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Lot Essay
‘When I set my little machine in motion to turn out places and beings, I do not know how the session will come out this time, over what unknown terrain it will undertake to sweep me, what encounters will occur and what kind of game will be spread out on my floor at the end of the day’
JEAN DUBUFFET
‘From the start of these canvas cut-outs I sensed that I was going to find in them what I had vainly looked for in other means … By this entirely different use of colour, by taking away from it all decorative qualities and aiming uniquely at obtaining a striking effect of intense life, it seemed to me that I would be opening up a very vast field of new explorations’
JEAN DUBUFFET
Teeming with life, texture and iridescent colour, Jean Dubuffet’s Paysage minéralogique stands among the very first examples of his revolutionary Tableaux d’assemblages. Executed in 1955 – the year that the artist made his seminal move to the rural outpost of Vence – it offers a jewel-like celebration of the raw natural terrain surrounding his Provençal studio. From a dense tapestry of fragments, layered organically like fallen leaves, a single tree blooms against the skyline. Created by cutting and rearranging segments of pre-painted canvas, the work simultaneously suggests a landscape seen from a distance and a microscopic aerial view of the ground, spiked with foliage and sparkling minerals. The technique marked something of a turning point for Dubuffet. Evolving from his earlier printed assemblages, as well as his landmark series of collaged butterfly wings, the canvas cut-outs initiated a writhing cellular language that would inform both his Paris Circus works of the early 1960s and the monumental twelve-year Hourloupe cycle that followed. Harnessing chance and experimentation as compositional tools, the Tableaux d’assemblages brought Dubuffet one step closer to channelling the innate, the automatic and the intuitive: qualities he had sought to rehabilitate in the aftermath of the Second World War. His fascination with art brut – unschooled visual languages created independently of teaching and culture – was given a new lease of life by his contact with the coarse, untamed pastures of Vence. The composite nature of the Tableaux d’assemblages allowed him to approximate the chaotic biodiversity of the earth, with its unpredictable collisions of form, surface, shape and colour. In Paysage minéralogique, the artist visualises the intangible flux of nature: ‘a kind of continuous universal soup with the savour of life itself’ (J. Dubuffet, quoted in Jean Dubuffet: paintings, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1966, p. 44).
The ailing health of Dubuffet’s wife during the early months of 1955 had prompted the couple to escape the noise and pollution of the city. The warmer, fresher climes of Southern France had a lasting impact upon his psyche, and the artist would remain there – by and large – for the next six years. Following his earlier explorations of landscape – most notably in the Paysages grotesques and the Paysages du mental – the Tableaux d’assemblages stand among his earliest major engagements with the physical terrain surrounding his new home. Technically, the works may be seen as an evolution of his Assemblages d’empreintes, begun two years previously, and continued in Vence in a studio dedicated specifically to their production. In these works, Dubuffet had used a machine to create patterned lithographs, which he then cut up and reassembled into new compositions. ‘When I set my little machine in motion to turn out places and beings, I do not know how the session will come out this time, over what unknown terrain it will undertake to sweep me, what encounters will occur and what kind of game will be spread out on my floor at the end of the day’, he explained (J. Dubuffet, quoted in Jean Dubuffet: Metamorphoses of Landscape, exh. cat., Fondation Beyeler, Basel, 2016, p. 116). The process of seeking out hidden correspondences between the fragments fed directly into his butterfly collages, in which the artist forged landscapes and figures from tiny translucent wings. In replacing this delicate natural resource with canvas itself – painted by his own hand – Dubuffet opened up a new world of possibility: one ‘rich in unexpected effects … an incomparable laboratory and an efficacious means of invention’ (J. Dubuffet, quoted in Jean Dubuffet: Metamorphoses of Landscape, exh. cat., Fondation Beyeler, Basel, 2016, p. 116).
In comparison to his previous collage work, the Tableaux d’assemblages allowed Dubuffet to better approximate the fleeting qualities of nature – particularly, as evidenced by the present work, with regards to colour. ‘From the start of these canvas cut-outs I sensed that I was going to find in them what I had vainly looked for in other means’, he explained; ‘… the colour was seemingly very much dispersed through the entire picture and in such a way as to make one forget it, to evade analysis by the eye, yet produce a glittering mother-of-pearl scintillation in which it is difficult to make out the particular colours that gave rise to it … By this entirely different use of colour, by taking away from it all decorative qualities and aiming uniquely at obtaining a striking effect of intense life, it seemed to me that I would be opening up a very vast field of new explorations’ (J. Dubuffet, quoted in A. Franzke, Jean Dubuffet, New York 1981, p. 105). Dubuffet saw that the colours of the natural world – subject to continual variations in light and atmospheric conditions – were impossible to pin down in something as static as pigment. By bringing together disparate chromatic fragments, he ruptured all sense of tonal continuity, transforming the picture plane into a fluid, prismatic space. Whilst on one level these works anticipate the glittering geological qualities of the Texturologies and Topographies, their complex, hybrid palettes may be seen to foreshadow the psychedelic and increasingly non-representational use of colour that would come to define Paris Circus, Hourloupe and much of his later oeuvre. In Paysage minéralogique, Dubuffet gives form to the diffuse, fragmentary nature of reality and perception: a quest that would occupy the rest of his practice.
JEAN DUBUFFET
‘From the start of these canvas cut-outs I sensed that I was going to find in them what I had vainly looked for in other means … By this entirely different use of colour, by taking away from it all decorative qualities and aiming uniquely at obtaining a striking effect of intense life, it seemed to me that I would be opening up a very vast field of new explorations’
JEAN DUBUFFET
Teeming with life, texture and iridescent colour, Jean Dubuffet’s Paysage minéralogique stands among the very first examples of his revolutionary Tableaux d’assemblages. Executed in 1955 – the year that the artist made his seminal move to the rural outpost of Vence – it offers a jewel-like celebration of the raw natural terrain surrounding his Provençal studio. From a dense tapestry of fragments, layered organically like fallen leaves, a single tree blooms against the skyline. Created by cutting and rearranging segments of pre-painted canvas, the work simultaneously suggests a landscape seen from a distance and a microscopic aerial view of the ground, spiked with foliage and sparkling minerals. The technique marked something of a turning point for Dubuffet. Evolving from his earlier printed assemblages, as well as his landmark series of collaged butterfly wings, the canvas cut-outs initiated a writhing cellular language that would inform both his Paris Circus works of the early 1960s and the monumental twelve-year Hourloupe cycle that followed. Harnessing chance and experimentation as compositional tools, the Tableaux d’assemblages brought Dubuffet one step closer to channelling the innate, the automatic and the intuitive: qualities he had sought to rehabilitate in the aftermath of the Second World War. His fascination with art brut – unschooled visual languages created independently of teaching and culture – was given a new lease of life by his contact with the coarse, untamed pastures of Vence. The composite nature of the Tableaux d’assemblages allowed him to approximate the chaotic biodiversity of the earth, with its unpredictable collisions of form, surface, shape and colour. In Paysage minéralogique, the artist visualises the intangible flux of nature: ‘a kind of continuous universal soup with the savour of life itself’ (J. Dubuffet, quoted in Jean Dubuffet: paintings, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1966, p. 44).
The ailing health of Dubuffet’s wife during the early months of 1955 had prompted the couple to escape the noise and pollution of the city. The warmer, fresher climes of Southern France had a lasting impact upon his psyche, and the artist would remain there – by and large – for the next six years. Following his earlier explorations of landscape – most notably in the Paysages grotesques and the Paysages du mental – the Tableaux d’assemblages stand among his earliest major engagements with the physical terrain surrounding his new home. Technically, the works may be seen as an evolution of his Assemblages d’empreintes, begun two years previously, and continued in Vence in a studio dedicated specifically to their production. In these works, Dubuffet had used a machine to create patterned lithographs, which he then cut up and reassembled into new compositions. ‘When I set my little machine in motion to turn out places and beings, I do not know how the session will come out this time, over what unknown terrain it will undertake to sweep me, what encounters will occur and what kind of game will be spread out on my floor at the end of the day’, he explained (J. Dubuffet, quoted in Jean Dubuffet: Metamorphoses of Landscape, exh. cat., Fondation Beyeler, Basel, 2016, p. 116). The process of seeking out hidden correspondences between the fragments fed directly into his butterfly collages, in which the artist forged landscapes and figures from tiny translucent wings. In replacing this delicate natural resource with canvas itself – painted by his own hand – Dubuffet opened up a new world of possibility: one ‘rich in unexpected effects … an incomparable laboratory and an efficacious means of invention’ (J. Dubuffet, quoted in Jean Dubuffet: Metamorphoses of Landscape, exh. cat., Fondation Beyeler, Basel, 2016, p. 116).
In comparison to his previous collage work, the Tableaux d’assemblages allowed Dubuffet to better approximate the fleeting qualities of nature – particularly, as evidenced by the present work, with regards to colour. ‘From the start of these canvas cut-outs I sensed that I was going to find in them what I had vainly looked for in other means’, he explained; ‘… the colour was seemingly very much dispersed through the entire picture and in such a way as to make one forget it, to evade analysis by the eye, yet produce a glittering mother-of-pearl scintillation in which it is difficult to make out the particular colours that gave rise to it … By this entirely different use of colour, by taking away from it all decorative qualities and aiming uniquely at obtaining a striking effect of intense life, it seemed to me that I would be opening up a very vast field of new explorations’ (J. Dubuffet, quoted in A. Franzke, Jean Dubuffet, New York 1981, p. 105). Dubuffet saw that the colours of the natural world – subject to continual variations in light and atmospheric conditions – were impossible to pin down in something as static as pigment. By bringing together disparate chromatic fragments, he ruptured all sense of tonal continuity, transforming the picture plane into a fluid, prismatic space. Whilst on one level these works anticipate the glittering geological qualities of the Texturologies and Topographies, their complex, hybrid palettes may be seen to foreshadow the psychedelic and increasingly non-representational use of colour that would come to define Paris Circus, Hourloupe and much of his later oeuvre. In Paysage minéralogique, Dubuffet gives form to the diffuse, fragmentary nature of reality and perception: a quest that would occupy the rest of his practice.