Joyeuse commère

Jean Dubuffet’s Joyeuse commère is a rare and exceptional example of the artist’s pivotal Intermèdes series, his raw, distorted figure emerging out from the thickly impastoed paint layers in a masterful demonstration of technical bravado. Painted in January 1952, in the midst of Dubuffet’s six-month residency in New York City, the work is one of only a few examples to come out of the artist’s Bowery studio, manifesting a potent realization of the cross-Atlantic artistic pollination between the European avant-garde and the burgeoning New York School. Joyeuse commère’s thickly laid impasto is eloquently kneaded onto the picture plane then incised and carved to reveal a solitary figure who emerges out from the ground in a crescendo of textural variance. This figure, extracted out of the paste-like surface, evocatively encapsulates Dubuffet’s interest in the illegible, immeasurable, or de-standardized body, a form which resists the classicizing anthropomorphism favored in the Neoclassicism of interwar Europe. Flattened against the panel support, Dubuffet’s depersonalized personage typifies the artist’s rejection of Vitruvian and humanist ideals defining the body as perfectly proportioned and measurable, instead articulating his novel theorization of beauty: “I believe that beauty is nowhere. I consider this notion of beauty as completely false. I refuse absolutely to assent to this idea that there are ugly persons and ugly objects. This idea is for me stifling and revolting” (“Anticultural Positions: Notes for a Lecture Given at the Arts Club of Chicago, December 20, 1951” in M. Rosenthall, Jean Dubuffet, “Anticultural Positions,” exh. cat., Acquavella Galleries, New York, 2016, p. 32). Dubuffet’s revolutionary innovations with figuration and materials challenged the Western artistic tradition and radically reinvented painting, his poignant confrontation contra to conventional portraiture and his emphasis on materiality profoundly impacting the development of postwar art on both sides of the Atlantic.