.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
The present work is a superior examble of Dubuffet's Sites Tricolores, which with the Paysages Castillans were the last groups created within his Hourloupe cycle. Between April and August of 1974, Dubuffet made prepatory drawings in black felt-tip pen, which his assistants projected and enlarged onto dramatically scaled canvases. This technique, also used by Warhol for large-scale paintings, represented a significant change in the artist's working method.
In an unpublished letter to Arnold Glimcher, dated October 12, 1974, Dubuffet commented upon his new work:
"These paintings make a somewhat brutal first impression because, like all those prior to Coucou Bazar, they are made up of flat portions outlined in black, thus ruling out all effects of shading or textures and all accidents of manual execution. The opposition of outlines and colors is given here that same character of impersonal coldness that typically goes along with the use of the felt-tip pen. This produces on paper, in scale with the original drawing, a graphic marking that is at once very heavy and very flowing which, enlarged through the projector, is reproduced just so in the final picture. The effect produced by this could not be got by improvising directly on the canvas, in full definitive scale, with the brush. It is precisely that specific effect inherent in this technique of enlargement which seems to me interesting in this series of paintings. On the other hand, people who take pleasure in the piddling accidents -smudges, skips, splashes, corrections- found in improvisational paintings will not find here what they are accustomed to looking for first of all, and even exclusively, in every work. It should be said that, the fact is, those accidents have become for many not only the principal attraction of painting but the very essence of it. Myself in the past I had great love for all those effects of autograph spontaneity in paintings, and many of my works made outrageously much of them. Today it pleases me to turn my efforts to the exact opposite and to direct my experiments towards an art that, like architecture or written music, would no longer be one of execution but of programming"
(J. Dubuffet quoted in A. Franzke, Dubuffet, New York, 1981, p. 227).
In an unpublished letter to Arnold Glimcher, dated October 12, 1974, Dubuffet commented upon his new work:
"These paintings make a somewhat brutal first impression because, like all those prior to Coucou Bazar, they are made up of flat portions outlined in black, thus ruling out all effects of shading or textures and all accidents of manual execution. The opposition of outlines and colors is given here that same character of impersonal coldness that typically goes along with the use of the felt-tip pen. This produces on paper, in scale with the original drawing, a graphic marking that is at once very heavy and very flowing which, enlarged through the projector, is reproduced just so in the final picture. The effect produced by this could not be got by improvising directly on the canvas, in full definitive scale, with the brush. It is precisely that specific effect inherent in this technique of enlargement which seems to me interesting in this series of paintings. On the other hand, people who take pleasure in the piddling accidents -smudges, skips, splashes, corrections- found in improvisational paintings will not find here what they are accustomed to looking for first of all, and even exclusively, in every work. It should be said that, the fact is, those accidents have become for many not only the principal attraction of painting but the very essence of it. Myself in the past I had great love for all those effects of autograph spontaneity in paintings, and many of my works made outrageously much of them. Today it pleases me to turn my efforts to the exact opposite and to direct my experiments towards an art that, like architecture or written music, would no longer be one of execution but of programming"
(J. Dubuffet quoted in A. Franzke, Dubuffet, New York, 1981, p. 227).