Lot Essay
Between October and December of 1964, Dubuffet embarked on the creation of a number of figure paintings executed in his newly invented Hourloupe style. Painted on 5th November, Le Béret Rouge is one of the most developed of this small number of highly significant paintings.
In mid-July 1962, Dubuffet in the course of his telephone calls, had taken to doodling with red ballpoint pen. Out of this unconscious and semi-automatic scribbling emerged a series of cell-like structures which Dubuffet recognised not only held the key to a new painterly language, but also opened up a series of philosophical questions about the nature of perception.
In 1972 he wrote: "What if our real world - that is the concrete picture we have of it, which we would never question - were in effect nothing but a world of flimsy images of the type described, sheer quirks and whims of our own mind?...Let us imagine a picture which stops being a simple image for contemplation to become a living reality into which we are invited to plunge."
Hourloupe was not so much a style for Dubuffet as an alternative reality into which he "plunged" for over twelve years. Hourloupe's ambigious and uncertain sense of space led him to create at first paintings and then sculptures before developing whole environments which ultimately culminated in his Coucou Bazaar Hourloupe Ball of 1973. From the initial doodles of 1962 a whole new world had opened up for him that was to obsess and preoccupy him for far longer than any other of his previous celebrated shifts in style.
In 1964 the basic logic of the Hourloupe painterly style had been evolved to such an extent in Dubuffet's work that it now obliterated the last remnants of the Paris Circus series of a few years before. Dubuffet was poised on the edge of a new departure. At precisely this point in October he began to work on Hourloupe style figures painted against a more conventional dark background that echoes his work of the late fifties. Gone is the spatial ambiguity of the Hourloupe abstraction - all that remains are cartoon-like Hourloupe figures. They seem to represent a moment of hesitation on Dubuffet's part.
Le Béret Rouge, however, is different and almost unique in that in this painting the Hourloupe figure in the red beret is not shown isolated against a dark background, but fully immersed in a Hourloupe environment. It is uncertain whether this figure is emerging out of the picture or dissolving into it. The ambiguity of space that so attracted Dubuffet to the Hourloupe style has been capitalised on here to present the image of a figure very much in the same predicament as Dubuffet was himself at this time - on the edge of full immersion into the Hourloupe world. A few weeks later, Dubuffet had abandoned the use of the human figure in his paintings completely and was concentrating on specific objects and the allusive and what he called "dubious" play between the combination of objects and shapes. Rather whimsically, the only certainty to be found in this remarkable painting is the red beret of the title.
In mid-July 1962, Dubuffet in the course of his telephone calls, had taken to doodling with red ballpoint pen. Out of this unconscious and semi-automatic scribbling emerged a series of cell-like structures which Dubuffet recognised not only held the key to a new painterly language, but also opened up a series of philosophical questions about the nature of perception.
In 1972 he wrote: "What if our real world - that is the concrete picture we have of it, which we would never question - were in effect nothing but a world of flimsy images of the type described, sheer quirks and whims of our own mind?...Let us imagine a picture which stops being a simple image for contemplation to become a living reality into which we are invited to plunge."
Hourloupe was not so much a style for Dubuffet as an alternative reality into which he "plunged" for over twelve years. Hourloupe's ambigious and uncertain sense of space led him to create at first paintings and then sculptures before developing whole environments which ultimately culminated in his Coucou Bazaar Hourloupe Ball of 1973. From the initial doodles of 1962 a whole new world had opened up for him that was to obsess and preoccupy him for far longer than any other of his previous celebrated shifts in style.
In 1964 the basic logic of the Hourloupe painterly style had been evolved to such an extent in Dubuffet's work that it now obliterated the last remnants of the Paris Circus series of a few years before. Dubuffet was poised on the edge of a new departure. At precisely this point in October he began to work on Hourloupe style figures painted against a more conventional dark background that echoes his work of the late fifties. Gone is the spatial ambiguity of the Hourloupe abstraction - all that remains are cartoon-like Hourloupe figures. They seem to represent a moment of hesitation on Dubuffet's part.
Le Béret Rouge, however, is different and almost unique in that in this painting the Hourloupe figure in the red beret is not shown isolated against a dark background, but fully immersed in a Hourloupe environment. It is uncertain whether this figure is emerging out of the picture or dissolving into it. The ambiguity of space that so attracted Dubuffet to the Hourloupe style has been capitalised on here to present the image of a figure very much in the same predicament as Dubuffet was himself at this time - on the edge of full immersion into the Hourloupe world. A few weeks later, Dubuffet had abandoned the use of the human figure in his paintings completely and was concentrating on specific objects and the allusive and what he called "dubious" play between the combination of objects and shapes. Rather whimsically, the only certainty to be found in this remarkable painting is the red beret of the title.