拍品專文
Painted in Paris in February 1951, Table aux pieces d'histoire naturelle is the first and largest of Dubuffet's fourteen table paintings. It comes from the Tables paysagées (Landscaped tables) series which is part of the artist's Sols et terrains series, along with the Paysages du mental (Landscapes of the Mind) and the Pierres philosophiques (Philosopher's stones).
It was only one year earlier that Dubuffet painted his powerful Corps de Dames (Ladies Bodies) which brutally portrayed the female figure. One can see in the brilliant palette and textured surface of Table aux pieces d'histoire naturelle Dubuffet's transformation of the sensuous figure that dominated the Corps de Dames pictures into an everyday, but by no means inanimate, object. Dubuffet's technique of heavily applying oil paint with a special paste to canvas almost renders the table into a three dimensional object. In the Pierre Matisse Gallery catalogue for the exhibition in which Table aux pieces d'histoire naturelle was first exhibited in New York in February 1952, Dubuffet explained his experimentation with the medium: 'I handled for a long time, this year, a paste which I made myself at the time I used it (it dries very quickly); I mixed zinc oxide with a lean but viscous varnish, rich in gum, very much like the one sold in New York under the name of Dammar Varnish. This paste, while still fresh, repels the oil, and the glazes one applies on it organize themselves into enigmatic branchings.'
Dubuffet's title, Table aux pieces d'histoire naturelle (Table with objects of natural history), refers to a table covered with the objects or tools commonly found in a natural science classroom. The objects are colored distinctively (red, pink, brown, yellow, blue and violet), yet their forms remain ambiguous. Dubuffet depicted the objects from memory creating something more visceral in appearance than representational. The plasticity of the painting's surface progressively becomes the artist's subject, leading to the more generalized landscapes of his later paintings from the Paysages du mental (Landscapes of the Mind) and the Pierres philosophiques (Philosopher's stones) series.
It was only one year earlier that Dubuffet painted his powerful Corps de Dames (Ladies Bodies) which brutally portrayed the female figure. One can see in the brilliant palette and textured surface of Table aux pieces d'histoire naturelle Dubuffet's transformation of the sensuous figure that dominated the Corps de Dames pictures into an everyday, but by no means inanimate, object. Dubuffet's technique of heavily applying oil paint with a special paste to canvas almost renders the table into a three dimensional object. In the Pierre Matisse Gallery catalogue for the exhibition in which Table aux pieces d'histoire naturelle was first exhibited in New York in February 1952, Dubuffet explained his experimentation with the medium: 'I handled for a long time, this year, a paste which I made myself at the time I used it (it dries very quickly); I mixed zinc oxide with a lean but viscous varnish, rich in gum, very much like the one sold in New York under the name of Dammar Varnish. This paste, while still fresh, repels the oil, and the glazes one applies on it organize themselves into enigmatic branchings.'
Dubuffet's title, Table aux pieces d'histoire naturelle (Table with objects of natural history), refers to a table covered with the objects or tools commonly found in a natural science classroom. The objects are colored distinctively (red, pink, brown, yellow, blue and violet), yet their forms remain ambiguous. Dubuffet depicted the objects from memory creating something more visceral in appearance than representational. The plasticity of the painting's surface progressively becomes the artist's subject, leading to the more generalized landscapes of his later paintings from the Paysages du mental (Landscapes of the Mind) and the Pierres philosophiques (Philosopher's stones) series.