“These pictures… are surely among the most aggressively shocking works known to the history of painting… They are primordial women, who in all their repulsive brutality speak most revealingly about the human animal, at times satisfied, at times alarming, but always grotesque."
An early and quintessential manifestation of Jean Dubuffet’s inimitable aesthetic revolution, Gambade à la rose demonstrates the raw and textured tactility that characterizes his most important work. Executed on an imposing scale, the present work is one of a group of ten canvases described in the artist’s catalogue raisonné as “mind-blowing and visionary” (Max Loreau, Catalogue des travaux de Jean Dubuffet: Corps de dames, Fascicule VI, Paris, 1965). Painted in 1950, the same period during which he developed his now iconic Corps de Dames series, these works are celebrated for their revolutionary approach to the female form. Indeed, the titular rose, with its blooming head and prominent thorns, acts as a visual metaphor for the challenges of idealized standards of feminine beauty. Like ancient hieroglyphs carved into coarse stone, Dubuffet’s crudely etched monochrome figures seem to float in an undefined landscape, their anti-aesthetic forms swelling in protest against traditional standards of artistry and convention. Gambade à la rose further manifests the narrative of artistic development in the Post-War era, having been held in the esteemed collection of artist Alfonso Ossorio, a close friend of Dubuffet. Acquired by Emily Fisher Landau in 1981, the present work has remained in her distinguished collection for over forty years, attesting to its lasting importance.
Dubuffet pursued the idea that art should be a direct reflection of emotion and instincts, without being sullied by the distorting effects of what he called art culturel—academic training and historical conventions. As he explained, “Nothing seems to me more false, more stupid, than the way students in an art class are placed in front of a completely nude woman standing motionless on a table, and stare at her for hours. The normal conditions under which a man has seen unclothed bodies are thus disregarded in a perfectly insane fashion, and insane too is the idea that under such conditions anyone could possibly reconstruct anything resembling the image of a naked woman as it exists normally in an ordinary man’s memory” (the artist cited in Exh. Cat., Washington, D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Jean Dubuffet 1943-1963: Paintings Sculptures Assemblages, 1993, p. 74). Influenced by Hans Brinzhorn’s book Artistry of the Mentally Ill, Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut, meaning “raw” or “outsider” art, to classify a mode of creation that functioned outside the aesthetic norm and celebrated, instead, the quotidian and the commonplace.
In Gambade à la rose, Dubuffet irreverently disarms the accepted traditional deception of naturalistic perspective, accentuating his figures’ two-dimensionality through a linear syntax of reductive and simplified forms. Filling the entire picture plane, their cavorting bodies command, stretch and expand to fill the space they occupy, a far cry from the elegant classicism of ancient Greece, or the idealized goddesses of nineteenth century salon painting. Dubuffet’s radically distorted women are further emphasized by his treatment of pigment: the scored, scraped, and carved surface, thickly rendered in viscous oil paint, accentuates the raw, distorted lines of the flattened figures.
"I believe beauty is nowhere. I consider this notion of beauty as completely false. I refuse to assent to this idea that there are ugly persons and ugly objects. This idea is for me stifling and revolting."
Alongside Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Willem de Kooning’s Woman paintings, Dubuffet’s women stand as some of the most important renditions of the female figure in the twentieth century. These radically different interpretations were the artists’ response to the classical tradition which had dominated art for centuries, but Dubuffet’s paintings went much further. As Peter Selz wrote in 1962 of Dubuffet’s figures, “These pictures… are surely among the most aggressively shocking works known to the history of painting. By their brutal attack on “Woman” they violate our sacred and dearly held concepts of mother, wife, mistress, beloved, daughter, and sister, as well as the very principles of beauty derived from erotic desires in most cultures… Some of the bodies are like geographic maps in which schematic signs for arms, breasts, buttocks, thighs, appear as though they were conventional symbols… They are primordial women, who in all their repulsive brutality speak most revealingly about the human animal, at times satisfied, at times alarming, but always grotesque” (in Exh. Cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art, The Work of Jean Dubuffet, 1962, p. 48).
