Untitled has also been restricted to mostly black and white and blue, a signature characteristic of the Hourloupe series in order to disarm the historical values of color.
While the shapes on the canvas are evocative of real form, their details remain deliberately elusive. The figures of Untitled exist free of any specific location in time or space: they could be anyone in any type of landscape, and yet they bear little resemblance to anything we are familiar with in our world. All sense of depth has been erased, as well as any sense of hierarchy of form within the image. In this way, Dubuffet claimed to have "abolish[ed] all particularities, all categories (by which I mean the usual classifications adopted by our reflexive mind which makes distinctions between one notion and another: between the notion of chair for example and that of tree, that of human, figure, cloud, ground, landscape, or anything else) so that this consistently uniform script indifferently applied to all things (and it should be emphasized, not only visible objects but also invisible inventions of our thoughts, imagination or fantasy; mixed together without discrimination) will reduce them all to the lowest common denominator and restitute a continuous undifferentiated universe; it will thereby dissolve the categories which our mind habitually employs to decipher (better to say cipher) the facts and spectacles of the world" (Jean Dubuffet, quoted in Margit Rowell, "Jean Dubuffet: An Art on the Margins of Culture," pp. 15-34, in Jean Dubuffet: A Retrospective, New York, 1973, p. 26).
While serious in its existential investigations, the Hourloupe series was in fact the result of an accidental discovery, drawn from doodles that Dubuffet made while on the phone one day: a fitting source for an artist who sought to turn the conventions of painting upside down while working within the medium's conventions. The seeming spontaneity of Dubuffet's lines, as well as his use of chance in his composition, draws comparison with the automatic drawings of the Surrealists.
As part of a generation of post-World War II artists, Dubuffet understood the unfixed nature of reality, and the always present possibility that everything can change in an instant. Through his experimentations with form, color, and perception, Dubuffet challenged the traditional values that we assume to exist in the world around us. Emblematic of the Hourloupe series, Untitled leads us to question our own interpretation of reality - a questioning that is reflected back to us in the uneasy ambiguity of the figures' expressions.