Milord

In the early 1960s, Jean Dubuffet embarked upon his longest-running body of work, the cycle of paintings, drawings and sculpture known as L’Hourloupe. What began as unconscious doodling whilst on the telephone gradually morphed into a three-dimensional cast of characters, brightly colored in interlocking shapes of red, white and blue. Over a hundred of these three-dimensional Hourloupe creatures were later brought to life in the now legendary performance piece known as Coucou Bazar when it debuted at the Guggenheim Museum in May of 1973.

Milord is an exceptional example of the so-called “practicables” that Dubuffet designed over a two-year period leading up to the premiere of Coucou Bazar. These large-scale, lively and unconventional characters were carved from specially formulated wood panels, rendered in Dubuffet’s signature red, white and blue palette, and often mounted on feet with wheels. Some were even motorized and moved via remote control. These practicables—aptly named for their practical use on the stage—became interactive components of a larger whole, forming the surreal, labyrinthian mis-en-scène of Coucou Bazar when it debuted in 1973. With its riotous cacophony of interlocking red, white and blue pieces, Milord epitomizes the unique visual language with which Dubuffet expressed his fascinating inner world—the world of Coucou Bazar—where the characters and objects of the everyday came blazing to life in their lively and amorphous new format.

Confronting the viewer eye-to-eye with a height measuring just over six feet, the exuberant and playful figure exemplifies Dubuffet’s mastery of the L’Hourloupe cast of characters. Its animated display of constantly shifting and jostling cellular pieces disorients the viewer, throwing off any immediate recognition in favor of the all-over visual tapestry of unique, biomorphic shapes. Gradually the impression of a standing figure emerges, whose downcast eyes and slightly pursed lips display the affectations of a distinguished—if a bit snobbish—English gentleman, caught in the midst of pouring his afternoon cup of tea. One even spies the teacup and kettle within the amorphous shapes that make up the figure’s torso, where every angle and vantage point of what normally would be a three-dimensional object has been flattened and reorganized into an animated and lively surface. With delightful tongue-in-cheek finesse, Dubuffet creates a parody of the artistic establishment, playfully riffing on a range of traditional subjects, from the aerial perspectives of cubist collage to the affected mannerisms of the artistic elite, brought to life in eye-catching detail.

When it premiered at the Guggenheim Museum in May of 1973, Coucou Bazar illustrated a discord of swarming and eccentric creatures who glided slowly around the stage as living, breathing embodiments of Dubuffet’s L’Hourloupe cast of characters. When the dancers moved, they enlivened the scene, allowing for an infinite number of combinations and permutations to unfold, thereby transforming the presentation from a static backdrop into a real and living landscape—the ultimate expression of Dubuffet’s artistic vision. So, too, did the viewers become part of this parallel world, entering into this surreal wonderland inhabited by the artist’s unique creations. The hour-long performance was set to a musical score by the Turkish composer İlhan Mimaroğlu (best known for producing albums for Charles Mingus and composing the score for Fellini’s Satyricon), with an accompaniment equally as unsettling and otherworldly as the action on the stage. Coucou Bazar has only been performed three times: at the Guggenheim Museum in May of 1973, in Paris at the Grand Palais that September, and in Turin in 1978.

In his notes for the Guggenheim program’s brochure, Dubuffet expressly indicated that his performance was not theatrical per se, but intended to be an extension of his painting, where the characters of the L’Hourloupe might exist in a continuum, breaking free from painting and coming out into the everyday world. Dubuffet imagined an utterly seamless encounter, in which even the non-moving practicables of the backdrop might appear to move, as part of an enlivened, quivering whole. He wrote: “Those who wear the costumes should move only slightly and very slowly. At times, they should even remain completely motionless. At all times, they should be scattered, set in groups, mixed among the static painted cut-outs so as to be barely distinguishable from them. ...All must be endowed with a semblance of life” (J. Dubuffet, quoted in his program for Coucou Bazar: Bal de l’Hourloupe—An Animated Painting, 1973, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, Exhibition Record A0003).

Aside from the costumes, Dubuffet created “practicables,” the large-scale, painted characters executed on a lightweight, smooth and durable wood called klégécell. Between 1972 and ‘73, Dubuffet designed 175 practicables, of which only a fraction were used in the actual performance. Today, more than half of these still reside in the Dubuffet Foundation archives. Other examples can be found in prestigious museum collections, such as the Tate, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis.

In 1973, Dubuffet expounded upon the exacting English gentleman in Milord when he executed a large-scale public monument known as Milord La Chamarre. Originally installed in front of the Seagram building in Manhattan, it was later acquired for Philadelphia’s Centre Square, where it resides today. Made of undulating stainless steel pieces with black epoxy accents, it sports a fancy cravat and buttoned-up vest. Milord, of course, is also the title of the eponymous song by Edith Piaf—a rollicking chanson of 1959 about a lower-class girl who succeeds in wooing an older English gentleman.

Widely considered to be his greatest masterpiece, Coucou Bazar was, in many ways, the ultimate embodiment of Dubuffet’s artistic ambitions: a new visual language that was uniquely suited to translating the raw essence of everyday life. It called into question the viewer’s perception of the world by offering up an unknown parallel version in which everything was new, strange and disorienting. As such, the “practicables” were uniquely suited to his mission, developing as they did out of the L’Hourloupe series, which sought to liberate art from traditional methods of representation in favor of a flat vocabulary of limited colors, one that was devoid of expression and traditional perspective. The result was s fusion of all three artistic categories—painting, drawing and sculpture—and has been described as the most ambitious creative experiment of his career.