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Lot Essay
‘[L’Hourloupe], with its heavy contouring, with its red, white and blue range shading off into purples and violets, began suddenly ... The clear, hard style was developed early in 1963, in a series of dense, all-over works typified in this exhibition by Veglione d’Ustensiles’ – L. Alloway
‘When one has looked at a painting of this kind, one looks at everything around one with a new refreshed eye, and one learns to see the unaccustomed and amusing side of things. When I say amusing, I do not mean solely the funny side, but also the grand, the moving and even the tragic aspects [of ordinary things]’ – J. Dubuffet
‘For Dubuffet [l’Hourloupe] is a “festival of the mind”, luminous, brilliant, sparkling, and continual. In it Dubuffet seeks an uninterrupted and uniform writing that brings everything to the frontal plane. It represents the wanderings of the thought processes, a mental and neuronal vision of the world, a vision of the real world that never stops questioning’ – V. da Costa and F. Hergott
With its inscrutable jigsaw of primary-coloured cells, Veglione d’Ustensiles (Carnival of Utensils) is a vivid early example of Jean Dubuffet’s most celebrated series: l’Hourloupe. Emblazoned against a black background, a swarming puzzle of red, white and blue segments forms a teeming, interlocking mass, entwined like quivering strands of DNA. Painted in 1964, the work is a hypnotic large-scale example of the writhing all-over compositions that defined his earliest experiments with his new, now-legendary visual language. Internalising the raw energy of the Paris Circus paintings that occupied him between 1961 and 1962, the chaotic cellular maelstrom of l’Hourloupe sought to redefine our understanding of the world around us. As we gaze into the pulsing matrix of Veglione d’Ustensiles, the amorphous fragments begin to coalesce into recognisable domestic objects: the blade of a knife, the curve of a handle, the shape of a garden tool. Dubuffet’s series of Ustensiles utopiques, initiated the same year as the present work, liberated these forms into portraits of individual quotidian items, articulated through the same quixotic script. Lavishing attention upon the unremarkable props of everyday existence, l’Hourloupe was to become a central ingredient in the transatlantic development of Pop Art, offering the same vibrant homage to the wonder of everyday life as Dubuffet’s American counterparts. Oscillating wildly within our vision, the tessellating components of Veglione d’Ustensiles proclaim the birth of a new way of seeing – as Valérie da Costa and Fabrice Hergott have described, ‘a vision of the real world that never stops questioning’ (V. da Costa and F. Hergott, Jean Dubuffet. Works, Writings, Interviews, Barcelona 2006, p. 77).
Like Roy Lichtenstein’s Ben Day dots and Andy Warhol’s vibrant silkscreens, l’Hourloupe presented an alternative visual lens through which to encounter the seismic cultural changes of the 1960s. A post-War euphoria swept the Western world, and both Europe and America rode the wave of consumerism, freedom and sexual revolution. Whereas many American artists responded to this sea-change by deliberately aping the iconography of this new age, on the other side of the Atlantic Dubuffet consciously peeled back all cultural trappings, seeking a pure, uninhibited vision of reality. It was a quest spurred on by his return to Paris in the 1960s after years spent in the depths of the countryside. Entranced by the cosmopolitan hustle and bustle of the city’s heyday, Dubuffet set about transmitting his impressions onto canvas – clamouring forms, gestures and colours came to life as people, shops, cars and houses, a surging maze of activity expressed as a kind of caustic graffiti. This was Paris Circus; yet, as the series progressed, something new began to creep into the texture of these works. From the infrastructure of streets and traffic came strange, alien beings, striped and cross-hatched in red, white and blue, dancing wildly against his psychedelic backdrops. As their presence multiplied, Paris Circus gave way to l’Hourloupe: the city streets became abstract entrails that jostled like blood cells within amoeba-like structures. Entire universes burst forth within their confines. Imbued with the force of life, these worlds became utopique: idealised spaces and objects that might, any minute, spring off the canvas and into our domain.
In Veglione d’Ustensiles, this impression is enhanced through Dubuffet’s painterly technique. Executed with the same scrubbed, chalk-like gestures that had defined Paris Circus, each cell is marked by receding layers of colour that lend differing degrees of depth to the composition. Observing the pictorial surface, individual segments fluctuate indefinitely before our eyes, coalescing to form an intractable compound that vibrates as if with the force of a thousand tiny electrons. This effect relates directly to the apocryphal story of l’Hourloupe’s origins. In 1962, Dubuffet made a series of telephone calls from his summer retreat of Touquet, letting his pen wander absent-mindedly as he talked. Contemplating these semi-conscious, automatic doodles, Dubuffet was captivated by the interaction between different shapes and lines. As he cut and rearranged these segments to create figures and objects, the word l’Hourloupe formed on his lips: an onomatopoeic invention that the artist later identified as a fusion of ‘hurler’ (‘to shout’), ‘hululer’ (‘to howl’), ‘loup’ (‘wolf’) and the title of Maupassant’s 1887 horror story Le Horla. This intuitive phonetic concoction was born of the same impulse as the drawings themselves, produced without deliberate appeal to training or tradition. As l’Hourloupe migrated from pen to paint, it came to embody everything Dubuffet had ever sought in his art: an unschooled visual language that forced the viewer to re-evaluate their understanding of the world around them. Under its spell, everyday objects – kitchen utensils, domestic furniture and industrial machinery – lost their banality, inviting us to encounter them afresh as miraculous, unknown entities. As da Costa and Hergott have written, [l’Hourloupe] is a “festival of the mind”, luminous, brilliant, sparkling, and continual. In it Dubuffet seeks an uninterrupted and uniform writing that brings everything to the frontal plane’ (V. da Costa and F. Hergott, Jean Dubuffet. Works, Writings, Interviews, Barcelona 2006, p. 77).
‘When one has looked at a painting of this kind, one looks at everything around one with a new refreshed eye, and one learns to see the unaccustomed and amusing side of things. When I say amusing, I do not mean solely the funny side, but also the grand, the moving and even the tragic aspects [of ordinary things]’ – J. Dubuffet
‘For Dubuffet [l’Hourloupe] is a “festival of the mind”, luminous, brilliant, sparkling, and continual. In it Dubuffet seeks an uninterrupted and uniform writing that brings everything to the frontal plane. It represents the wanderings of the thought processes, a mental and neuronal vision of the world, a vision of the real world that never stops questioning’ – V. da Costa and F. Hergott
With its inscrutable jigsaw of primary-coloured cells, Veglione d’Ustensiles (Carnival of Utensils) is a vivid early example of Jean Dubuffet’s most celebrated series: l’Hourloupe. Emblazoned against a black background, a swarming puzzle of red, white and blue segments forms a teeming, interlocking mass, entwined like quivering strands of DNA. Painted in 1964, the work is a hypnotic large-scale example of the writhing all-over compositions that defined his earliest experiments with his new, now-legendary visual language. Internalising the raw energy of the Paris Circus paintings that occupied him between 1961 and 1962, the chaotic cellular maelstrom of l’Hourloupe sought to redefine our understanding of the world around us. As we gaze into the pulsing matrix of Veglione d’Ustensiles, the amorphous fragments begin to coalesce into recognisable domestic objects: the blade of a knife, the curve of a handle, the shape of a garden tool. Dubuffet’s series of Ustensiles utopiques, initiated the same year as the present work, liberated these forms into portraits of individual quotidian items, articulated through the same quixotic script. Lavishing attention upon the unremarkable props of everyday existence, l’Hourloupe was to become a central ingredient in the transatlantic development of Pop Art, offering the same vibrant homage to the wonder of everyday life as Dubuffet’s American counterparts. Oscillating wildly within our vision, the tessellating components of Veglione d’Ustensiles proclaim the birth of a new way of seeing – as Valérie da Costa and Fabrice Hergott have described, ‘a vision of the real world that never stops questioning’ (V. da Costa and F. Hergott, Jean Dubuffet. Works, Writings, Interviews, Barcelona 2006, p. 77).
Like Roy Lichtenstein’s Ben Day dots and Andy Warhol’s vibrant silkscreens, l’Hourloupe presented an alternative visual lens through which to encounter the seismic cultural changes of the 1960s. A post-War euphoria swept the Western world, and both Europe and America rode the wave of consumerism, freedom and sexual revolution. Whereas many American artists responded to this sea-change by deliberately aping the iconography of this new age, on the other side of the Atlantic Dubuffet consciously peeled back all cultural trappings, seeking a pure, uninhibited vision of reality. It was a quest spurred on by his return to Paris in the 1960s after years spent in the depths of the countryside. Entranced by the cosmopolitan hustle and bustle of the city’s heyday, Dubuffet set about transmitting his impressions onto canvas – clamouring forms, gestures and colours came to life as people, shops, cars and houses, a surging maze of activity expressed as a kind of caustic graffiti. This was Paris Circus; yet, as the series progressed, something new began to creep into the texture of these works. From the infrastructure of streets and traffic came strange, alien beings, striped and cross-hatched in red, white and blue, dancing wildly against his psychedelic backdrops. As their presence multiplied, Paris Circus gave way to l’Hourloupe: the city streets became abstract entrails that jostled like blood cells within amoeba-like structures. Entire universes burst forth within their confines. Imbued with the force of life, these worlds became utopique: idealised spaces and objects that might, any minute, spring off the canvas and into our domain.
In Veglione d’Ustensiles, this impression is enhanced through Dubuffet’s painterly technique. Executed with the same scrubbed, chalk-like gestures that had defined Paris Circus, each cell is marked by receding layers of colour that lend differing degrees of depth to the composition. Observing the pictorial surface, individual segments fluctuate indefinitely before our eyes, coalescing to form an intractable compound that vibrates as if with the force of a thousand tiny electrons. This effect relates directly to the apocryphal story of l’Hourloupe’s origins. In 1962, Dubuffet made a series of telephone calls from his summer retreat of Touquet, letting his pen wander absent-mindedly as he talked. Contemplating these semi-conscious, automatic doodles, Dubuffet was captivated by the interaction between different shapes and lines. As he cut and rearranged these segments to create figures and objects, the word l’Hourloupe formed on his lips: an onomatopoeic invention that the artist later identified as a fusion of ‘hurler’ (‘to shout’), ‘hululer’ (‘to howl’), ‘loup’ (‘wolf’) and the title of Maupassant’s 1887 horror story Le Horla. This intuitive phonetic concoction was born of the same impulse as the drawings themselves, produced without deliberate appeal to training or tradition. As l’Hourloupe migrated from pen to paint, it came to embody everything Dubuffet had ever sought in his art: an unschooled visual language that forced the viewer to re-evaluate their understanding of the world around them. Under its spell, everyday objects – kitchen utensils, domestic furniture and industrial machinery – lost their banality, inviting us to encounter them afresh as miraculous, unknown entities. As da Costa and Hergott have written, [l’Hourloupe] is a “festival of the mind”, luminous, brilliant, sparkling, and continual. In it Dubuffet seeks an uninterrupted and uniform writing that brings everything to the frontal plane’ (V. da Costa and F. Hergott, Jean Dubuffet. Works, Writings, Interviews, Barcelona 2006, p. 77).