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Lot Essay
‘A meandering, uninterrupted and resolutely uniform line, which brings all planes to the surface and takes no account of the concrete quality of the object described, its size and position but, rather, abolishes all the usual categories’ (J. Dubuffet, quoted in M. Glimcher (ed.), Jean Dubuffet: Towards an Alternative Reality, New York 1987, p. 223).
An interlocking jigsaw of red, white and blue cells, cut and spliced from multiple aerial perspectives, transforms before our eyes into a vision of a teacup, saucer and spoon in Jean Dubuffet’s Tasse de thé V (utopique). Executed in January 1966, it is a highly accomplished large-scale example of Dubuffet’s celebrated Ustensiles Utopiques paintings, in which the artist applied his signature l’Hourloupe style to a series of ubiquitous, everyday objects. As the fifth in a numbered sequence of six paintings entitled Tasse de thé, each uniquely subtitled, the present work takes its place alongside the depictions of bottles, wheelbarrows, chairs, stoves, scissors and cafetières that had been his focus since 1964. Paralleling developments across the Atlantic, where artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann and Claes Oldenburg were creating their own vibrant homages to mass produced and commercial goods, Dubuffet’s amorphous compositions lavished attention upon overlooked quotidian objects with the same uninhibited sense of childlike wonder that had driven his earliest fascination with art brut. Grounded in the automatism of doodling and free association, l’Hourloupe sought to liberate art from traditional representational strategies, creating a flat, primary-coloured vocabulary devoid of expression and classical linear perspective. It was, in many ways, the culmination of Dubuffet’s artistic ambitions: a new unschooled visual language, equipped to translate the raw essence of everyday life. Under the spell of l’Hourloupe, banal manufactured objects became sites of ‘Utopia’, visionary reappraisals of the formerly unstudied paraphernalia of daily existence. Following on from the seminal Paris Circus paintings of the early 1960s, the Ustensiles Utopiques works pioneered a new, distinctly European brand of Pop Art, coming to prominence at a time when its American counterparts were taking the world by storm. Situated within this revolutionary body of work, Tasse de thé V (utopique) was exhibited in the year of its creation at Dubuffet’s solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. It has subsequently featured in important shows at institutions including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Palazzo Grassi, Venice and the Badischer Kunstverein, Kalsruhe.
Having spent much of the immediate post-War period in the countryside, engaged in dark, material studies of rural terrains, the early 1960s saw Dubuffet lift his eyes from the ground and marvel at the newfound joie de vivre of Paris. So intense was his engagement with the city’s euphoria that, towards the end of 1962, the vibrant pictorial idiosyncrasies cultivated throughout the series began to distil themselves, gradually morphing into the distinctive language that would become known as l’Hourloupe – an onomatopoeic concoction that fused ‘hurler’ (‘to shout’), ‘hululer’ (‘to howl’), ‘loup’ (‘wolf’) and the title of Maupassant’s 1887 horror story Le Horla. The beginnings of l’Hourloupe were visible in a number of Paris Circus paintings, born of Dubuffet’s complex chalk-like scrawl; yet it was not until July 1962 that the distinctive cellular forms were truly consolidated. Over the course of a series of phone calls from Touquet, Dubuffet allowed his ball point pen to wander aimlessly, creating a series of distracted semi-automatic drawings which he cross-hatched with red and blue lines. Dubuffet cut out and rearranged elements of these doodlings, and was struck by the way they came to life when positioned against a black background. Dubuffet described his new invention as ‘a meandering, uninterrupted and resolutely uniform line, which brings all planes to the surface and takes no account of the concrete quality of the object described, its size and position but, rather, abolishes all the usual categories’ (J. Dubuffet, quoted in M. Glimcher (ed.), Jean Dubuffet: Towards an Alternative Reality, New York 1987, p. 223). Dissolving the simplistic values normally attributed to commonplace objects, the deep, receding colour of the cells reintroduces a sense of the depth that would once have existed in the composition. Compressed into two dimensions and isolated within a dark void, Dubuffet’s unassuming teacup is elevated from an unremarkable daily ritual to a strange optical distortion: a metamorphic curiosity that invites to re-evaluate our perception of reality.
An interlocking jigsaw of red, white and blue cells, cut and spliced from multiple aerial perspectives, transforms before our eyes into a vision of a teacup, saucer and spoon in Jean Dubuffet’s Tasse de thé V (utopique). Executed in January 1966, it is a highly accomplished large-scale example of Dubuffet’s celebrated Ustensiles Utopiques paintings, in which the artist applied his signature l’Hourloupe style to a series of ubiquitous, everyday objects. As the fifth in a numbered sequence of six paintings entitled Tasse de thé, each uniquely subtitled, the present work takes its place alongside the depictions of bottles, wheelbarrows, chairs, stoves, scissors and cafetières that had been his focus since 1964. Paralleling developments across the Atlantic, where artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann and Claes Oldenburg were creating their own vibrant homages to mass produced and commercial goods, Dubuffet’s amorphous compositions lavished attention upon overlooked quotidian objects with the same uninhibited sense of childlike wonder that had driven his earliest fascination with art brut. Grounded in the automatism of doodling and free association, l’Hourloupe sought to liberate art from traditional representational strategies, creating a flat, primary-coloured vocabulary devoid of expression and classical linear perspective. It was, in many ways, the culmination of Dubuffet’s artistic ambitions: a new unschooled visual language, equipped to translate the raw essence of everyday life. Under the spell of l’Hourloupe, banal manufactured objects became sites of ‘Utopia’, visionary reappraisals of the formerly unstudied paraphernalia of daily existence. Following on from the seminal Paris Circus paintings of the early 1960s, the Ustensiles Utopiques works pioneered a new, distinctly European brand of Pop Art, coming to prominence at a time when its American counterparts were taking the world by storm. Situated within this revolutionary body of work, Tasse de thé V (utopique) was exhibited in the year of its creation at Dubuffet’s solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. It has subsequently featured in important shows at institutions including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Palazzo Grassi, Venice and the Badischer Kunstverein, Kalsruhe.
Having spent much of the immediate post-War period in the countryside, engaged in dark, material studies of rural terrains, the early 1960s saw Dubuffet lift his eyes from the ground and marvel at the newfound joie de vivre of Paris. So intense was his engagement with the city’s euphoria that, towards the end of 1962, the vibrant pictorial idiosyncrasies cultivated throughout the series began to distil themselves, gradually morphing into the distinctive language that would become known as l’Hourloupe – an onomatopoeic concoction that fused ‘hurler’ (‘to shout’), ‘hululer’ (‘to howl’), ‘loup’ (‘wolf’) and the title of Maupassant’s 1887 horror story Le Horla. The beginnings of l’Hourloupe were visible in a number of Paris Circus paintings, born of Dubuffet’s complex chalk-like scrawl; yet it was not until July 1962 that the distinctive cellular forms were truly consolidated. Over the course of a series of phone calls from Touquet, Dubuffet allowed his ball point pen to wander aimlessly, creating a series of distracted semi-automatic drawings which he cross-hatched with red and blue lines. Dubuffet cut out and rearranged elements of these doodlings, and was struck by the way they came to life when positioned against a black background. Dubuffet described his new invention as ‘a meandering, uninterrupted and resolutely uniform line, which brings all planes to the surface and takes no account of the concrete quality of the object described, its size and position but, rather, abolishes all the usual categories’ (J. Dubuffet, quoted in M. Glimcher (ed.), Jean Dubuffet: Towards an Alternative Reality, New York 1987, p. 223). Dissolving the simplistic values normally attributed to commonplace objects, the deep, receding colour of the cells reintroduces a sense of the depth that would once have existed in the composition. Compressed into two dimensions and isolated within a dark void, Dubuffet’s unassuming teacup is elevated from an unremarkable daily ritual to a strange optical distortion: a metamorphic curiosity that invites to re-evaluate our perception of reality.