拍品专文
Dated May 1949, Deux Figures dans un Paysage, is one of the first Paysages Grotesques which Dubuffet painted on his return from his third trip to the Sahara.
In contrast to his previous sojurns in North Africa of 47 and 48, This last trip did not yield many paintings and one must look to the thirty or so Paysages Grotesques to realise the experience gained in these two months of 49.
Gone are the colourfull attires, gone are the folkoric camels, scorpions and other exotic animals: The figures regain their primordial importance, not as illustrations of a locale but as a main subject of interest, in their banality and generality. Similary the background landscapes lose their identity" to search for their belonging to any site from anywhere". The trees in Deux Figures dans un Paysage could easily be palm trees, yet we are now in theory back to the French countryside as is more evident in other Paysages Grotesques such as La Vie Agreste, La Vie à la Campagne or Evreux 5 Km. In his introduction to fascicule IV of the Catalogue Integral des Travaux de Jean Dubuffet, Max Loreau points to Dubuffet's effort to give birth to an " unrooted" landscape, prototype of all imaginable landscapes and in his introduction to fascicule V remarks that the figures are meant to express no more than "L'Homme affirmant le Geste" and no less: The painting having therefore no other objective than being a collection of concepts, "Man performing the Act in the Landscape".
In contrast to his previous sojurns in North Africa of 47 and 48, This last trip did not yield many paintings and one must look to the thirty or so Paysages Grotesques to realise the experience gained in these two months of 49.
Gone are the colourfull attires, gone are the folkoric camels, scorpions and other exotic animals: The figures regain their primordial importance, not as illustrations of a locale but as a main subject of interest, in their banality and generality. Similary the background landscapes lose their identity" to search for their belonging to any site from anywhere". The trees in Deux Figures dans un Paysage could easily be palm trees, yet we are now in theory back to the French countryside as is more evident in other Paysages Grotesques such as La Vie Agreste, La Vie à la Campagne or Evreux 5 Km. In his introduction to fascicule IV of the Catalogue Integral des Travaux de Jean Dubuffet, Max Loreau points to Dubuffet's effort to give birth to an " unrooted" landscape, prototype of all imaginable landscapes and in his introduction to fascicule V remarks that the figures are meant to express no more than "L'Homme affirmant le Geste" and no less: The painting having therefore no other objective than being a collection of concepts, "Man performing the Act in the Landscape".