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拍品专文
Acquired by the present owner in 1985, La vie en rose is an arresting work from Jean Dubuffet’s series of Partitions. Swathed in gestural streaks of red, blue and pink, and overlaid with vigorous black and white scrawl, seven figures hover in separate chambers, rhythmically arranged in groups of one, two and three. Wittily evoking Edith Piaf’s song of the same title, the work takes its place within the extraordinary final phase of Dubuffet’s oeuvre: a period that saw his practice take an introspective, psychological turn. The landscapes of his earlier years—from his visions of the Sahara to his landmark Paris Circus series—became swirling mindscapes, mapping out mental rather than physical spaces. Divorced from the everyday realities they once inhabited, his characters became figments of memory and imagination, locked in their own worlds. Piaf’s song, notably, had been written in 1945: the year after Dubuffet’s first ever solo exhibition. Here, just five years before his death, its melody haunts the rose-tinted surface of the painting, echoing through its corridors like a distant refrain.
Along with the Sites aux figurines, Psycho-sites and Sites aléatoires, Dubuffet’s Partitions marked a distinctive new phase in his practice. After four months of inactivity due to ailing health, the artist had returned to painting with an enlivened sense of purpose in April 1980. Following on from the Théâtres de mémoire of the 1970s—collages woven from fragments of pre-existing paintings—he began to move into increasingly abstract territory, removing his figures from the recognisable world and re-housing them in strange, painterly vacuums. They no longer wandered bustling streets or frolicked in rural pastures; instead, they inhabited a world of gesture, sensation and psychological illusion. ‘The aim is to bring together in a single gaze various different moments of the gaze’, Dubuffet once wrote. ‘The result is a mechanism similar to what in music we call polyphony … It seems to me that anyone who wants to communicate an idea of what is happening in his or her mind at any time can only do so by way of a cacophony of dissonant elements’ (J. Dubuffet, quoted in V. da Costa and F. Hergott, Jean Dubuffet: Works, Writings and Interviews, Barcelona 2006, p. 90).
By 1980, Dubuffet had been making art for almost four decades. In his early days, he had made an impassioned study of what he termed ‘art brut’—visual objects forged outside the confines of traditional academic teaching. This quest had led him to examine the art of children, nomadic tribes and psychiatric inpatients, inspiring a fascination with the different ways in which the brain processes reality. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Dubuffet’s discoveries offered hope, proposing that—in spite of all the horrors—art-making still remained an essential function of the human spirit. It was a notion echoed in Piaf’s song, which similarly spoke of seeing life in its best light. By the time of the present work, Dubuffet’s embrace of raw, unschooled freedom of expression was beginning to exert a powerful influence on future generations: artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat would carry his mantle into the 1980s. In La vie en rose, the artist’s characters seem to fade into the ether like ancient carvings, their forms subsumed by encroaching clouds of paint. Flickering with the embers of a half-remembered song, it is a poignant emblem of a life lived under art’s spell, and of a practice that allowed us to see the world in colour.
Along with the Sites aux figurines, Psycho-sites and Sites aléatoires, Dubuffet’s Partitions marked a distinctive new phase in his practice. After four months of inactivity due to ailing health, the artist had returned to painting with an enlivened sense of purpose in April 1980. Following on from the Théâtres de mémoire of the 1970s—collages woven from fragments of pre-existing paintings—he began to move into increasingly abstract territory, removing his figures from the recognisable world and re-housing them in strange, painterly vacuums. They no longer wandered bustling streets or frolicked in rural pastures; instead, they inhabited a world of gesture, sensation and psychological illusion. ‘The aim is to bring together in a single gaze various different moments of the gaze’, Dubuffet once wrote. ‘The result is a mechanism similar to what in music we call polyphony … It seems to me that anyone who wants to communicate an idea of what is happening in his or her mind at any time can only do so by way of a cacophony of dissonant elements’ (J. Dubuffet, quoted in V. da Costa and F. Hergott, Jean Dubuffet: Works, Writings and Interviews, Barcelona 2006, p. 90).
By 1980, Dubuffet had been making art for almost four decades. In his early days, he had made an impassioned study of what he termed ‘art brut’—visual objects forged outside the confines of traditional academic teaching. This quest had led him to examine the art of children, nomadic tribes and psychiatric inpatients, inspiring a fascination with the different ways in which the brain processes reality. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Dubuffet’s discoveries offered hope, proposing that—in spite of all the horrors—art-making still remained an essential function of the human spirit. It was a notion echoed in Piaf’s song, which similarly spoke of seeing life in its best light. By the time of the present work, Dubuffet’s embrace of raw, unschooled freedom of expression was beginning to exert a powerful influence on future generations: artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat would carry his mantle into the 1980s. In La vie en rose, the artist’s characters seem to fade into the ether like ancient carvings, their forms subsumed by encroaching clouds of paint. Flickering with the embers of a half-remembered song, it is a poignant emblem of a life lived under art’s spell, and of a practice that allowed us to see the world in colour.