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Lot Essay
A sprawling, anthropomorphic vision infused with mysticism and whimsy, Le Vase de Barbe (Beard Vase) is a rare and outstanding work from Jean Dubuffet’s celebrated series of Barbes (Beards). Rising totemically from a vase-like base, a human face emerges, its vast, textured beard billowing across the canvas like ancient calligraphy. Included in the artist’s first American retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1962—and more recently in his major 2016 survey at the Fondation Beyeler—the work is among the largest in an extraordinary sequence of nineteen oil paintings that mark the culmination of the Barbes series. Just six other works were painted on this immersive scale, including examples held in the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven and the Fondation Beyeler. A further two works, slightly smaller in size, reside in the National Gallery of Art Washington D. C. and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Formerly part of several distinguished private collections, and subsequently held in the present ownership for over two decades, Le Vase de Barbe captures the poetic material alchemy that defined one of the most remarkable chapters in Dubuffet’s oeuvre.
Created largely between May and December 1959, Dubuffet’s Barbes are situated at a pivotal moment in his practice. On one hand, they continue the raw, earthy language of his Texturologies, produced in response to his rural surroundings at Vence in the South of France during the late 1950s. On the other hand, their curious cast of characters and writhing painterly textures seem to prefigure elements of the artist’s Paris Circus series, begun two years later following his return to the French capital. Dubuffet had long been fascinated by the intersection between portraiture and landscape—a defining theme of the Fondation Beyeler’s exhibition. Throughout his practice, he sought to portray the human figure as a product of its surroundings, indelibly linked to the textures of the earth. In this regard, the Barbes may be seen as something of a male counterpart to Dubuffet’s earlier series of Corps de dames (Bodies of Women), which cast their female subjects as a vast, natural topographies. Similarly, the present work imagines the beard as a near-abstract geological structure, flecked, scumbled, swirled and spattered with rivulets, fissures and sparkling mineral hues.
Dubuffet’s Barbes have their origins in an idea sparked by his friend Georges Limbour: the Surrealist poet who was one of the artist’s earliest champions. In the introduction to a catalogue for an exhibition of his Texturologies¸ Limbour drew a comparison between Dubuffet and the ancient Stoics: the philosophers of the Hellenistic period who believed that intellectual freedom was the gateway to happiness. In response, Dubuffet sent Limbour a letter containing a drawing of a bearded man—captioned ‘Marcus Aurelius’—in the style of an ancient statue. It was the start of a series that would take multiple forms: from a sequence of india ink imprints, to a number of collage works, to the ultimate set of oil paintings to which the present work belongs. The artist also composed a poetry book entitled As-tu cueilli la fleur de barbe, which he subsequently set to music and recorded himself singing. The surreal tenor of the verse is perhaps appropriate given the series’ connection to Limbour; indeed, the present work—with its curious fusion of beard and ancient vessel—seems perhaps more closely aligned with this spirit than many of its companions. ‘Your beard is my boat’, runs one of the lines; ‘Your beard is the sea on which I sail’.
The Barbes may also be seen in the context of Dubuffet’s fascination with ‘Art Brut’—one of the key themes of his major survey at the Barbican, London, this year. Years spent studying the visual creations of children, psychiatric patients, desert tribes and other ‘outsider’ cultures fed into his aesthetic, instilling in him a desire to return art to its most raw, uninhibited state. The Barbes—a term etymologically linked to ‘barbaric’—seem to mock the bearded scholars and deities of Greek and Roman antiquity, posing a witty riposte to Limbour’s lofty characterisation of Dubuffet. Instead, they confront the viewer as arbiters of a different kind of wisdom: an innate, carnal knowledge—spiritual and mysterious—that seems to writhe within the cellular depths of each beard. ‘Some resemble great rock formations or age-old boulders predating man’s presence on this planet’, wrote Peter Selz in the catalogue for Dubuffet’s 1962 retrospective. ‘… Their shapes recall the menhirs of Stonehenge and the Winged Bulls from Assyrian palaces’ (P. Selz, The Work of Jean Dubuffet, New York 1962, p. 149). They speak of a halcyon age in which humankind had not yet lost its connection with the natural—and, indeed, the supernatural—worlds.
For all its conscious anachronism, however, Le Vase de Barbe retains a decidedly contemporary quality. On one hand, the thick, near-abstract textures of Dubuffet’s paintings during this period were closely aligned with the development of European Art Informel, embodied by artists such as Antoni Tàpies, Jean Fautrier, Alberto Burri and Pierre Soulages. At the same time, however, the scrawled, all-over surface patterns of the Barbes invite comparison with contemporaneous achievements in the field of American Abstract Expressionism—notably the work of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. It is perhaps no coincidence that, between 1958 and 1959, the Museum of Modern Art’s seminal exhibition The New American Painting had toured eight European cities, showcasing the work of these artists and their compatriots. The transcendental aspirations of their paintings, moreover, certainly chimed with Dubuffet’s own ambitions, which centred on stripping away ingrained ideas about pictorial representation in favour of elemental, sensual revelation. That the present work made its debut in New York just a few short years later is certainly fitting in this regard. Within its mysterious depths, art making is reborn as a vehicle for peeling back centuries of taught knowledge, allowing us to lose ourselves in the primal mysteries of paint.
Created largely between May and December 1959, Dubuffet’s Barbes are situated at a pivotal moment in his practice. On one hand, they continue the raw, earthy language of his Texturologies, produced in response to his rural surroundings at Vence in the South of France during the late 1950s. On the other hand, their curious cast of characters and writhing painterly textures seem to prefigure elements of the artist’s Paris Circus series, begun two years later following his return to the French capital. Dubuffet had long been fascinated by the intersection between portraiture and landscape—a defining theme of the Fondation Beyeler’s exhibition. Throughout his practice, he sought to portray the human figure as a product of its surroundings, indelibly linked to the textures of the earth. In this regard, the Barbes may be seen as something of a male counterpart to Dubuffet’s earlier series of Corps de dames (Bodies of Women), which cast their female subjects as a vast, natural topographies. Similarly, the present work imagines the beard as a near-abstract geological structure, flecked, scumbled, swirled and spattered with rivulets, fissures and sparkling mineral hues.
Dubuffet’s Barbes have their origins in an idea sparked by his friend Georges Limbour: the Surrealist poet who was one of the artist’s earliest champions. In the introduction to a catalogue for an exhibition of his Texturologies¸ Limbour drew a comparison between Dubuffet and the ancient Stoics: the philosophers of the Hellenistic period who believed that intellectual freedom was the gateway to happiness. In response, Dubuffet sent Limbour a letter containing a drawing of a bearded man—captioned ‘Marcus Aurelius’—in the style of an ancient statue. It was the start of a series that would take multiple forms: from a sequence of india ink imprints, to a number of collage works, to the ultimate set of oil paintings to which the present work belongs. The artist also composed a poetry book entitled As-tu cueilli la fleur de barbe, which he subsequently set to music and recorded himself singing. The surreal tenor of the verse is perhaps appropriate given the series’ connection to Limbour; indeed, the present work—with its curious fusion of beard and ancient vessel—seems perhaps more closely aligned with this spirit than many of its companions. ‘Your beard is my boat’, runs one of the lines; ‘Your beard is the sea on which I sail’.
The Barbes may also be seen in the context of Dubuffet’s fascination with ‘Art Brut’—one of the key themes of his major survey at the Barbican, London, this year. Years spent studying the visual creations of children, psychiatric patients, desert tribes and other ‘outsider’ cultures fed into his aesthetic, instilling in him a desire to return art to its most raw, uninhibited state. The Barbes—a term etymologically linked to ‘barbaric’—seem to mock the bearded scholars and deities of Greek and Roman antiquity, posing a witty riposte to Limbour’s lofty characterisation of Dubuffet. Instead, they confront the viewer as arbiters of a different kind of wisdom: an innate, carnal knowledge—spiritual and mysterious—that seems to writhe within the cellular depths of each beard. ‘Some resemble great rock formations or age-old boulders predating man’s presence on this planet’, wrote Peter Selz in the catalogue for Dubuffet’s 1962 retrospective. ‘… Their shapes recall the menhirs of Stonehenge and the Winged Bulls from Assyrian palaces’ (P. Selz, The Work of Jean Dubuffet, New York 1962, p. 149). They speak of a halcyon age in which humankind had not yet lost its connection with the natural—and, indeed, the supernatural—worlds.
For all its conscious anachronism, however, Le Vase de Barbe retains a decidedly contemporary quality. On one hand, the thick, near-abstract textures of Dubuffet’s paintings during this period were closely aligned with the development of European Art Informel, embodied by artists such as Antoni Tàpies, Jean Fautrier, Alberto Burri and Pierre Soulages. At the same time, however, the scrawled, all-over surface patterns of the Barbes invite comparison with contemporaneous achievements in the field of American Abstract Expressionism—notably the work of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. It is perhaps no coincidence that, between 1958 and 1959, the Museum of Modern Art’s seminal exhibition The New American Painting had toured eight European cities, showcasing the work of these artists and their compatriots. The transcendental aspirations of their paintings, moreover, certainly chimed with Dubuffet’s own ambitions, which centred on stripping away ingrained ideas about pictorial representation in favour of elemental, sensual revelation. That the present work made its debut in New York just a few short years later is certainly fitting in this regard. Within its mysterious depths, art making is reborn as a vehicle for peeling back centuries of taught knowledge, allowing us to lose ourselves in the primal mysteries of paint.