J
ean Dubuffet’s collaged Les Visiteurs from 1979 is a pristine example of the artist’s oeuvre from the end of his long, masterful career. Featuring the primary color palette and playful figures that Dubuffet is best known for, Les Visiteurs merges the figurative and the abstract in a picture devoid of distinct background or foreground. Instead, every element of the painting collapses into the other, resulting in a fulfillment of the artists own proclamation: “Portraits and landscapes must come together and it is more or less the same thing, I want portraits where the depiction follows the same mechanism as that of the depiction of a landscape, here ripples and ravines, there a nose, here trees, there a mouth and a house.”
“Portraits and landscapes must come together and it is more or less the same thing, I want portraits where the depiction follows the same mechanism as that of the depiction of a landscape, here ripples and ravines, there a nose, here trees, there a mouth and a house.”
Featuring four figures in profile and forward-facing, the present work positions its subjects in a densely patterned atmosphere of lines, polka dots and flat planes of color. Bright red and navy coalesce with segments of pale yellow and powder blue while thick lines of black paint unapologetically fill the white portions of the canvas and outline the indistinct shapes that flow across the mixed-media image. Lacking any suggestion of realism, Les Visiteurs embodies the Art Brut philosophy and spirit that Dubuffet introduced to the world.
Skilled as a painter, sculptor, printmaker and beyond, Dubuffet led somewhat of a nontraditional career; having studied in Paris, where he developed friendships with Fernand Léger and André Masson, Dubuffet then stopped his artistic practice in the wake of the Nazi occupation of France. During this period of pause, the painter immersed himself in poetry and developed a business selling wine. His return to artmaking was galvanized by a rejection of conventional conceptions of beauty and refinement; instead, Dubuffet embraced uninhibited aesthetics formerly determined to be obscene. Such became the foundations of Art Brut, a space for artwork charged with emotional expression and raw spontaneity. Showcasing the artist’s ability to abstract the figurative and to free image making from the shackles of convention, Les Visiteurs embodies Dubuffet’s rebellious contributions to art history.
