Lot Essay
This very rare set of twenty four lithographs, commissioned to illustrate a collection of poems by Guillevic, was executed in 1945, the year in which the artist coined the term 'Art Brut'.
The book was printed in an edition of 172 with a set of fifteen prints en-texte. Only the de luxe edition of ten included two separate unsigned suites of the fifteen prints as well as two suites of an additional nine lithographs not included in the book.
Webel records only three signed proof impressions of each of the fifteen lithographs, and none of the suplementary nine lithographs. This complete signed suite of the complete series of twenty-four is therefore apparently unique.
Paul Baudier, to whom the first print is dedicated, was a celebrated typographer who collaborated on many of the great Livres d'artistes of the period, working with Marc Chagall, Sonia Delaunay, André Masson, Joan Miró and others.
Dubuffet had practised as a full time artist since 1942 and soon emerged as one of the most important figurative artists in the aftermath of the Second World War. He designated the term 'Art Brut' for his collection of artefacts produced by children, the 'primitive', and the psychotic, a collection that he had built up since the 1920s. It was precisely in these works that the artist found the basis for his formulation of an expressive style.
In a Europe at war, artists such as Dubuffet were drawn to a fundamental critique of a mainstream tradition of Western painting, still emersed in a certain pictorial and aesthetic genre. In a senseless world of social-anarchy where man is completely alone, Dubuffet believed that alienation was paramount to real creative activity. He writes '... creative invention has surely no greater enemy than social order..., (it) can only survive in taking the opposite stance, refusal and impermeability' (quoted in Margit Rowell, Jean Dubuffet: An Art on the Margins of Culture, in Jean Dubuffet, A Retrospective, New York, 1973, p. 22); and the artist addressed himself to the alienated, 'to the symptoms of madness as expressive of the universal creative impulse, uncontaminated by cultural inhibitions' (ibid).
For fifteen years after the war, Dubuffet created a great number of prints. In Les Murs, we see the coming together of the artist's fundamental ideas. He was fascinated with natural materials, making lithographs from his imprints discovered through his experiments with stone, leaves, dirt etc. In this set of prints, over and again he repeats the motif of the stone wall, exploring the endless possibilities of the texture of stone, and variants on the stone patterns. In 1945, he said 'I feed on the banal. The more banal a thing may be, the better it suits me (...) It is where the picturesque is absent that I am in a state of constant amazement' (ibid, p. 15). It is by presenting these images of crudeness and banality that the artist wants to shock the viewer into seeing the world with a 'new refreshed eye' (ibid, p. 23).
The figures in Les Murs do not seem to have any definable relationship either to each other, or to their surroundings. Extreme psychic isolation is portrayed, where figure or object are not bound to any recognizable perception of space or time. Often they seem enmeshed in the very stuff that the walls are made of. This seems to represent the realisation that man is as anonymous and is as powerless as any object (a wall or a root of a tree) to change the universe, the realisation of the futility of man's existence that makes the protagonist of Sartre's La Nausée physically sick. Man is equally powerless in Dubuffet's eyes; 'since man's real substance is his psychic life - a moving flux of undetermined impulses - to define him as a prime mover of the universe appeared as erroneous a claim as the medieval belief that the earth was flat. On the contrary, the universe moves, forms and qualifies man. So that the role of individual reponsibility (and the question of personal identity) in this interplay of forces had to be reassessed' (ibid., p. 33).
Les Murs represents a fusion of various elements and themes so characteristic of artists of the 'post-war angst' generation, but offered to the viewer in Dubuffet's unique and ingenious way, humour and fear conveyed by means of extreme simplification of execution and content.
The book was printed in an edition of 172 with a set of fifteen prints en-texte. Only the de luxe edition of ten included two separate unsigned suites of the fifteen prints as well as two suites of an additional nine lithographs not included in the book.
Webel records only three signed proof impressions of each of the fifteen lithographs, and none of the suplementary nine lithographs. This complete signed suite of the complete series of twenty-four is therefore apparently unique.
Paul Baudier, to whom the first print is dedicated, was a celebrated typographer who collaborated on many of the great Livres d'artistes of the period, working with Marc Chagall, Sonia Delaunay, André Masson, Joan Miró and others.
Dubuffet had practised as a full time artist since 1942 and soon emerged as one of the most important figurative artists in the aftermath of the Second World War. He designated the term 'Art Brut' for his collection of artefacts produced by children, the 'primitive', and the psychotic, a collection that he had built up since the 1920s. It was precisely in these works that the artist found the basis for his formulation of an expressive style.
In a Europe at war, artists such as Dubuffet were drawn to a fundamental critique of a mainstream tradition of Western painting, still emersed in a certain pictorial and aesthetic genre. In a senseless world of social-anarchy where man is completely alone, Dubuffet believed that alienation was paramount to real creative activity. He writes '... creative invention has surely no greater enemy than social order..., (it) can only survive in taking the opposite stance, refusal and impermeability' (quoted in Margit Rowell, Jean Dubuffet: An Art on the Margins of Culture, in Jean Dubuffet, A Retrospective, New York, 1973, p. 22); and the artist addressed himself to the alienated, 'to the symptoms of madness as expressive of the universal creative impulse, uncontaminated by cultural inhibitions' (ibid).
For fifteen years after the war, Dubuffet created a great number of prints. In Les Murs, we see the coming together of the artist's fundamental ideas. He was fascinated with natural materials, making lithographs from his imprints discovered through his experiments with stone, leaves, dirt etc. In this set of prints, over and again he repeats the motif of the stone wall, exploring the endless possibilities of the texture of stone, and variants on the stone patterns. In 1945, he said 'I feed on the banal. The more banal a thing may be, the better it suits me (...) It is where the picturesque is absent that I am in a state of constant amazement' (ibid, p. 15). It is by presenting these images of crudeness and banality that the artist wants to shock the viewer into seeing the world with a 'new refreshed eye' (ibid, p. 23).
The figures in Les Murs do not seem to have any definable relationship either to each other, or to their surroundings. Extreme psychic isolation is portrayed, where figure or object are not bound to any recognizable perception of space or time. Often they seem enmeshed in the very stuff that the walls are made of. This seems to represent the realisation that man is as anonymous and is as powerless as any object (a wall or a root of a tree) to change the universe, the realisation of the futility of man's existence that makes the protagonist of Sartre's La Nausée physically sick. Man is equally powerless in Dubuffet's eyes; 'since man's real substance is his psychic life - a moving flux of undetermined impulses - to define him as a prime mover of the universe appeared as erroneous a claim as the medieval belief that the earth was flat. On the contrary, the universe moves, forms and qualifies man. So that the role of individual reponsibility (and the question of personal identity) in this interplay of forces had to be reassessed' (ibid., p. 33).
Les Murs represents a fusion of various elements and themes so characteristic of artists of the 'post-war angst' generation, but offered to the viewer in Dubuffet's unique and ingenious way, humour and fear conveyed by means of extreme simplification of execution and content.