“When one has looked at a painting of this kind, one looks at everything with a new refreshed eye, and one learns to see the unaccustomed and amusing side of things. When I say amusing, I do not mean solely the funny side, but also the grand, the moving and even the tragic aspects of ordinary things"
I mmersing the viewer in a jigsaw of visual complexity, Cafetière II stands as an exceptional still life from Jean Dubuffet’s most important series: l’Hourloupe. Characterized by its puzzle-like arrangement of crosshatched red, white, and blue pieces, this innovative cycle of works offered an alternative perspective on reality, signifying a remarkable formal evolution in the artist’s pictorial style. Executed in 1965, the present work belongs to a specific subgroup of paintings within the larger series entitled Ustensiles utopiques, in which the artist applied his signature l’Hourloupe style to a myriad of ubiquitous, everyday objects. Paralleling developments across the Atlantic, where artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Claes Oldenburg were similarly turning their focus to the quotidian, Cafetière II, in its sensuous recreation of an irregularly shaped coffee pot, takes its place alongside kaleidoscopic depictions of chairs, bottles, wheelbarrows, scissors, and teapots. A beloved motif in the storied tradition of still lifes and a particular favorite in Picasso’s Cubist renditions, the cafetière appears in just six large-scale paintings by Dubuffet, along with a handful of drawings and group compositions from 1965 to 1966. A testament to the present work’s significance within the artist’s legendary career, Cafetière II was acquired by Harry Abrams in 1966, only one year after its execution, from the Robert Fraser Gallery in London, where it was exhibited that April in the first collective presentation of the Ustensiles utopiques series, and has remained in the family collection ever since.
Recognized as the artist’s largest and most sustained series, encompassing drawing, painting, and sculpture, l’Hourloupe occupied Dubuffet’s artistic output from 1962 to 1974. It was during this twelve year period that the artist produced some of the most visually captivating and richly imaginative paintings of his career, of which Cafetière II is no exception. While the previous Paris Circus series depicted, in a particularly rich palette and figures bustling around the urban magma, l’Hourloupe drastically reduced the color palette to concentrate on four main colors—red and blue, together with black and white—and immersed the viewer in a fantastical world now disconnected from reality. Through scribbles, the stylistic crux of the entire l’Hourloupe series, Dubuffet channels the instinct-driven creative fervor integral to his Art Brut aesthetic, which sought to elevate the strange, the outcast, and the outsider over academic methods and art world norms. “This cycle of work was characterized by a much more seriously arbitrary and irrational mood than anything I had done before,” Dubuffet explains. “This was a plunge into fantasy, into a phantom parallel universe. My renewed interest in outsider art was no doubt not unconnected with this sudden new development” (Jean Dubuffet quoted in Exh. Cat., Salzburg, Museum der Moderne (and traveling), Jean Dubuffet: Trace of an Adventure, November 2003 - April 2004, p. 174).
The l’Hourloupe series was first conceived in July 1962 when Dubuffet absent-mindedly produced some simple, sinuous doodles on scraps of paper which he cross-hatched with red and blue ballpoint pen whilst speaking on the phone. In a manner similar to the Surrealist practice of automatic drawings, Dubuffet saw the act of doodling as a means of encouraging the emergence of subconscious knowledge through the uncontrolled movement of the hand. Upon cutting out and rearranging the various elements of these drawings, Dubuffet was struck by the immediacy at which they sprung to life when set against a black background. The fanciful name of the series is, likewise, a product of Dubuffet’s extraordinary imagination, created through the fusion of multiple French words into the sonorously luxuriant term, “l’Hourloupe.” Asked about the series, Dubuffet revealed that the word was “...based upon its sound. In French, these sounds suggest some wonderland or grotesque object or creature, while at the same time they evoke something rumbling and threatening with tragic overtones. Both are implied” (Jean Dubuffet quoted in Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Jean Dubuffet: A Retrospective, 1973, p. 35).
“For Dubuffet [l’Hourloupe] is a ‘festival of the mind’, luminous, brilliant, sparkling, and continual. In it Dubuffet seeks an uninterrupted and uniform writing that brings everything to the frontal plane. It represents the wanderings of the thought processes, a mental and neuronal vision of the world, a vision of the real world that never stops questioning.”
Cafetière II, in particular, belongs to a later subseries of paintings within l’Hourlope known as Ustensiles utopiques. Adhering to and expanding upon the visual vocabulary of the l’Hourlope series, each object in this cycle of works follows a consistent compositional structure: the object, abstractly rendered in the characteristic interlocking jigsaw of reds, blues, whites, and Breton stripes, is placed on a stark black background that is devoid of any potential signifiers of time and place. In a manner strikingly similar to his American contemporaries Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Rauschenberg, Dubuffet chose to celebrate the beauty of the banal, defamiliarizing ubiquitous objects to create bold artistic interpretations. Divorced from any context, and presented as the sole focus of the composition, Cafetiere II is thus elevated from an ordinary coffee pot to a metamorphic curiosity that takes on a splendor of its own—a sublime icon in this celebration of the everyday. With Cafetière II and the rest of the Ustensiles utopiques, Dubuffet revolutionized the traditional genre of still life, ushering in a new brand of French Pop art.
Channeling the same uninhibited sense of wonder which fueled his earliest fascination with Art Brut, Dubuffet’s whimsical compositions in Ustensiles Utopiques bestowed considerable attention upon overlooked quotidian objects. Under the guise of his later and most formative l’Hourloupe, ordinary objects become sites of “utopia,” visionary reappraisals of the formerly unstudied paraphernalia of daily existence. Thus, Cafetiere II represents, in many ways, the culmination of Dubuffet’s artistic ambitions—a new unschooled visual dialect, leveraged to capture and translate the raw essence of everyday life.
