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Lot Essay
‘… there enters into it the physical pleasure one takes in using a large spatula, as wide as a hand, to spread this handsome brilliant white butter of firm consistency of the previous field of dark colours, then running over that smooth dough again with long round-ended knife which so easily traces in it graffiti of resonant colours. It is the same pleasure that leads the hand of anyone inscribing a very hasty drawing or some written word on the wet plaster of a wall or the freshly smoothed-out cement of a pavement’
JEAN DUBUFFET
‘I want portraits in which description makes use of the same mechanisms as those used in a landscape; here wrinkles, there ravines or paths; here a nose, there a tree; here a mouth, there a house’
JEAN DUBUFFET
With its raw, visceral terrain inscribed with quivering graphic forms, Jean Dubuffet’s Banlieue (Suburb) offers a primal vision of quotidian joie de vivre. Thick swathes of impasto are swept across the canvas in rich, marbled layers. Into this geological surface, Dubuffet carves a suburban panorama of figures and houses, which hover before the viewer like graffiti engraved into a rockface. Scraped, scored and scratched into the picture plane, the artist’s rapid, intuitive marks reveal the fossilized strata of colour below, creating a mesmerizing illusion of depth. Painted in December 1954, the work is contemporaneous with the sprawling depictions of cattle and pastures produced following Dubuffet’s relocation to the hills of Auvergne that summer. Channelling the rustic textures of the pastoral landscape into a bristling snapshot of daily life, it presages the dense, earthbound surfaces of the works produced in rural Vence between 1955 and 1961. Dubuffet’s early interest in uncultivated, unprocessed visual languages, a phenomenon he termed art brut, was amplified by his to-and-fro between town and country during this period. The coarse material beauty of fields, soil and plant-life, combined with the hustle and bustle of suburbia, gave rise to a renewed fascination with the wonder inherent in everyday existence. Dubuffet’s technique – one of layering and excavation – sought to tap into these base, primeval sensations. As he explained, ‘there enters into it the physical pleasure one takes in using a large spatula, as wide as a hand, to spread this handsome brilliant white butter of firm consistency of the previous field of dark colours, then running over that smooth dough again with long round-ended knife which so easily traces in it graffiti of resonant colours. It is the same pleasure that leads the hand of anyone inscribing a very hasty drawing or some written word on the wet plaster of a wall or the freshly smoothed out cement of a pavement’ (J. Dubuffet, quoted in A. Franzke, Dubuffet, New York 1981, p. 83). Quivering with the untamed magic of an ancient inscription, Banlieue is a powerful demonstration of this approach.
Working in the aftermath of the Second World War, Dubuffet felt that mankind’s connection to the innate rhythms and nuances of the world around him had been overshadowed. The prevailing lessons of art history, he felt, had numbed our ability to commune with basic visual and haptic instinct. During the 1940s, Dubuffet’s desire to escape the teachings of Western culture had led him across the world: from the Bedouin tribes of the Sahara desert, to mental health institutes in Switzerland. He had studied the art of children and psychics, and had probed the visual traditions of isolated communities. However, it was ultimately in the rural corners of his native France that he would begin to fully consolidate these influences. In July 1954, his wife’s illness prompted the couple to seek fresher climes in Auvergne; her still-ailing health would drive them to Vence the following year. ‘Once more I became preoccupied with country subjects’, the artist recalled; ‘fields, trees, grassy pastures, cattle, carts and the work of the fields – all things I had treated with enthusiasm in 1943 and 1944’ (J. Dubuffet, quoted in Jean Dubuffet: Paintings, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1966, p. 40). Though the present painting takes its place within this body of work, its dynamic figures, oscillating buildings and optically dazzling textures harbour the seeds of his later Paris Circus series, begun after the artist’s return to the capital in 1962. With its intuitive scrawl and semi-automatic approach to mark making, it may also be seen to foreshadow the linear aspirations of Cy Twombly, who sought a similar connection with invisible primal forces.
In its fusion of figure and ground, Banlieue eloquently extends Dubuffet’s explorations of the relationship between body and landscape. His Paysages grotesques and Corps de dames of the early 1950s had forged a new union between the topographies of flesh and earth: great carnal masses imbued with the rhythms and contours of nature. This connection would be further expounded in the sculptures that Dubuffet began in 1954, in which earthbound materials such as sponge, driftwood and volcanic rock morphed into strange figural beings. ‘I want portraits in which description makes use of the same mechanisms as those used in a landscape’, he asserted; ‘here wrinkles, there ravines or paths; here a nose, there a tree; here a mouth, there a house’ (J. Dubuffet, letter to J. Berne, 13 January 1947, in H. Damisch (ed.), Prospectus et tout ecrits suivants, Vol. 2, Paris 1967, p. 432). In the present work, man and his natural surroundings are inextricable. Like geological strata eroded to varying degrees, they dissolve in and out of one another, their colours bleeding and cross-contaminating. Foreground and background oscillate before our eyes, agitating the retina and the psyche in equal measure. ‘One should not confuse what the eyes perceive with what the spirit produces as a result of the perception’, Dubuffet wrote. ‘The eyes only see what appears to them in a single moment; they meet on a small visual field. The spirit, however, completes; it remembers all the fields, lets them dance together. It brings them together, exchanges them, everything is in motion’ (J. Dubuffet, quoted in A. Husslein-Arco (ed.), Jean Dubuffet: Trace of an Adventure, Munich 2003, p. 26).
JEAN DUBUFFET
‘I want portraits in which description makes use of the same mechanisms as those used in a landscape; here wrinkles, there ravines or paths; here a nose, there a tree; here a mouth, there a house’
JEAN DUBUFFET
With its raw, visceral terrain inscribed with quivering graphic forms, Jean Dubuffet’s Banlieue (Suburb) offers a primal vision of quotidian joie de vivre. Thick swathes of impasto are swept across the canvas in rich, marbled layers. Into this geological surface, Dubuffet carves a suburban panorama of figures and houses, which hover before the viewer like graffiti engraved into a rockface. Scraped, scored and scratched into the picture plane, the artist’s rapid, intuitive marks reveal the fossilized strata of colour below, creating a mesmerizing illusion of depth. Painted in December 1954, the work is contemporaneous with the sprawling depictions of cattle and pastures produced following Dubuffet’s relocation to the hills of Auvergne that summer. Channelling the rustic textures of the pastoral landscape into a bristling snapshot of daily life, it presages the dense, earthbound surfaces of the works produced in rural Vence between 1955 and 1961. Dubuffet’s early interest in uncultivated, unprocessed visual languages, a phenomenon he termed art brut, was amplified by his to-and-fro between town and country during this period. The coarse material beauty of fields, soil and plant-life, combined with the hustle and bustle of suburbia, gave rise to a renewed fascination with the wonder inherent in everyday existence. Dubuffet’s technique – one of layering and excavation – sought to tap into these base, primeval sensations. As he explained, ‘there enters into it the physical pleasure one takes in using a large spatula, as wide as a hand, to spread this handsome brilliant white butter of firm consistency of the previous field of dark colours, then running over that smooth dough again with long round-ended knife which so easily traces in it graffiti of resonant colours. It is the same pleasure that leads the hand of anyone inscribing a very hasty drawing or some written word on the wet plaster of a wall or the freshly smoothed out cement of a pavement’ (J. Dubuffet, quoted in A. Franzke, Dubuffet, New York 1981, p. 83). Quivering with the untamed magic of an ancient inscription, Banlieue is a powerful demonstration of this approach.
Working in the aftermath of the Second World War, Dubuffet felt that mankind’s connection to the innate rhythms and nuances of the world around him had been overshadowed. The prevailing lessons of art history, he felt, had numbed our ability to commune with basic visual and haptic instinct. During the 1940s, Dubuffet’s desire to escape the teachings of Western culture had led him across the world: from the Bedouin tribes of the Sahara desert, to mental health institutes in Switzerland. He had studied the art of children and psychics, and had probed the visual traditions of isolated communities. However, it was ultimately in the rural corners of his native France that he would begin to fully consolidate these influences. In July 1954, his wife’s illness prompted the couple to seek fresher climes in Auvergne; her still-ailing health would drive them to Vence the following year. ‘Once more I became preoccupied with country subjects’, the artist recalled; ‘fields, trees, grassy pastures, cattle, carts and the work of the fields – all things I had treated with enthusiasm in 1943 and 1944’ (J. Dubuffet, quoted in Jean Dubuffet: Paintings, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1966, p. 40). Though the present painting takes its place within this body of work, its dynamic figures, oscillating buildings and optically dazzling textures harbour the seeds of his later Paris Circus series, begun after the artist’s return to the capital in 1962. With its intuitive scrawl and semi-automatic approach to mark making, it may also be seen to foreshadow the linear aspirations of Cy Twombly, who sought a similar connection with invisible primal forces.
In its fusion of figure and ground, Banlieue eloquently extends Dubuffet’s explorations of the relationship between body and landscape. His Paysages grotesques and Corps de dames of the early 1950s had forged a new union between the topographies of flesh and earth: great carnal masses imbued with the rhythms and contours of nature. This connection would be further expounded in the sculptures that Dubuffet began in 1954, in which earthbound materials such as sponge, driftwood and volcanic rock morphed into strange figural beings. ‘I want portraits in which description makes use of the same mechanisms as those used in a landscape’, he asserted; ‘here wrinkles, there ravines or paths; here a nose, there a tree; here a mouth, there a house’ (J. Dubuffet, letter to J. Berne, 13 January 1947, in H. Damisch (ed.), Prospectus et tout ecrits suivants, Vol. 2, Paris 1967, p. 432). In the present work, man and his natural surroundings are inextricable. Like geological strata eroded to varying degrees, they dissolve in and out of one another, their colours bleeding and cross-contaminating. Foreground and background oscillate before our eyes, agitating the retina and the psyche in equal measure. ‘One should not confuse what the eyes perceive with what the spirit produces as a result of the perception’, Dubuffet wrote. ‘The eyes only see what appears to them in a single moment; they meet on a small visual field. The spirit, however, completes; it remembers all the fields, lets them dance together. It brings them together, exchanges them, everything is in motion’ (J. Dubuffet, quoted in A. Husslein-Arco (ed.), Jean Dubuffet: Trace of an Adventure, Munich 2003, p. 26).