.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
‘What these pictures afford me... is a kind of peace. Invigorating and ardent peace, plane of serene exaltation like that of Asiatic meditations. Great peace of greenswards, bare and empty plains, silent uninterrupted expanses where nothing comes to upset the homogeneity, the continuity. I love the great broad homogenous worlds without trails or limits like the sea, the snowy heights, the deserts, and steppes; I aspire to paintings which procure for me the equivalent... the very breath of great places exhaled by such small site which becomes vast as the whole of a summer’s starry sky. The very notion of dimensions is turned upside down, does away with itself’ – J. Dubuffet
Ripe with painterly complexity, Jean Dubuffet’s Texturology IV (Nuancée de rosâtre) weaves together a homogenous web of dense speckles and stippling of nuanced color. Disrupting the traditional hierarchy of subject matter in art, the Texturologies celebrate the most prosaic of all things—the earth—in order to sharpen our visual perception by redirecting it to the arenas in life that are erroneously condemned as too mundane and therefore unworthy of a leading place in art. Owing a debt to the New York School’s elegant sparseness and total abstractness, the flat-bed representation of soil enabled Dubuffet to experiment with other media and new techniques. Collected by such prestigious institutions as the Tate, London; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Dubuffet’s Texturologies serve as a sophisticated commemoration of the ground we walk on from an artist often known for his bold and or psychedelic colours celebrating the bustle of city life.
Occupying the artist for intervals at a time between September 1957 and October 1958, Dubuffet began experimenting with new painterly techniques to be used in the construction of his assemblages. However, his fascination with the total abstraction of the ‘Tyrolean’ method quickly resulted in the emergence of the homogenous canvases that comprise his Texturologies. Dubuffet has described the process, stating, ‘Certain of these elements, intended for my assemblages, were the result of a special technique which consisted of shaking a brush over the painting spread out on the floor, covering it with a spray of tiny droplets. This is the technique, known as “Tyrolean”, that masons use in plastering walls to obtain certain mellowing effects. But instead of brushes, they use little branches of trees—juniper, box, etc.—and they have different ways of shaking them to get the particular effect they want. I combined this technique with others - successive layers, applications of sheets of paper, scattering sand over the painting, scratching it with the prongs of a fork. In this way I produced finely worked sheets that gave the impression of teeming matter, alive and sparkling, which I could use to represent soil, but which could also evoke all kinds of indeterminate textures, and even galaxies and nebulae. But I then decided to keep most of these paintings intact, instead of cutting them up for my assemblages, and gave them the name Texturologies’ (J. Dubuffet, quoted in R. Alley, Catalogue of the Tate Gallery’s Collection of Modern Art other than Works by British Artists, London 1981, pp.182-3). One of the first Texturologies, Nuancée de rosâtre was executed in Vence, France, where Dubuffet created the first ten works from the series between September and December 1957. Numbered in the order in which they were completed, the series resumed in Paris in March of 1958 and finished in Vence that October.
Striving to make his viewer conscious of the common, everyday environment in which we live, Dubuffet’s unconventional technical method activated the canvas with an extremely animated, yet somewhat primitive surface, reminiscent of the rocky surface of early cave paintings. ‘What these pictures afford me in addition is a kind of peace,’ Dubuffet stated. ‘Invigorating and ardent peace, plane of serene exaltation like that of Asiatic meditations. Great peace of greenswards, bare and empty plains, silent uninterrupted expanses where nothing comes to upset the homogeneity, the continuity. I love the great broad homogenous worlds without trails or limits like the sea, the snowy heights, the deserts, and steppes; I aspire to paintings which procure for me the equivalent. That the surfaces of terrain conjured up in them may be the dimensions of a napkin or at the most a bed does not at all bother me in that respect. Or rather, yes: it augments my uneasiness because of the vertigo caused by the ambiguity of the dimension—the very breath of great places exhaled by such small site which becomes vast as the whole of a summer’s starry sky. The very notion of dimensions is turned upside down, does away with itself’ (J. Dubuffet, quoted in A. Frankze, Dubuffet, New York, 1981, p. 118).
Dubuffet vehemently believed that the importance of art lay in its ability to express man’s natural state, and the 1950s saw his interest in Art Brut develop into ever more exuberant and innovative manifestations. Objecting to the hierarchies of both material and subject matter that are implicit to Western aesthetics, Dubuffet sought out an art that was more immediate and truer than what had gone before. In his famous lecture ‘Anticultural Positions’, given at the beginning of the 1950s, Dubuffet stated that ‘For most western people, there are objects that are beautiful and others that are ugly; there are beautiful people and ugly people, beautiful places and ugly ones. But not for me. Beauty does not enter into the picture for me. I consider the western notion of beauty completely erroneous’ (J. Dubuffet, “Anticultural Positions, 1951,” quoted in M. Glimcher (ed.), Jean Dubuffet: Towards an Alternative Reality, New York, 1987, p. 129).
Ripe with painterly complexity, Jean Dubuffet’s Texturology IV (Nuancée de rosâtre) weaves together a homogenous web of dense speckles and stippling of nuanced color. Disrupting the traditional hierarchy of subject matter in art, the Texturologies celebrate the most prosaic of all things—the earth—in order to sharpen our visual perception by redirecting it to the arenas in life that are erroneously condemned as too mundane and therefore unworthy of a leading place in art. Owing a debt to the New York School’s elegant sparseness and total abstractness, the flat-bed representation of soil enabled Dubuffet to experiment with other media and new techniques. Collected by such prestigious institutions as the Tate, London; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Dubuffet’s Texturologies serve as a sophisticated commemoration of the ground we walk on from an artist often known for his bold and or psychedelic colours celebrating the bustle of city life.
Occupying the artist for intervals at a time between September 1957 and October 1958, Dubuffet began experimenting with new painterly techniques to be used in the construction of his assemblages. However, his fascination with the total abstraction of the ‘Tyrolean’ method quickly resulted in the emergence of the homogenous canvases that comprise his Texturologies. Dubuffet has described the process, stating, ‘Certain of these elements, intended for my assemblages, were the result of a special technique which consisted of shaking a brush over the painting spread out on the floor, covering it with a spray of tiny droplets. This is the technique, known as “Tyrolean”, that masons use in plastering walls to obtain certain mellowing effects. But instead of brushes, they use little branches of trees—juniper, box, etc.—and they have different ways of shaking them to get the particular effect they want. I combined this technique with others - successive layers, applications of sheets of paper, scattering sand over the painting, scratching it with the prongs of a fork. In this way I produced finely worked sheets that gave the impression of teeming matter, alive and sparkling, which I could use to represent soil, but which could also evoke all kinds of indeterminate textures, and even galaxies and nebulae. But I then decided to keep most of these paintings intact, instead of cutting them up for my assemblages, and gave them the name Texturologies’ (J. Dubuffet, quoted in R. Alley, Catalogue of the Tate Gallery’s Collection of Modern Art other than Works by British Artists, London 1981, pp.182-3). One of the first Texturologies, Nuancée de rosâtre was executed in Vence, France, where Dubuffet created the first ten works from the series between September and December 1957. Numbered in the order in which they were completed, the series resumed in Paris in March of 1958 and finished in Vence that October.
Striving to make his viewer conscious of the common, everyday environment in which we live, Dubuffet’s unconventional technical method activated the canvas with an extremely animated, yet somewhat primitive surface, reminiscent of the rocky surface of early cave paintings. ‘What these pictures afford me in addition is a kind of peace,’ Dubuffet stated. ‘Invigorating and ardent peace, plane of serene exaltation like that of Asiatic meditations. Great peace of greenswards, bare and empty plains, silent uninterrupted expanses where nothing comes to upset the homogeneity, the continuity. I love the great broad homogenous worlds without trails or limits like the sea, the snowy heights, the deserts, and steppes; I aspire to paintings which procure for me the equivalent. That the surfaces of terrain conjured up in them may be the dimensions of a napkin or at the most a bed does not at all bother me in that respect. Or rather, yes: it augments my uneasiness because of the vertigo caused by the ambiguity of the dimension—the very breath of great places exhaled by such small site which becomes vast as the whole of a summer’s starry sky. The very notion of dimensions is turned upside down, does away with itself’ (J. Dubuffet, quoted in A. Frankze, Dubuffet, New York, 1981, p. 118).
Dubuffet vehemently believed that the importance of art lay in its ability to express man’s natural state, and the 1950s saw his interest in Art Brut develop into ever more exuberant and innovative manifestations. Objecting to the hierarchies of both material and subject matter that are implicit to Western aesthetics, Dubuffet sought out an art that was more immediate and truer than what had gone before. In his famous lecture ‘Anticultural Positions’, given at the beginning of the 1950s, Dubuffet stated that ‘For most western people, there are objects that are beautiful and others that are ugly; there are beautiful people and ugly people, beautiful places and ugly ones. But not for me. Beauty does not enter into the picture for me. I consider the western notion of beauty completely erroneous’ (J. Dubuffet, “Anticultural Positions, 1951,” quoted in M. Glimcher (ed.), Jean Dubuffet: Towards an Alternative Reality, New York, 1987, p. 129).