Jean Dubuffet

The artist
Michel Tapié, Paris
Claude Hersaint, Paris
Galerie Beyeler, Basel
Stephen Hahn, New York
Private Collection, London
Waddington Galleries, Ltd., London
The Pace Gallery, New York
Contessa Gallery, Cleveland

Vienna, Museum des 20 Jahrhunderts, Idole und Dämonen, 1963
Basel, Galerie Beyeler, Jean Dubuffet, 1965, no. 26, illustrated in colour
Zurich, Gimpel & Hanover Galerie, Jean Dubuffet, 1965
Stockholm, Svensk-Franska Konstgalleriet, Jean Dubuffet: Målningar 1944–1959, 1967, no. 15, illustrated
Lörrach, Germany, Galerie Regio, Sommeraustellung, Summer, 1967
Lucerne, Kunstmuseum, Neue Formen Expressionistischer Malerei seit 1950, 1968
New York, William Pall Gallery, Jean Dubuffet, 1976
New York, Pace Primitive, Fierce Beauty: Art from the Nigeria/Cameroon Border, 2004
New York, Barbara Mathes Gallery, Dubuffet & Miró A Dialogue, 2009
Roslyn, New York, Nassau County Museum of Art, Miró/ Dubuffet/ Basquiat, 2010

 

Max Loreau, Catalogue des travaux de Jean Dubuffet, fascicule VI: Corps de dames, Paris 1987, p. 59, no. 81, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is slightly deeper and richer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection under raking light reveals a small number of isolated networks of unobtrusive drying cracks scattered at intervals throughout which are inherent to the nature of the medium; an extremely small and minor loss to the overturn centre right edge and one to the overturn lower right edge. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
"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. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
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"Let us seek instead ingenious ways to flatten objects on the surface; and let the surface speak its own language and not an artificial language of three-dimensional space which is not proper to it. ... I feel the need to leave the surface visibly flat. The objects represented will be transformed into pancakes, as though flattened by a pressing iron.''  (The artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Jean Dubuffet: A Retrospective, 1973, p. 24)

Présence Légère is a remarkable example of Jean Dubuffet's dual commitment to materials (matière) and figurative two-dimensionality during the 1950s – a period of pivotal importance within the artist's career.  Executed in 1951, contemporaneously to Dubuffet's renowned series Corps de Dame, the present work evidences the anti-civilized and 'primitivist' cultural project pursued in his painting, writing and collecting since the end of World War II. In the present work Dubuffet deftly challenges the authority of line and form with the raw veracity of materials.  Inhabiting a fundamentally anti-cultural stance, the works from this period look to raise the conventional subservience of matière to equal, if not surpass, the traditional dominance of form. 1951 represents a highly significant year for the artist, at once documenting the artist's move from Paris to New York, and coinciding with the full realisation of Dubuffet's artistic maturity.  Representing the very culmination of the artist's formative engagement with Art Brut alongside his burgeoning emphasis on the creative reality of substance, Présence Légère is a consummate exemplification of Dubuffet's inimitable liberation of matière. Magnified by the work's impressive scale and the deep pigment used to roughly render the features of the figure's inflated head, the present work truly embodies the strength of Dubuffet's convictions with undeniable intensity.

In December 1951 Dubuffet verbally formalized his artistic philosophy upon delivering his Anticultural Positions lecture at the Arts Club in Chicago. During this address, the artist outlined his rejection of the two basic tenets of Western culture, dismissing both the value of categorical thought as well as traditional notions of beauty; as later recounted by the artist: "my speech was concerned with the creative process, with the sterility of the concept of beauty, with the potential of irrational action and paradoxical views which have strangely sustained the interest of the public" (The artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Jean Dubuffet: A Retrospective, 1973, p. 280). Herein, Dubuffet emphasises art as a vehicle, not for visual entertainment, but for the transcendent purpose of achieving a heightened state of spirituality. For Dubuffet, the task of art is not to search for the correct arrangement of forms but to uncover the hidden depths of human creativity: "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." (Jean Dubuffet, Anticultural Positions, Point 6, Chicago, 1951).

After the Second World War Dubuffet was confronted with a deep angst and consumed with the need to rid visual art of its affected heroics and cultural inhibitions. In the present work an unidentified male face forms a nameless cipher, an alienated and expressionless exemplar of isolation; as expressed by Margrit Rowell, in Dubuffet's treatment of figuration "there exists an undercurrent of tragic humanism, a tragic vision of the helpless anonymity of modern man." (Margrit Rowell, 'Jean Debuffet: An Art on the Margins of Culture' in: Op. Cit., p. 34). Thus, in moving away from the traditions of three-dimensional perspective, volumetric illusion and prescribed colour, Dubuffet reflects the disenchantment of the post-war generation, subverting an ideal humanism deemed inappropriate with the onset of modernity.

During the 1950s the artist increasingly liberated line from its function as structuring and formally determining element of composition. The translation of a portrait head and shoulders format is here naively reduced to the very basest of two-dimensional form, roughly scored and incised onto the canvas surface. Creating a rich and textured topography the artist builds up, scrapes, smears and inscribes the surface of the canvas, instilling the figure with a physical and psychological vitality that seems almost to burst beyond the limits of a canvas that can barely contain him. Présence Légère exemplifies Dubuffet's insistence on a subversive and unique pictorial language. The drastically flattened effigy challenges the smooth, well tempered and formally coherent abstractions that exemplified the prevailing taste in Paris at the time, instead delivering a literal embodiment of Dubuffet's fascination with the primitive.  Dubuffet himself articulated this innovative pictorial agenda: "... it should become an inner drawing, projected from within, operating within the very flesh of things, and no longer, as in traditional art, restricted to tracing the contours of objects as seen from outside. A new way of drawing, internal and diffuse, which I have done my utmost to practice."  (the artist cited in: Agnes Husslein-Arco, Jean Dubuffet, Munich 2003, p. 74). In Présence Légère, the chaotic and bare distribution of line combined with the physical substance of pigment, stages the confrontation between form and matière that would ultimately give way by the mid-1950s to total formal obliteration in Dubuffet's Materiologies.

Dubuffet's radical step towards something other than the intellectualized methodology on which functional modernism was built was not taken alone, and throughout the 1950s and 1960s the artist became an increasingly influential proponent of Tachism. Frequently associated with this movements leading proponents such as Jean Fautier, Wols, Alberto Burri and Antoni Tàpies, among others, these artists had no one definitive style, technique or medium. Rather, the connection between these artists materialized in their emotional and physical engagement with the creative process that they hoped would result in more spontaneous and authentic works of art. Their preoccupation with the materiality of a work is tangible in the impastoed layers and distressed form of Dubuffet's Présence Légère, a compellingly expressive image that continues to challenge artistic boundaries six decades after its creation.