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拍品專文
Executed in July 1944, Femme assise au fauteuil dates from the beginning of Dubuffet's friendship with the French man of letters, Jean Paulhan. This picture carries a lengthy, invocation-like inscription that at once dedicates it as a sign of Dubuffet's friendship for Paulhan, and also states that the woman depicted is intended as an encouragement to the writer's philanthropy. The woman has been scratched and scrawled and dragged into existence, showing Dubuffet's already unorthodox exploration of traditional artistic media. He has created an image that is filled with jubilant, honest, direct energy. Both in terms of the frenetic traces of the creative process that gave rise to this image and in terms of the subject herself, Femme assise au fauteuil conveys Dubuffet's contagious joie de vivre. As Dubuffet said, "An artwork is all the more enthralling the more of an adventure it has been, particularly if it bears the mark of this adventure, and if one can discern all the struggles that occurred between the artist and the intractabilities of the materials. And if he himself did not know where it would all lead" ('Notes for the Well-Read', M. Glimcher, ed., Jean Dubuffet: Towards an Alternative Reality, New York, 1987, p. 69). In this way, Femme assise au fauteuil is an existential map of Dubuffet's struggles with his subject-matter and materials, yet at the same time, it is the vivid and open charting of these struggles that lends the picture its intense sense of energy, accomplishment and joy.
One wonders if the overt happiness of this seated woman is in deliberate contrast to Picasso's paintings of Dora Maar, from the years just prior to this period. Picasso painted Dora again and again as a victim, sitting on strange chairs, often weeping, her agony and sadness an extension of the artist's own anxieties at the Spanish Civil War, and then the Second World War. By contrast, in Femme assise au fauteuil Dubuffet has created a friendly image of celebration, filled with buoyant energy. Perhaps this reflects the political climate of the time, as the Allied advance in France was already well under way, and the liberation of Paris was only a month away. But in addition to that, Femme assise au fauteuil reflects a more general joy: more than anything, it is a celebration of friendship and of life.
One wonders if the overt happiness of this seated woman is in deliberate contrast to Picasso's paintings of Dora Maar, from the years just prior to this period. Picasso painted Dora again and again as a victim, sitting on strange chairs, often weeping, her agony and sadness an extension of the artist's own anxieties at the Spanish Civil War, and then the Second World War. By contrast, in Femme assise au fauteuil Dubuffet has created a friendly image of celebration, filled with buoyant energy. Perhaps this reflects the political climate of the time, as the Allied advance in France was already well under way, and the liberation of Paris was only a month away. But in addition to that, Femme assise au fauteuil reflects a more general joy: more than anything, it is a celebration of friendship and of life.