Lot Essay
After selling his wine business in 1942, Jean Dubuffet set out to become a full-time artist. By the next year, he had begun painting piquant and humorous scenes of the city of Paris. These paintings, including La rue, were intended as an homage to everyday life. La rue is a cheerful genre scene which captures a moment of daily life. In his 1951 speech, "Anticultural Positions," Dubuffet stated, "For myself, I aim for an art which would be in immediate connection with daily life, an art which would start from the daily life, and which would be a very direct and very sincere expression of our real life and our real moods" (J. Dubuffet, Dubuffet and the Anticulture, New York, 1969, p. 3).
Dubuffet's desire to capture daily life coincided with his admiration of Art Brut, which was initiated by his reading of Bildnerei der Geisteskranken by Dr. Hans Prinzhorn. Prinzhorn asserted that art produced by the mentally ill was worthy of serious aesthetic consideration and drew comparisons between these works and art made by children and primitive cultures. Dubuffet was inspired by such art and rejected western notions of logic and beauty in favor of the more unconscious and spiritual impulses of Art Brut. Dubuffet's child-like drawing and naove use of color are deliberate strategies to produce works that are direct and primitive.
La rue possesses characteristic qualities of Dubuffet's style during this period: purposefully crude drawing, thickly applied paint, and pure, undiluted pigments. Furthermore, the surface of the present painting exhibits a striking dynamism, with color blocks of complementary hues juxtaposed to produce a sense of optical vibration. The black outlines of the forms temper the strength of the colors. Peter Schjeldahl has explained, "Dubuffet's way of painting in the 1940s merges two immediacies: layered, heaped, granulated impasto, and childlike drawing frequently scored into the paint. Material and line collide--the paint pushing outward, the line digging inward--to create a surface not so much laid on flat as dynamically flattened: smashed and impacted between opposing forces" (P. Schjeldahl, exh. cat., Jean Dubuffet 1943-1963, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1993, p. 16).
Dubuffet's desire to capture daily life coincided with his admiration of Art Brut, which was initiated by his reading of Bildnerei der Geisteskranken by Dr. Hans Prinzhorn. Prinzhorn asserted that art produced by the mentally ill was worthy of serious aesthetic consideration and drew comparisons between these works and art made by children and primitive cultures. Dubuffet was inspired by such art and rejected western notions of logic and beauty in favor of the more unconscious and spiritual impulses of Art Brut. Dubuffet's child-like drawing and naove use of color are deliberate strategies to produce works that are direct and primitive.
La rue possesses characteristic qualities of Dubuffet's style during this period: purposefully crude drawing, thickly applied paint, and pure, undiluted pigments. Furthermore, the surface of the present painting exhibits a striking dynamism, with color blocks of complementary hues juxtaposed to produce a sense of optical vibration. The black outlines of the forms temper the strength of the colors. Peter Schjeldahl has explained, "Dubuffet's way of painting in the 1940s merges two immediacies: layered, heaped, granulated impasto, and childlike drawing frequently scored into the paint. Material and line collide--the paint pushing outward, the line digging inward--to create a surface not so much laid on flat as dynamically flattened: smashed and impacted between opposing forces" (P. Schjeldahl, exh. cat., Jean Dubuffet 1943-1963, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1993, p. 16).