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Lot Essay
A thrilling panoramic vision, J’opterai pour l’erreur (I will choose the mistake) stands among the earliest major works in Jean Dubuffet’s career-defining Hourloupe cycle. Painted on 25 March 1963, it crystallises the electrifying visual language that would come to dominate his practice for the next decade, and which would take its place among the great artistic innovations of the twentieth century. Inspired by a series of doodles, Hourloupe translated the urban energy of Dubuffet’s Paris Circus series into wild abstract compositions, marking the culmination of his search for an alternate reality. The present work captures the vital immediacy imparted by his early use of oil paint in the series, predating his adoption of vinyl the following year. Its title, meanwhile, encapsulates the spirit of a practice that embraced the unschooled and the spontaneous. The painting featured in important early Hourloupe exhibitions at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice and Galerie Jeanne Bucher, Paris in 1964, and was illustrated on the latter’s catalogue cover. It was subsequently included in Dubuffet’s first American museum survey at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York in 1966, as well as his centenary exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris in 2001.
With its quixotic, meandering script of cells and lines, Hourloupe was one the most radical visual languages of its time. Contemporaneous with the evolution of Pop Art, as well as Cy Twombly’s looping, graphic effusions, it epitomised Dubuffet’s view of painting as a fantastical, mystical lens through which to view the ordinary and mundane. At the start of his career some two decades prior, he had dedicated himself to the pursuit of what he termed ‘Art Brut’: ‘raw’ art produced outside the confines of Western tradition and teaching. He examined the images produced by nomadic tribes, psychiatric patients and children, identifying in them an uninhibited, visceral energy and freedom. This kind of art, he believed, showed us more about the ‘truth’ of the human condition than any lofty academic painting. Over the following decades Dubuffet channelled these findings into his own practice, rejecting traditional notions of ‘beauty’ and embracing intuition, error, chance and incongruity. Notably, the present painting’s first owner was Morris Pinto—an ardent admirer of ‘Art Brut’—whose collection juxtaposed works by Dubuffet with major examples of African and Oceanic sculpture.
In 1962, Dubuffet’s quest came to a head. He had spent the previous couple of years immersed in his ground-breaking series Paris Circus, painting clamouring impressions of the metropolis that called to mind graffiti and chalk pavement drawings. That summer, on holiday in Le Touquet, he let his pen wander as he talked on the telephone. Fascinated by these semi-conscious, absent-minded doodlings—evocative of Surrealist automatism—he began to experiment with cutting them out and positioning them against black backgrounds. Suddenly, they seemed to come to life before his eyes, like cellular organisms writhing under a microscope. While his early Hourloupe works consisted largely of gouache figures, it was not until March 1963 that Dubuffet made his first major paintings in this new style. The present work was the third of these, painted during a short sojourn to the artist’s rural retreat in Vence. Vivid and tactile in its distinctive use of oil, its palette of red, white, black and blue would become synonymous with the series, harking back to the original colours of his ballpoint pen drawings.
Significantly, many of Dubuffet’s very first Hourloupe paintings bore titles relating to mistakes, ambiguities, oddities and inconsistencies. This lexicon emphasised not only the fluid, semi-automatic nature of Hourloupe itself, but also went straight to the heart of a practice predicated on dismantling notions of truth and reality. ‘Painting seems to me of no interest unless … it involves that which the painter wishes to see and can find only by constructing it himself’, he wrote in 1964. In the same text he called for a celebration of the ‘arbitrary and fantastic’, summoning the ‘shimmering scarves of incongruity’ (J. Dubuffet, ‘Image Fair’, in L’Hourloupe, exh. cat. Galerie Jeanne Bucher, Paris 1964, n.p.). Fittingly, the word ‘Hourloupe’ itself was a made-up concoction, evocative of words such as ‘hurler’ (‘to howl’) and ‘hululer’ (‘to hoot’). As Renato Barilli noted in the Palazzo Grassi catalogue, ‘it sounds very much like “entourlouper”, to make a fool of … Our leg is being pulled, subtly, alarmingly, metaphysically, we are being dragged into an irresistible and unavoidable “comedy of errors”’ (R. Barilli, ‘L’Hourloupe’, in L’Hourloupe di Jean Dubuffet, exh. cat. Palazzo Grassi, Venice 1964, n.p.).
With examples held in museums worldwide, the large-scale paintings made by Dubuffet between 1963 and 1964 stand among the most vibrant expressions of Hourloupe. Some, like the present, were purely abstract: others contained small objects and faces amid the jigsaw of lines, while some took the form of cut-out still-lifes or figures isolated against dark backdrops. Gradually, Hourloupe would come to life in three dimensions: initially in the form of monumental sculpture, and eventually as the groundbreaking 1973 performance piece Coucou Bazar. Thomas M. Messer, former director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, described it as ‘most radical structural reinterpretation since Cubism’ (T. M. Messer, ‘Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985): A Summary’, in Jean Dubuffet and Art Brut, exh. cat. Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 1986, p. 24). The curator Daniel Abadie, meanwhile, saw in it ‘a new world, the likes of which had never been produced by art’ (D. Abadie, ‘The mind’s greatest game’, in Jean Dubuffet, exh. cat. Galerie Boulakia, Paris 2007, p. 8). In J’opterai pour l’erreur, Dubuffet ushers in a parallel universe: one more brilliant, alive and entrancing than our own.
With its quixotic, meandering script of cells and lines, Hourloupe was one the most radical visual languages of its time. Contemporaneous with the evolution of Pop Art, as well as Cy Twombly’s looping, graphic effusions, it epitomised Dubuffet’s view of painting as a fantastical, mystical lens through which to view the ordinary and mundane. At the start of his career some two decades prior, he had dedicated himself to the pursuit of what he termed ‘Art Brut’: ‘raw’ art produced outside the confines of Western tradition and teaching. He examined the images produced by nomadic tribes, psychiatric patients and children, identifying in them an uninhibited, visceral energy and freedom. This kind of art, he believed, showed us more about the ‘truth’ of the human condition than any lofty academic painting. Over the following decades Dubuffet channelled these findings into his own practice, rejecting traditional notions of ‘beauty’ and embracing intuition, error, chance and incongruity. Notably, the present painting’s first owner was Morris Pinto—an ardent admirer of ‘Art Brut’—whose collection juxtaposed works by Dubuffet with major examples of African and Oceanic sculpture.
In 1962, Dubuffet’s quest came to a head. He had spent the previous couple of years immersed in his ground-breaking series Paris Circus, painting clamouring impressions of the metropolis that called to mind graffiti and chalk pavement drawings. That summer, on holiday in Le Touquet, he let his pen wander as he talked on the telephone. Fascinated by these semi-conscious, absent-minded doodlings—evocative of Surrealist automatism—he began to experiment with cutting them out and positioning them against black backgrounds. Suddenly, they seemed to come to life before his eyes, like cellular organisms writhing under a microscope. While his early Hourloupe works consisted largely of gouache figures, it was not until March 1963 that Dubuffet made his first major paintings in this new style. The present work was the third of these, painted during a short sojourn to the artist’s rural retreat in Vence. Vivid and tactile in its distinctive use of oil, its palette of red, white, black and blue would become synonymous with the series, harking back to the original colours of his ballpoint pen drawings.
Significantly, many of Dubuffet’s very first Hourloupe paintings bore titles relating to mistakes, ambiguities, oddities and inconsistencies. This lexicon emphasised not only the fluid, semi-automatic nature of Hourloupe itself, but also went straight to the heart of a practice predicated on dismantling notions of truth and reality. ‘Painting seems to me of no interest unless … it involves that which the painter wishes to see and can find only by constructing it himself’, he wrote in 1964. In the same text he called for a celebration of the ‘arbitrary and fantastic’, summoning the ‘shimmering scarves of incongruity’ (J. Dubuffet, ‘Image Fair’, in L’Hourloupe, exh. cat. Galerie Jeanne Bucher, Paris 1964, n.p.). Fittingly, the word ‘Hourloupe’ itself was a made-up concoction, evocative of words such as ‘hurler’ (‘to howl’) and ‘hululer’ (‘to hoot’). As Renato Barilli noted in the Palazzo Grassi catalogue, ‘it sounds very much like “entourlouper”, to make a fool of … Our leg is being pulled, subtly, alarmingly, metaphysically, we are being dragged into an irresistible and unavoidable “comedy of errors”’ (R. Barilli, ‘L’Hourloupe’, in L’Hourloupe di Jean Dubuffet, exh. cat. Palazzo Grassi, Venice 1964, n.p.).
With examples held in museums worldwide, the large-scale paintings made by Dubuffet between 1963 and 1964 stand among the most vibrant expressions of Hourloupe. Some, like the present, were purely abstract: others contained small objects and faces amid the jigsaw of lines, while some took the form of cut-out still-lifes or figures isolated against dark backdrops. Gradually, Hourloupe would come to life in three dimensions: initially in the form of monumental sculpture, and eventually as the groundbreaking 1973 performance piece Coucou Bazar. Thomas M. Messer, former director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, described it as ‘most radical structural reinterpretation since Cubism’ (T. M. Messer, ‘Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985): A Summary’, in Jean Dubuffet and Art Brut, exh. cat. Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 1986, p. 24). The curator Daniel Abadie, meanwhile, saw in it ‘a new world, the likes of which had never been produced by art’ (D. Abadie, ‘The mind’s greatest game’, in Jean Dubuffet, exh. cat. Galerie Boulakia, Paris 2007, p. 8). In J’opterai pour l’erreur, Dubuffet ushers in a parallel universe: one more brilliant, alive and entrancing than our own.