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拍品专文
Executed in 1975, Jean Dubuffet’s Mondanité XXIII immediately follows the artist's largest series, L’Hourloupe, which occupied him over a twelve-year span from 1962 to 1974. Thrumming with motion and frenetic energy, Mondanité XXIII is a spirited work from Dubuffet’s important but lesser known Mondanité series. The figures are rendered in a flurry of animated lines, and each are depicted in the joyful, naïve style that characterized the artist’s practice. Against a gleaming white ground, Dubuffet paints his jumble of figures in eyepopping reds and oranges. Utterly divorced from classical perspective traditions, Mondanité XXIII collapses time, action and space into a single, feverish panel. Mondanité XXIII is directly based on Dubuffet's unique method of semi-autonomous drawing that he first began while speaking on the telephone. By combining these chance forms created by spontaneous and unconscious movements of the pen to create a series of indeterminate shapes, Dubuffet was able to arrange the elements in such a way that they evoke the figurative world, yet remain a deliberate, jangling chaos, filled with his customary sense of fun and play.
Consistent with Dubuffet’s use of playful titles throughout his oeuvre, the word "mondanité" functions as a figure of speech that connotes worldliness and society life. In these paintings, Dubuffet astutely captures the claustrophobic press of the masses and the frenetic heartbeat of urban commotion, a departure from his previous works depicting single individuals. Mondanité XXIII conveys Dubuffet’s ability to capture the jubilance he saw in Parisian society life, as he exclaimed: “It is the unreal now that enchants me; I have an appetite for nontruth, the false life, the anti-world; my efforts are launched on the path of irrealism. …I continue moreover to think, as I always have, that truly violent and highly efficacious effects are arrived at by skillfully dosing marriages of irrealism with realism, the presence of one seeming to me necessary in order to manifest the other. In the paintings I now plan to do there will only be aggressively unreasonable forms, colors gaudy without reason, a theater of irrealities, an outrageous attempt against everything existing, the way wide open for the most outlandish inventions” (J. Dubuffet, quoted in A. Frankze, Dubuffet, New York, 1981, p. 147).
In tune with his bold Art Brut mission to create direct, immediate sensation in his works, Dubuffet aimed to make his paintings inviting and relatable. Rather than creating abstract, intangible meditations on mental space, he filled them with friendly, appealing characters. These figures, he explained, "heighten the evocative power of the place portrayed … the presence of a human figure gives the place the necessary existence and vitality without which it might remain to the observer merely a network of incomprehensible planes and lines. The figures have the function of a catalyst that triggers the imagination" (J. Dubuffet, quoted in Jean Dubuffet, exh. cat., Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, 2003, p. 252). Mondanité XXIII is a culmination of Dubuffet’s mature artistic vision that exemplifies not only his formal and stylistic insight but also his precocious interpretation of cosmopolitan society.
Consistent with Dubuffet’s use of playful titles throughout his oeuvre, the word "mondanité" functions as a figure of speech that connotes worldliness and society life. In these paintings, Dubuffet astutely captures the claustrophobic press of the masses and the frenetic heartbeat of urban commotion, a departure from his previous works depicting single individuals. Mondanité XXIII conveys Dubuffet’s ability to capture the jubilance he saw in Parisian society life, as he exclaimed: “It is the unreal now that enchants me; I have an appetite for nontruth, the false life, the anti-world; my efforts are launched on the path of irrealism. …I continue moreover to think, as I always have, that truly violent and highly efficacious effects are arrived at by skillfully dosing marriages of irrealism with realism, the presence of one seeming to me necessary in order to manifest the other. In the paintings I now plan to do there will only be aggressively unreasonable forms, colors gaudy without reason, a theater of irrealities, an outrageous attempt against everything existing, the way wide open for the most outlandish inventions” (J. Dubuffet, quoted in A. Frankze, Dubuffet, New York, 1981, p. 147).
In tune with his bold Art Brut mission to create direct, immediate sensation in his works, Dubuffet aimed to make his paintings inviting and relatable. Rather than creating abstract, intangible meditations on mental space, he filled them with friendly, appealing characters. These figures, he explained, "heighten the evocative power of the place portrayed … the presence of a human figure gives the place the necessary existence and vitality without which it might remain to the observer merely a network of incomprehensible planes and lines. The figures have the function of a catalyst that triggers the imagination" (J. Dubuffet, quoted in Jean Dubuffet, exh. cat., Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, 2003, p. 252). Mondanité XXIII is a culmination of Dubuffet’s mature artistic vision that exemplifies not only his formal and stylistic insight but also his precocious interpretation of cosmopolitan society.