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Lot Essay
Vache la belle fessue (Cow with a beautiful bottom) is one of sixteen celebrated cow portraits that Dubuffet painted during the summer of 1954. Each of these extraordinary sixteen pictures depicts a "pricelessly funny" animal radiating with what has been described as "an ecstatic stupidity." (P. Schjeldahl, 'Jean Dubuffet and his Century', taken from exh. cat., Washington D.C., Hirshhorn Museum, Jean Dubuffet 1943-1963, p. 18)
"From the beginning of July 1954, as my wife, for reasons of health, was living on the outskirts of Clermont-Ferrand, I often had occasion to drive along the road between Paris and Auvergne, and to take long solitary walks in the countryside around the village where she was being cared for. In this village I had at my disposal a little place which I fitted up as a studio. Once more I became preoccupied with country subjects - fields, grassy pastures, cattle, carts and the work of the fields - all things I had treated with enthusiasm in 1943 and 1944. As formerly, I loved spending hours watching the cows and afterwards drawing them from memory, or even, but much more rarely, from life... The sight of this animal gives me an inexhaustible sense of well-being because of the atmosphere of calm and serenity it seems to generate. I can also say that pastures, and even merely the colour green - because of the cows, I suppose, by an unconscious association of ideas - has a comforting and soothing effect on me...... But this was not always the effect I wanted to produce. Very often I liked to portray the cow as a preposterous Punch, and to use all the elements of the countryside - meadows, trees and others - to create a sort of grotesque theatre, a circus of clowns. This was probably the consequence of the same attitude evident in Portraits, in Arabs, in Corps de Dames or Paysages Grotesques. It follows the same principle ....of setting up more and more obstacles to prevent the objects from being recognised, in order that finally their presence should come as a shock. Although I never consciously thought of it at the time, on looking back, I am sure that in transferring their image to a devil-may-care, arbitrary, phantasmagoric world of clowns, I had an obscure idea of confering on them, by means of irreality, a more intensely alive reality. After all, this is the aim that is sought, and in the best instance attained, in all good clown acts, in all good theatre." (Jean Dubuffet, 'Vaches, Herbe, Frondaisons,' reproduced in exh. cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art, Dubuffet, New York 1962, pp. 101-103).
Like the table-tops of his Pttes Battues or the women's bodies in his Corp de dames, in many ways Dubuffet's cows are merely another means by which he could explore the diversity of patterns and rhythms inherent within the remarkable texture of his paint. However, Dubuffet's amazing ability to convey and exaggerate the unique and often hysterical personalities of the cows he saw on his regular journeys to the Clermont-Ferrand sanitarium elevates these sixteen works to a unparalleled place within his oeuvre.
Vache la belle fessue is a particularly daft looking animal with long drooping ears that it seems to be waving contentedly from side to side. Rendered in thick oil paint that has been pasted and smeared onto the canvas in a variety of ways, its earthy animal presence has been magically conjured from the material by Dubuffet's child-like eye and genuine enthusiasm for his subject. Like prehistoric cave paintings, the love the artist bears for the animal is clearly perceivable in the way in which it has been rendered. Indeed, to paint observable nature in a way that reflects one's feelings towards it as well as its outward appearance was Dubuffet's primary concern at this time. "I am obsessed", he wrote about these paintings, "by the idea that there is something both false and unprofitable in looking at things too closely and too long. It is not normal for a human being to stare at objects for the sole purpose of inspecting them and making an inventory of their constituent parts...... Man sees things without trying to see them... . What to me seems interesting is to recover in the representation of an object the whole complex set of impressions we receive as we see it normally in everday life, the manner in which it has touched our sensibility, and the forms it assumes in our memory. This is what I have always tried to do." (ibid, p. 97)
"From the beginning of July 1954, as my wife, for reasons of health, was living on the outskirts of Clermont-Ferrand, I often had occasion to drive along the road between Paris and Auvergne, and to take long solitary walks in the countryside around the village where she was being cared for. In this village I had at my disposal a little place which I fitted up as a studio. Once more I became preoccupied with country subjects - fields, grassy pastures, cattle, carts and the work of the fields - all things I had treated with enthusiasm in 1943 and 1944. As formerly, I loved spending hours watching the cows and afterwards drawing them from memory, or even, but much more rarely, from life... The sight of this animal gives me an inexhaustible sense of well-being because of the atmosphere of calm and serenity it seems to generate. I can also say that pastures, and even merely the colour green - because of the cows, I suppose, by an unconscious association of ideas - has a comforting and soothing effect on me...... But this was not always the effect I wanted to produce. Very often I liked to portray the cow as a preposterous Punch, and to use all the elements of the countryside - meadows, trees and others - to create a sort of grotesque theatre, a circus of clowns. This was probably the consequence of the same attitude evident in Portraits, in Arabs, in Corps de Dames or Paysages Grotesques. It follows the same principle ....of setting up more and more obstacles to prevent the objects from being recognised, in order that finally their presence should come as a shock. Although I never consciously thought of it at the time, on looking back, I am sure that in transferring their image to a devil-may-care, arbitrary, phantasmagoric world of clowns, I had an obscure idea of confering on them, by means of irreality, a more intensely alive reality. After all, this is the aim that is sought, and in the best instance attained, in all good clown acts, in all good theatre." (Jean Dubuffet, 'Vaches, Herbe, Frondaisons,' reproduced in exh. cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art, Dubuffet, New York 1962, pp. 101-103).
Like the table-tops of his Pttes Battues or the women's bodies in his Corp de dames, in many ways Dubuffet's cows are merely another means by which he could explore the diversity of patterns and rhythms inherent within the remarkable texture of his paint. However, Dubuffet's amazing ability to convey and exaggerate the unique and often hysterical personalities of the cows he saw on his regular journeys to the Clermont-Ferrand sanitarium elevates these sixteen works to a unparalleled place within his oeuvre.
Vache la belle fessue is a particularly daft looking animal with long drooping ears that it seems to be waving contentedly from side to side. Rendered in thick oil paint that has been pasted and smeared onto the canvas in a variety of ways, its earthy animal presence has been magically conjured from the material by Dubuffet's child-like eye and genuine enthusiasm for his subject. Like prehistoric cave paintings, the love the artist bears for the animal is clearly perceivable in the way in which it has been rendered. Indeed, to paint observable nature in a way that reflects one's feelings towards it as well as its outward appearance was Dubuffet's primary concern at this time. "I am obsessed", he wrote about these paintings, "by the idea that there is something both false and unprofitable in looking at things too closely and too long. It is not normal for a human being to stare at objects for the sole purpose of inspecting them and making an inventory of their constituent parts...... Man sees things without trying to see them... . What to me seems interesting is to recover in the representation of an object the whole complex set of impressions we receive as we see it normally in everday life, the manner in which it has touched our sensibility, and the forms it assumes in our memory. This is what I have always tried to do." (ibid, p. 97)