Jean Dubuffet

Acquired directly from the artist by the father of the present owner in 1957

Catalogue Intégral des Travaux de Jean Dubuffet: Célébration du Sol I, fasc. XIII, Lausanne 1969, p. 84, no. 111, illustrated

In 1959 Dubuffet wrote “I have liked to carry the human image on to a plane of seriousness where the futile embellishments of aesthetics have no longer any place” (Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Jean Dubuffet: A Retrospective, 1973, p. 22). The founder of the Art Brut movement, Dubuffet effected one of the single greatest revolutions in twentieth century art by praising and championing the art of sociopaths and mental patients, children and untaught amateurs. A step beyond the cultivated admiration for native art that inspired the works of artists like Gaugin, Matisse and Picasso, Dubuffet’s work speaks of the unthinking, untrained and primal urge to create, reaching a process perhaps closer to a “pure psychic automatism” than the surrealists ever did. Dubuffet believed art was a purely personal action, and that attempts to “communicate with the public” or “to adapt, to conform, to mimic” (ibid, p. 23) traditional aesthetic conventions were a death knell to art.  

In the present work, which anticipates the Figures Fantomatiques series of 1959, the nebulous form of the anxious old man has been rolled out like dough on a chopping board, his wonderfully uneven edges expressive of his troubled state of mind. The palette knife has been used to pull and push the thick paint across the canvas in great streaks. The hugging arms, scraped in with the tip of the palette knife, seem to be attempting to hold the shape of his collapsing form.  Like a man in an out-of-focus lens, this ghost stares at us with perfectly round eyes and a mouth compressed to a single slashing line: shock and dismay are etched into his very few features. Typically, Dubuffet has mixed extraneous materials like putty and glue into the white oil paint to achieve his wonderfully heavy and opaque impasto, and also degrading this traditionally elite medium. By assaulting our senses with the crudeness and raw force of his work, Dubuffet shocks us out of our banal preconceptions about beauty.