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Lot Essay
‘Their bodies and faces are exaggeratedly simplified, drawn as if with a finger on a window misted with condensation. These women, infused with a banal eroticism… are a debauch of colour reminiscent of the fireworks at a street festival. They convey the artist’s sense of derision, his scant interest in following the great causes’ (V. da Costa and F. Hergott, Jean Dubuffet. Works, Writings, Interviews, Barcelona 2006, p. 22).
With its brilliant palette, raw geometries and vibrant application of paint, Jean Dubuffet’s Femme assise aux persiennes is an historic early work that played a pivotal role in the artist’s career. Painted in 1943, it was selected for the group show Le nu dans l’art contemporain at the Galerie René Drouin in Paris that year. Representing the artist at this landmark exhibition, Femme assise aux persiennes marked Dubuffet’s first major step forward within the professional art world. Seated in peaceful repose before a pair of shutters, Dubuffet’s woman confronts the viewer face-on, meeting our gaze with the direct immediacy which would become synonymous with the artist’s aesthetic. Extending from the distinctive paintings of nude women that have since come to be recognised as Dubuffet’s first significant body of work, the work’s rudimentary streaks of paint, chalk-like textures and impulsive layering of pigment bear all the hallmarks of his burgeoning art brut style. Painted against the backdrop of occupied Paris during the Second World War, its bright colours, elementary composition and bold, interlocking shapes bear witness to Dubuffet’s desire to create an art rooted in the immediacy of sensation, divorced from prevailing intellectual currents and systems of thought. It was this appeal to the innate essence of reality, rather than its cultural trappings, that was to become the single most important guiding principle in Dubuffet’s oeuvre.
Starting life as a wine trader, Dubuffet had always dreamed of becoming an artist, and produced a number of paintings, drawings and gouaches throughout the 1920s and 1930s. In 1937, with his family wine business under severe financial pressure, Dubuffet had felt his chances of becoming a full-time painter slowly slipping away from him. Two years later he was called up to military service; returning to Paris after the armistice, Dubuffet managed to turn the relative shortage of wine to his advantage, and by 1942 was successful enough to be able to ‘treat myself to two or three years of good times (having had hardly any previously)’ (J. Dubuffet, ‘Biographie au pas de course’, reproduced in Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, vol. 4, 1995, pp. 459-538). This was the turning point he had been waiting for, and the works produced over the next few years would firmly establish his position within the post-War artistic landscape. The exhibition at Drouin’s gallery provided Dubuffet with his first substantial launchpad into this milieu; indeed, in the years that followed, Drouin would become an instrumental figure in the artist’s rise to prominence, granting him his first solo show in 1944.
Speaking of Dubuffet’s early figures, Valérie da Costa and Fabrice Hergott have written ‘Their bodies and faces are exaggeratedly simplified, drawn as if with a finger on a window misted with condensation. These women, infused with a banal eroticism … are a debauch of colour reminiscent of the fireworks at a street festival. They convey the artist’s sense of derision, his scant interest in following the great causes. In an epoch crushed by the weight of war, this deliberately foolish gaiety is not altogether free of cynicism. It situates art not above the concerns of the time, but rather in a space conventionally considered to be inferior, belonging to the imagery of graffiti’ (V. da Costa and F. Hergott, Jean Dubuffet. Works, Writings, Interviews, Barcelona 2006, p. 22). As well as female nudes, Dubuffet painted figures on the metro, bustling Parisian street scenes, idyllic countryside vistas and jazz clubs – subjects that overrode the contemporary Zeitgeist. It was this sense of uninhibited joy in the unremarkable details of everyday life that would continue to drive Dubuffet’s practice for the next four decades.
With its brilliant palette, raw geometries and vibrant application of paint, Jean Dubuffet’s Femme assise aux persiennes is an historic early work that played a pivotal role in the artist’s career. Painted in 1943, it was selected for the group show Le nu dans l’art contemporain at the Galerie René Drouin in Paris that year. Representing the artist at this landmark exhibition, Femme assise aux persiennes marked Dubuffet’s first major step forward within the professional art world. Seated in peaceful repose before a pair of shutters, Dubuffet’s woman confronts the viewer face-on, meeting our gaze with the direct immediacy which would become synonymous with the artist’s aesthetic. Extending from the distinctive paintings of nude women that have since come to be recognised as Dubuffet’s first significant body of work, the work’s rudimentary streaks of paint, chalk-like textures and impulsive layering of pigment bear all the hallmarks of his burgeoning art brut style. Painted against the backdrop of occupied Paris during the Second World War, its bright colours, elementary composition and bold, interlocking shapes bear witness to Dubuffet’s desire to create an art rooted in the immediacy of sensation, divorced from prevailing intellectual currents and systems of thought. It was this appeal to the innate essence of reality, rather than its cultural trappings, that was to become the single most important guiding principle in Dubuffet’s oeuvre.
Starting life as a wine trader, Dubuffet had always dreamed of becoming an artist, and produced a number of paintings, drawings and gouaches throughout the 1920s and 1930s. In 1937, with his family wine business under severe financial pressure, Dubuffet had felt his chances of becoming a full-time painter slowly slipping away from him. Two years later he was called up to military service; returning to Paris after the armistice, Dubuffet managed to turn the relative shortage of wine to his advantage, and by 1942 was successful enough to be able to ‘treat myself to two or three years of good times (having had hardly any previously)’ (J. Dubuffet, ‘Biographie au pas de course’, reproduced in Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, vol. 4, 1995, pp. 459-538). This was the turning point he had been waiting for, and the works produced over the next few years would firmly establish his position within the post-War artistic landscape. The exhibition at Drouin’s gallery provided Dubuffet with his first substantial launchpad into this milieu; indeed, in the years that followed, Drouin would become an instrumental figure in the artist’s rise to prominence, granting him his first solo show in 1944.
Speaking of Dubuffet’s early figures, Valérie da Costa and Fabrice Hergott have written ‘Their bodies and faces are exaggeratedly simplified, drawn as if with a finger on a window misted with condensation. These women, infused with a banal eroticism … are a debauch of colour reminiscent of the fireworks at a street festival. They convey the artist’s sense of derision, his scant interest in following the great causes. In an epoch crushed by the weight of war, this deliberately foolish gaiety is not altogether free of cynicism. It situates art not above the concerns of the time, but rather in a space conventionally considered to be inferior, belonging to the imagery of graffiti’ (V. da Costa and F. Hergott, Jean Dubuffet. Works, Writings, Interviews, Barcelona 2006, p. 22). As well as female nudes, Dubuffet painted figures on the metro, bustling Parisian street scenes, idyllic countryside vistas and jazz clubs – subjects that overrode the contemporary Zeitgeist. It was this sense of uninhibited joy in the unremarkable details of everyday life that would continue to drive Dubuffet’s practice for the next four decades.