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Lot Essay
When Dubuffet first ventured into the Sahara in February 1947, he was struck immediately by the landscape and the lifestyle. There was a sparseness in the desert that seemed matched by the sense of necessity that characterised the lives of the Bedouins, and this had a huge impact on his art. When he returned to France in April that year, his head and his sketches were brimming with ideas. Le soleil les décolore, painted that month, was one of the first large-scale oils in which Dubuffet treated a desert subject, and is redolent with his enthusiasm for Africa. The golden sunlight from the title, which gleams on the edges of the Bedouins' clothes and the camel, gives this painting a romantic feel, and in terms of subject matter, this could be seen as a continuation of the Orientalist tradition. However, Dubuffet has painted this lyrical scene without any contrived sense of lyricism. Here instead, he has painted this work with pure energy. Even Le soleil les décolore's surface appears to bear witness to the artist's frenzied activity, with the contrast between the thick impasto and areas that appear almost scraped, as though he had attacked the canvas, not adorned it. At the same time, the figures are close-up, looking at the artist, showing Dubuffet's immersion in their world. He was intoxicated by his time in the Sahara, and within months of his return to France had set off again, this time having started learning Arabic. Dubuffet had essentially fallen in love, and with the untainted nomadic civilisation in the desert found a completely fresh way to see the world. Le soleil les décolore is therefore an important testimony to the early and immediate influence that Africa had on his art.
In creating Le soleil les décolore, Dubuffet perfectly achieved what he had sought in Africa - to distance himself completely from Western art. He had gone to the desert, a huge empty space, to create his own tabula rasa, to start from scratch and discard any Western prototypes and precedents. In travelling to Africa, Dubuffet was not merely seeking a new landscape or a new sense of light, unlike precursors such as Renoir or Matisse. Instead he was seeking a whole new perspective on the world. In part, this was an urge created by the Second World War. France in 1947 was a scarred and ravaged land, and Max Loreau, who compiled the catalogue raisonné of Dubuffet's works pointed out that it was almost easier to go to the hot desert than it was to find coal in Paris.
Jean Dubuffet at El Goléa, Sahara, 1947-1948
In creating Le soleil les décolore, Dubuffet perfectly achieved what he had sought in Africa - to distance himself completely from Western art. He had gone to the desert, a huge empty space, to create his own tabula rasa, to start from scratch and discard any Western prototypes and precedents. In travelling to Africa, Dubuffet was not merely seeking a new landscape or a new sense of light, unlike precursors such as Renoir or Matisse. Instead he was seeking a whole new perspective on the world. In part, this was an urge created by the Second World War. France in 1947 was a scarred and ravaged land, and Max Loreau, who compiled the catalogue raisonné of Dubuffet's works pointed out that it was almost easier to go to the hot desert than it was to find coal in Paris.
Jean Dubuffet at El Goléa, Sahara, 1947-1948