Jean Dubuffet

Galerie Stadler, Paris
Acquired directly from the above

Paris, Musée des Art Décoratifs, Jean Dubuffet: 1942-1960, 1960, (incorrectly titled and dated)
Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris-Paris, 1937-57, 1981, p. 238, illustrated in colour

Max Loreau, Catalogue Intégral des Travaux de Jean Dubuffet: Vaches Petites Statues de la Vie Précaire, Fascicule X, Lausanne 1969, p. 57, no. 69, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the red tone is brighter in the original and the illustration fails to convey the shimmering quality of the surface due to the lacquered paint applied by the artist. Condition: This work is very good condition. Close inspections reveals a very soft crease to the canvas toward the upper right corner and three small and very fine and stable networks of craquelure: one to the left of the figure's face, one underneath the figure's left eye, and another one to the centre of the figure's right arm. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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Le Barbouillé is an exemplary painting that synthesizes Dubuffet's conception and approach to art during a pivotal period in the artist's career.  Conceived only a couple of years after the artist's renowned series Corps de Dame, the present work maintains the anti-civilized and 'primitivist' cultural project that Dubuffet pursued in his painting, writing and collecting since the end of World War II.  In 1951, a few years prior to the present work, the artist's vision became verbally formalized when he delivered his Anticultural Positions lecture at the Arts Club in Chicago.   During this address, Dubuffet 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.  "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). Le Barbouillé shows the strength of Dubuffet's convictions with undeniable intensity that is magnified by the work's impressive scale and the deep red pigment used to render the rough features of the figure's bulbous head. 

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. Combined with the figure's blocky contours and malproportioned limbs and head, the painting insists on a new and unique pictorial language, one that questions the conventions and standards by which normality is defined; the artist's drastically flattened effigy challenging the smooth, well tempered and formally coherent abstractions that exemplified the prevailing taste in Paris at the time, and instead delivering a literal embodiment of Dubuffet's fascination with the primitive. "The objective of painting is to animate a surface which is by definition two-dimensional and without depth. One does not enrich it in seeking effects of relief or trompe-l'oeil through shading; one denatures and adulterates it...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." (The artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Jean Dubuffet, A Retrospective, 1973, p. 24).

Dubuffet's commitment to art stripped of affectation was catalyzed in 1923 when he was given the book Artistry of the Mentally Ill, written by Dr. Hans Prinzhorn.  One of the first people to compare the art of the mentally ill, the art of children and the art of primitive cultures, Dr. Prinzhorn asserted that these three groups should be granted serious aesthetic consideration for the very fact that they exist beyond the reach of society's repressive hold.  Dubuffet concurred with Dr. Prinzhorn's analysis, becoming increasingly intrigued with the art of groups that inhabited a realm removed from the mainstream, seeing in them a freedom of expression, an unfettered individuality and a purity that he believed to be stifled in others by the structured and mimetic approach to art in civilized society.  The intensely personal and solitary need of the mentally ill to create art disassociated from the desire to communicate with others through conventional art channels, impressed Dubuffet to such an extent that he became involved in creating a collection of what he came to term Art Brut, with the help of André Breton as well as the leading authority on primitive art in Paris, Charles Ratton.  While the artist acknowledged that his immersion within society disallowed his art to be Art Brut,  his exposure to the creations of the mentally ill did, however, strengthen his resolve to work towards the production of an art that shows no precedents; learning from Art Brut the importance of learning no lesson at all.

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 artists in this movement 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 Le Barbouillé creating a compellingly expressive image that continues to challenge artistic boundaries almost six decades after its creation.