Jean Dubuffet

signed and dated 54 on the left side of the base



executed in October 1954

Galerie Rive Gauche, Paris
Richard Feigen Gallery, Chicago
Mr. and Mrs. Harold Weinstein, Chicago
Private Collection, New York
Christie's, New York, May 13, 1987, lot 367
Acquired by the present owner from the above sale

Paris, Galerie Rive Gauche, Petites statues de la vie précaire de Jean Dubuffet, Fall 1954, cat. no. 44
Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art; Madrid, Museo Naçional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia; Florence, Forte Belvedere; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, A Century of Modern Sculpture: The Patsy and Raymond Nasher Collection, June 1987 - March 1989
New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, A Century of Sculpture: The Nasher Collection, February - June 1997
Dallas, Nasher Sculpture Center, Bodies Past and Present: the Figurative Tradition in the Nasher Collection, October 2005 - 2007

Jean Dubuffet, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, Paris, 1967, pp. 98-99
Max Loreau, ed., Catalogue des travaux de Jean Dubuffet, Fascicule X: Vaches Petites statues de la vie précaire, Paris, 1969, cat. no. 42, p. 38, illustrated
Andreas Franzke, Jean Dubuffet: Petites statues de la vie précaire, Bern, 1988, cat. no 40, p. 145, illustrated 

This work is in very good and sound condition. The coloration of the lava stone is a richer brown than it appears in the catalogue illustration. There are scattered surface irregularities and minor nicks to the base (visible in the catalogue) many of which appear inherent to the medium and the artist's intent. Otherwise, there are no condition problems with this work.
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.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Le Fuligineux emanates from an important series of roughly 43 sculptures which Jean Dubuffet created between March and October in 1954 called Petites Statues de la Vie Precaire (Little Statues of Precarious Life). As sculpted characters created from assemblages of found materials, these works followed on directly from the two dimensional works of collaged butterflies which he created in late 1953. With these works he wanted to point out the parallels between the fragility of human and material life and he therefore purposefully chose materials which were as natural as possible. Newspaper, steel wool, clinkers, sponges, grapevine stalks and, as in this case, lava rock and slag were used to create beautifully expressive figures whose very existence seemed as unpredictable as life itself.

Dubuffet here encourages the viewer to mentally deconstruct the human form into the sum of its organic components. He wanted to create a sculpture which might have appeared to have made and found itself in nature. There is an obvious linkage here between the artist's historical use of the different mediums to create studies on paper, but in using the the raw material, Dubuffet creates a tactile crudeness of form which illustrates the artist's belief in the organic unity between man and nature, and his desire to reject inherited false notions of beauty. Dubuffet believed Western man was so preoccupied with occidental concepts like beauty and ugliness, that it was impossible to appreciate the inner soul and life of all things.

The earthy, primitive character of Dubuffet's earliest inscribed paintings and sculptures reveal a fervent passion and burning desire to explore all extremes of formal expression. Art, as Dubuffet saw it, should be the place where the major issues of society and existence were able to enjoy free expression, where materials (matière) were empowered by their inherent natural properties to act as a medium between the artist and his subject matter. This unexplored relationship led Dubuffet's charge against what he saw as the 'false gods of culture' during the 1940s and 1950s, and as Dubuffet's chronicler Max Loreau suggests these years of material exploration not only served to exhibit the artist's mandatory reliance upon his means, but also to elevate materials from their conventional inferiority to form.

From Dubuffet's irreverent, anticultural perspective, form was equated to the difficulties of culture and replaced by matière as the fundamental motive for creation. As is sublimely illustrated by Le Fuligineux, the organic materiality of Dubuffet's best works has a self-perpetuating logic in which the form and component materials are inseparable.