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Lot Essay
With its raw autumnal colours and its heavily worked textural surface, Fragment Terraqué ("Earth Fragment") is one of Dubuffet's celebrated early landscape paintings. In these charming and deliberately primitive works Dubuffet expressed his vision of nature as a totality and his inherent belief in the primordial and simbiotic nature of man's relationship to soil and to the Earth.
"In my paintings I intend to show all the things that haunt my thoughts," Dubuffet asserted of such paintings, "and I refuse myself such constraints as those imposed by visual perspective which limit my freedom" (J. Dubuffet cited in Op. cit., Loreau, p. 170). In Fragment Terraqué Dubuffet has abandoned perspective in order to convey a complete view of the landscape in which each element not only becomes equally important but also seems to interconnect with everything else in a kind of tapestry of form. The surface of the painting becomes all important as a conveyer of meaning, and the intricacies of the surface texturally mimic the notion of the Earth and the landscape as itself a surface on which everything, including man, lives. In order to enhance this effect in these early landscapes, Dubuffet prepared each work by creating an undulating surface of plaster as a ground onto which he has painted in oil and then incised lines using the hard end of his paint brush. In this way the surface of the painting becomes a relief that shimmers with a variety of energetic colour, volume, and form in a way that expresses the microcosmic vitality of the landscape and, indeed, anticipates the later textural landscapes and Paté Battué paintings that Dubuffet would make in the 1950s.
As a means of further emphasising this sense of union, Dubuffet has drenched the surface of the Fragment Terraqué with a rich soil colour and abandoned any sense of a horizon line. Punctuating the scene in a style that owes its origins to the work of Paul Klee, Dubuffet's figures, trees, houses, and animals have been rendered with an almost hieroglyphic linearity that shows them as little more than animated incisions in the earthy surface of the painting. The crude and seemingly untutored way in which Dubuffet renders these figures generates a sense of banality that is borrowed from the art of children and of the mentally insane.
"Personally I am not interested in what is exceptional and this extends to all domains," Dubuffet maintained," I feed on the banal. The more banal a thing may be, the better it suits me...In my paintings, I wish to recover the vision of an average and ordinary man, and it is without using techniques beyond the grasp of an ordinary man...that I have tried to constitute great celebrations. Celebrations (or feasts) are much more highly prized when, instead of setting themselves apart on foreign soil...they occur in everyday life. It is then that their virtue...is effective. I am speaking of celebrations of the mind; please may it be understood: celebrations of humours and deliriums. Art addresses itself to the mind, not to the eyes. Too many people think that it addresses itself to the eyes. That is to make of it poor use... Similarly, the most simple and common spectacles appeal to me the most...I am a tourist of a very special kind: what is pictureque disturbs me. It is where the picturesque is absent that I am in a state of constant amazement." (J. Dubuffet, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, Paris, 1967, vol II, p. 62).
"In my paintings I intend to show all the things that haunt my thoughts," Dubuffet asserted of such paintings, "and I refuse myself such constraints as those imposed by visual perspective which limit my freedom" (J. Dubuffet cited in Op. cit., Loreau, p. 170). In Fragment Terraqué Dubuffet has abandoned perspective in order to convey a complete view of the landscape in which each element not only becomes equally important but also seems to interconnect with everything else in a kind of tapestry of form. The surface of the painting becomes all important as a conveyer of meaning, and the intricacies of the surface texturally mimic the notion of the Earth and the landscape as itself a surface on which everything, including man, lives. In order to enhance this effect in these early landscapes, Dubuffet prepared each work by creating an undulating surface of plaster as a ground onto which he has painted in oil and then incised lines using the hard end of his paint brush. In this way the surface of the painting becomes a relief that shimmers with a variety of energetic colour, volume, and form in a way that expresses the microcosmic vitality of the landscape and, indeed, anticipates the later textural landscapes and Paté Battué paintings that Dubuffet would make in the 1950s.
As a means of further emphasising this sense of union, Dubuffet has drenched the surface of the Fragment Terraqué with a rich soil colour and abandoned any sense of a horizon line. Punctuating the scene in a style that owes its origins to the work of Paul Klee, Dubuffet's figures, trees, houses, and animals have been rendered with an almost hieroglyphic linearity that shows them as little more than animated incisions in the earthy surface of the painting. The crude and seemingly untutored way in which Dubuffet renders these figures generates a sense of banality that is borrowed from the art of children and of the mentally insane.
"Personally I am not interested in what is exceptional and this extends to all domains," Dubuffet maintained," I feed on the banal. The more banal a thing may be, the better it suits me...In my paintings, I wish to recover the vision of an average and ordinary man, and it is without using techniques beyond the grasp of an ordinary man...that I have tried to constitute great celebrations. Celebrations (or feasts) are much more highly prized when, instead of setting themselves apart on foreign soil...they occur in everyday life. It is then that their virtue...is effective. I am speaking of celebrations of the mind; please may it be understood: celebrations of humours and deliriums. Art addresses itself to the mind, not to the eyes. Too many people think that it addresses itself to the eyes. That is to make of it poor use... Similarly, the most simple and common spectacles appeal to me the most...I am a tourist of a very special kind: what is pictureque disturbs me. It is where the picturesque is absent that I am in a state of constant amazement." (J. Dubuffet, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, Paris, 1967, vol II, p. 62).