Lot Essay
Portrait Cambouis was one of the 48 pictures exhibited in the controversial Dubuffet show in May 1946 entitled Mirobolus, Macadam & Cie, Hautes Pâtes at the Galerie Drouin in Paris. It was the artist's second important exhibition and it outraged the public to such an extent that some viewers even tried to attack the canvases. They were not prepared for the crude imagery and the use of non-conventional materials. Nevertheless, the exhibition sold out within a few days.
The present picture is a wonderful example of Dubuffet's use of haute pâte, thick impasto. Dubuffet scratched and carved into the mollasses-like surface to allow the portrait to emerge and the picture has the quality of a three-dimensional relief. He added stones and sand in order to fashion a sort of prehistoric or tribal fetish, the mouth consisting of a trail of stones shaped like an oval, whose fixed grin is simultaneously threatening and comic.
Filling the small canvas, the disproportionately enlarged head of the subject mocks the traditional rules of portraiture. Her gender is indicated only by the breasts with their pebble nipples. The raw materials make it a confrontational creature, staring back at the viewer in a frontal, rigid pose. This is far from our traditional canon of beauty, but as the artist explained, "I feel beauty is merely an accident and very spacious convention. I feel that the things which are reputed to be ugly are so reputed without reason, and are no less beautiful than the things reputed to be beautiful."(Jean Dubuffet quoted in: Ex. Cat. New York, The Elkon Gallery, Jean Dubuffet: The First Two Decades, 1986).
Dubuffet turned to portraiture just as the war ended, reviving a genre that was no longer in fashion. He often painted his friends and literary contemporaries. In the case of Portrait Cambouis, he has portrayed an unidentified sitter, which epitomises Dubuffet's wish for his portraiture neither to bare a resemblance to a specific person nor contain any psychological insight into their personality. He explained: "In order for a portrait to work for me, I need it to be hardly a portrait. At the limit where it is no longer a portrait. It's there that it functions with its greatest force... Those who have spoken about my portraits as an undertaking aimed at psychological penetration have understood nothing at all... The portraits were anti-psychological, anti-individualistic." (As quoted in: Ex. Cat, Washington D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Dubuffet, June-September 1993, p. 28)
The present picture is a wonderful example of Dubuffet's use of haute pâte, thick impasto. Dubuffet scratched and carved into the mollasses-like surface to allow the portrait to emerge and the picture has the quality of a three-dimensional relief. He added stones and sand in order to fashion a sort of prehistoric or tribal fetish, the mouth consisting of a trail of stones shaped like an oval, whose fixed grin is simultaneously threatening and comic.
Filling the small canvas, the disproportionately enlarged head of the subject mocks the traditional rules of portraiture. Her gender is indicated only by the breasts with their pebble nipples. The raw materials make it a confrontational creature, staring back at the viewer in a frontal, rigid pose. This is far from our traditional canon of beauty, but as the artist explained, "I feel beauty is merely an accident and very spacious convention. I feel that the things which are reputed to be ugly are so reputed without reason, and are no less beautiful than the things reputed to be beautiful."(Jean Dubuffet quoted in: Ex. Cat. New York, The Elkon Gallery, Jean Dubuffet: The First Two Decades, 1986).
Dubuffet turned to portraiture just as the war ended, reviving a genre that was no longer in fashion. He often painted his friends and literary contemporaries. In the case of Portrait Cambouis, he has portrayed an unidentified sitter, which epitomises Dubuffet's wish for his portraiture neither to bare a resemblance to a specific person nor contain any psychological insight into their personality. He explained: "In order for a portrait to work for me, I need it to be hardly a portrait. At the limit where it is no longer a portrait. It's there that it functions with its greatest force... Those who have spoken about my portraits as an undertaking aimed at psychological penetration have understood nothing at all... The portraits were anti-psychological, anti-individualistic." (As quoted in: Ex. Cat, Washington D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Dubuffet, June-September 1993, p. 28)