Jean Dubuffet

Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above 

Paris, Cercle Volney, Exposition de peintures, dessins et divers travaux exécutés de 1942 à 1954 par Jean Dubuffet, March - April 1954, no. 47
New York, The American Federation of Arts, Private Worlds, March 1960 - March 1961, no. 10
Saint-Paul de Vence, Fondation Maeght, Jean Dubuffet Rétrospective: Peintures, Sculptures, Dessins, July - October 1985, p. 59, no. 24, illustrated 
Osaka, The National Museum of Art, Jean Dubuffet: The Early Works 1940s-1950s, June - August 1993, p. 39, no. 11, illustrated in color
Avignon, Palais des Papes, Dubuffet: "Hauts lieux": Landscapes 1944-1984, June - October 1994, p. 39, illustrated in color
Paris, Musée National d'art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Dubuffet, September - December 2001, p. 112, illustrated in color
Berlin, Kunsthandel Wolfgang Werner KG, Jean Dubuffet, April - July 2010, no. 3, illustrated in color
New York, Acquavella Galleries, Jean Dubuffet: Anticultural Positions, April - June 2016, p. 119, illustrated in color, pp. 120-121, illustrated in color (detail) and p. 203, illustrated in color

Max Loreau, Ed., Catalogue des Travaux de Jean Dubuffet, Fascicule V: Paysages Grotesques, Paris, 1965, p. 40, no. 59, illustrated
Andreas Franzke, Dubuffet, New York, 1981, p. 58, illustrated

This work is in excellent condition. Close inspection reveals minor and unobtrusive hairline cracking to the heavy impasto along the bottom overturn edge. Close inspection further reveals a small circular area of loss to the impasto, approximately 1/8" in diameter, located along the overturned right edge approximately 6 ¾" down from the upper right corner. Under ultraviolet light there are no apparent restorations. The work is framed in a stained wood frame.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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Crafting an arresting tableau that is at once an expansive panorama and a detailed biological microcosm, Jean Dubuffet’s seminal L'Adieu à la Fenêtre is an early and consummate manifestation of the artist’s inimitable aesthetic revolution. Created in 1949, the present work shows Dubuffet indulging in the sculpturally visceral method of painterly engraving characteristic of his seminal series of Paysages Grotesques. Like ancient hieroglyphs carved into coarse stone, the linear forms of Dubuffet’s primal monochromy construct a ploughed landscape that incorporates the texture of mystical sands, recalling his recent travels in the Algerian Sahara desert. Whilst preceding works that referred explicitly to Bedouin culture, it is in L'Adieu à la Fenêtre that Dubuffet discards his nostalgic reflections on the African desert and utilizes his newfound spiritual connection with landscape to conceive of a geographically ambiguous, imaginative realm. By inventing a scene that draws from both winding sand dunes and familiar views of his native France, Dubuffet accesses a mode of pictorial flux that upturns the formal traditions of Western painting; privileging intuitive fantasy over referential naturalism.   

In February 1947 Dubuffet and his wife Lili travelled to the oasis of El Goléa, sparking a love affair with Algeria and its awe-inspiring landscape that drew them back several times over the next two years. The experience of cultural dislocation and environmental solitude inspired  a new strand of existential enquiry in Dubuffet’s landscapes: “Perhaps it was the time I spent in the deserts of White Africa that sharpened my taste... for the little, the almost nothing, and especially, in my art, for the landscapes where one finds only the formless.” (the artist cited in Mildred Glimcher, Jean Dubuffet: Towards An Alternative Reality, New York, 1987, p. 9) Evolving from his desert paintings and harnessing a sense of interminable travel across mysterious pathways, the Paysages Grotesques dominated the artist’s output between May 1949 and January 1950. Painted during the apex of this series, L'Adieu à la Fenêtre signals Dubuffet’s comfort within a new idiom, abandoning a sense of wistful longing for North Africa whilst infusing his imaginative hybrid scene with its exotic mystique. Relishing in dream-like ambiguities, the foregrounded insect form is both desert scorpion and common European grasshopper; a creature toward the top right, perhaps both a humped camel and feathered French cockerel. Transitioning as such, the consciously unsophisticated proportions and flattened dimensionality of the figures form precursors to the landmark Corps de Dames series created the following year.

Making a grand titular claim to finally bid ‘farewell to the window,’ the present work enacts a seminal gesture that is both conclusive and regenerative. Signaling more than a parting with the spiritual window of his Saharan works, the present work radically signals the artist’s abandonment of the conventions of the Western pictorial tradition.  Since the Renaissance systemization of linear perspective, painting had been driven by a mathematically guided naturalism that transformed the picture plane into a ‘window onto the world’: a mimesis of lived perception through which an imaginative realm might be articulated.  Whilst the antithetical history of the modernist avant-garde challenged this paradigm, it is in L'Adieu à la Fenêtre that Dubuffet conclusively puts to rest the tired tropes of illusionism. The artist pioneers an iconic technique by rapidly inscribing a loose architecture of naïve figures and structures into the freshly painted surface.  As such, we are presented with a visual pun in the suggestion that we purvey this quaint view through an open window. However, Dubuffet irreverently disarms the aesthetic deception of naturalistic perspective here, confounding this window onto the world, by drawing his horizon up to the top edge of the frame and awkwardly pushing the recessive plane toward our field of vision, imbibing strange anti-gravitational flux. Rather than attempting to craft the illusion of receding depth within the painted surface, the figures in the present work are grafted on top of it and haphazardly stacked in successive tiers. We are simultaneously caught in the terrestrial view of the lower register’s magnified jungle flora, whilst also inhabiting a bird’s-eye view of the distant village locale. Moreover, the centralized straight road no longer diminishes into the distance but climbs up the orthogonal of the canvas, drawing apart the two endearing pedestrians who extend the titular pun as they bid ‘farewell’ to one another.  Dubuffet thus constructs a metaphorical crossroads that signals a new direction for the painted medium, no longer conventionally visual but essentially cerebral.  

Substituting the science of picture-making with emotive intuition, Dubuffet makes manifest a passion for the primal energy of creation that he characterized in his term Art Brut.  In 1948 he set up La Compagnie de l’Art Brut, giving a collective framework to his obsession with the art of children, psychics and the mentally ill. The desire to obtain and give form to a state of psychic and emotional innocence subsequently underpinned Dubuffet’s practice. In L’Adieu à la Fênetre, Dubuffet channels the psychic automatism of his theoretical associate, Surrealist André Breton’s literary practice, yielding a line that is a rapid extension of his subconscious, scribing the cerebral ecstasy of unfettered inspiration. Drawing from the exquisitely pictorial nature of the Arabic characters that he was so enamored by in Algeria, Dubuffet’s painted écriture harnesses a symbolic power that conjures images within the imagination and provides a new cognitive stimulus that usurps the sensationalism of illusion.