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Lot Essay
Jean Dubuffet's Tete en tache de moisissure, 1950, (Head in a Spot of Mildew), was the first of several works by the artist to enter the Carpenter collection. Purchased in 1952 from the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, it became one of Charles Carpenter's favorite works of art. He described it as a "great flattened face floating peacefully on the picture plane...beautiful and quite lyrical." Mary Grace Carpenter took several years to feel entirely comfortable with this earthy creature achieved in the medium of oil on masonite. It points out the different sensibilities of French and American painters at mid-century.
Dubuffet's use of natural materials and metamorphic processes forced the issue of artistic control within his creative world. The artist described himself as an integral yet also vulnerable part of nature's own changeable and fluid systems. "There is a key to natural mechanisms just as what happens in a grain of sand or a drop of water exactly reproduces that which happens in a mountain or an ocean--aside from scale, aside from the rate of speed which vary. As a painter, I am an explorer of the natural world and a fervent seeker of this key."
Charles Carpenter felt he had experienced something important by living with Tete en tache de moisissure. He learned to appreciate beauty that did not depend upon bright color, conventionally handsome form or an engaging narrative. During the early 1960s, Charles Carpenter paid a visit to Dubuffet's studio in France. They enjoyed a good dinner and examined a new edition of prints which Carpenter eventually bought. They kept in touch for decades. His encounters with Dubuffet encouraged Carpenter's appreciation of the raw, elemental yet exquisite style that influenced the approaches and philosophies of so many later twentieth century European artists.
-Susan C. Larsen, Ph.D.
Dubuffet's use of natural materials and metamorphic processes forced the issue of artistic control within his creative world. The artist described himself as an integral yet also vulnerable part of nature's own changeable and fluid systems. "There is a key to natural mechanisms just as what happens in a grain of sand or a drop of water exactly reproduces that which happens in a mountain or an ocean--aside from scale, aside from the rate of speed which vary. As a painter, I am an explorer of the natural world and a fervent seeker of this key."
Charles Carpenter felt he had experienced something important by living with Tete en tache de moisissure. He learned to appreciate beauty that did not depend upon bright color, conventionally handsome form or an engaging narrative. During the early 1960s, Charles Carpenter paid a visit to Dubuffet's studio in France. They enjoyed a good dinner and examined a new edition of prints which Carpenter eventually bought. They kept in touch for decades. His encounters with Dubuffet encouraged Carpenter's appreciation of the raw, elemental yet exquisite style that influenced the approaches and philosophies of so many later twentieth century European artists.
-Susan C. Larsen, Ph.D.