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拍品专文
‘[The Éléments Botaniques] stem ... from the mood of an alchemist rather than that of a rustic. They are alchemical and microcosmic. They ... aim to provoke the mind by resorting to the absurd and the delirious’ — J. Dubuffet
‘I’ve sometimes enjoyed using soft and strongly expressive materials, such as butterfly wings or cabbage leaves, precisely because they are so inappropriate. I’m convinced that the fact of being inappropriate is one of the most useful qualities of a material that can be exploited to reveal the mental character of what a painter’s doing when he creates an image’ — J. Dubuffet
Executed in 1959, Jean Dubuffet’s La Gorgerette Froncée (Puckered Collar) belongs to the remarkable series of Éléments Botaniques (Botanical Elements) that Dubuffet developed from his caustic experiments with raw earth and natural forms in his abstract Texturologie series of 1958. In La Gorgerette Froncée Dubuffet has used cabbage leaves, layered and pasted on to the canvas to create an extraordinary textural personnage. Out of a dynamic, roughly painted and uneven surface of flattened leaves, two eyes emerge in the form of flower heads. The outline of a broad nose is delineated by the shape of another single leaf, whilst beneath the figure’s chin a huge cabbage leaf takes the form of a somewhat comical cravat or enormous bow-tie. In this work especially, the shape, colour and form of the figure recall the characters from Dubuffet’s beard paintings, in which off-cuts from his Texturologies were incorporated into figural depictions to form the elaborate beards of his characters, who subsequently appeared to embody the spirit of the materials from which they were made. Lawrence Alloway, in his introduction to the 1960 exhibition of the Éléments Botaniques at Arthur Tooth & Sons, wrote of their ‘Archimboldesque idea of figures’, observing that Dubuffet ‘... does not revalue his materials completely, as an oil painter does. Instead he creates figures and landscapes which are sympathetically characterised by the organic substances of their creation. The Éléments Botaniques ... are small in size, taking their scale from the plants in them, like herbs protected in small plots from exposure’ (L. Alloway, Jean Dubuffet: Éléments Botaniques, 1960, exh. cat., Arthur Tooth & Sons Ltd., London, 1960, unpaged).
In La Gorgerette Froncée, figure and landscape become one. The raw, visceral energy of Dubuffet’s early personnages, inspired by his early explorations of art brut, combine with the coarse, earthy textures that became the subject of his work during the 1950s. In his quest for uninhibited, unfettered modes of expression, Dubuffet had repeatedly removed himself from the confines of mainstream society, frequenting the Sahara desert during the 1940s and exiling himself to the rural French region of Vence for most of the following decade. Through his engagement with natural materials – as through his earlier studies of ‘outsider’ art and tribal cultures – Dubuffet sought an innate, mystical knowledge, unimpeded by Western cultural tradition. As he explained, the Éléments Botaniques ‘stem ... from the mood of an alchemist rather than that of a rustic. They are alchemical and microcosmic. They ... aim to provoke the mind by resorting to the absurd and the delirious’ (J. Dubuffet, letter to J. P. W. Cochrane, 13 May 1960). Equally, however, these works may also be seen to inflect a variety of art-historical tropes: from pastoral depictions of the Garden of Eden and other biblical subjects, to Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s anthropomorphic portraits composed of fruit, flowers and vegetation. At the same time, La Gorgerette Froncée exudes an unstudied primitivism, redolent of ancient graffiti, cave painting and archaeological remnants. As with so much of Dubuffet’s oeuvre, the work’s whimsical appearance belies a deeper existential mission: to pull apart our traditional means of pictorial communication, and to rediscover the primal instincts that lie at the very heart of creation.
‘I’ve sometimes enjoyed using soft and strongly expressive materials, such as butterfly wings or cabbage leaves, precisely because they are so inappropriate. I’m convinced that the fact of being inappropriate is one of the most useful qualities of a material that can be exploited to reveal the mental character of what a painter’s doing when he creates an image’ — J. Dubuffet
Executed in 1959, Jean Dubuffet’s La Gorgerette Froncée (Puckered Collar) belongs to the remarkable series of Éléments Botaniques (Botanical Elements) that Dubuffet developed from his caustic experiments with raw earth and natural forms in his abstract Texturologie series of 1958. In La Gorgerette Froncée Dubuffet has used cabbage leaves, layered and pasted on to the canvas to create an extraordinary textural personnage. Out of a dynamic, roughly painted and uneven surface of flattened leaves, two eyes emerge in the form of flower heads. The outline of a broad nose is delineated by the shape of another single leaf, whilst beneath the figure’s chin a huge cabbage leaf takes the form of a somewhat comical cravat or enormous bow-tie. In this work especially, the shape, colour and form of the figure recall the characters from Dubuffet’s beard paintings, in which off-cuts from his Texturologies were incorporated into figural depictions to form the elaborate beards of his characters, who subsequently appeared to embody the spirit of the materials from which they were made. Lawrence Alloway, in his introduction to the 1960 exhibition of the Éléments Botaniques at Arthur Tooth & Sons, wrote of their ‘Archimboldesque idea of figures’, observing that Dubuffet ‘... does not revalue his materials completely, as an oil painter does. Instead he creates figures and landscapes which are sympathetically characterised by the organic substances of their creation. The Éléments Botaniques ... are small in size, taking their scale from the plants in them, like herbs protected in small plots from exposure’ (L. Alloway, Jean Dubuffet: Éléments Botaniques, 1960, exh. cat., Arthur Tooth & Sons Ltd., London, 1960, unpaged).
In La Gorgerette Froncée, figure and landscape become one. The raw, visceral energy of Dubuffet’s early personnages, inspired by his early explorations of art brut, combine with the coarse, earthy textures that became the subject of his work during the 1950s. In his quest for uninhibited, unfettered modes of expression, Dubuffet had repeatedly removed himself from the confines of mainstream society, frequenting the Sahara desert during the 1940s and exiling himself to the rural French region of Vence for most of the following decade. Through his engagement with natural materials – as through his earlier studies of ‘outsider’ art and tribal cultures – Dubuffet sought an innate, mystical knowledge, unimpeded by Western cultural tradition. As he explained, the Éléments Botaniques ‘stem ... from the mood of an alchemist rather than that of a rustic. They are alchemical and microcosmic. They ... aim to provoke the mind by resorting to the absurd and the delirious’ (J. Dubuffet, letter to J. P. W. Cochrane, 13 May 1960). Equally, however, these works may also be seen to inflect a variety of art-historical tropes: from pastoral depictions of the Garden of Eden and other biblical subjects, to Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s anthropomorphic portraits composed of fruit, flowers and vegetation. At the same time, La Gorgerette Froncée exudes an unstudied primitivism, redolent of ancient graffiti, cave painting and archaeological remnants. As with so much of Dubuffet’s oeuvre, the work’s whimsical appearance belies a deeper existential mission: to pull apart our traditional means of pictorial communication, and to rediscover the primal instincts that lie at the very heart of creation.