“ Perhaps it was the time I spent in the deserts of White Africa that sharpened my taste…” -Jean Dubuffet

The present work beautifully captures Dubuffet’s fascination and enthusiasm about Arabic culture and marks the inception and development of many technical and aesthetic possibilities that came to occupy much of the artist’s oeuvre. Executed very early in the artist’s acclaimed career, Nomade Aux Traces De Pas Dans Le Sable materializes the insatiable joy and vivacious energy of Dubuffet’s interpretation of the visual world around him during three journeys he took to North Africa between 1947 and 1949. Isolated from the conventions and doctrines of European society, Dubuffet was enraptured both by the extraordinary nature of the Saharan environment and by the customs and way of life of the desert peoples. Upon returning to Paris in April 1948 from his second of the three trips, a six month stay in the Algerian Sahara Desert, he almost immediately began painting Nomade Aux Traces De Pas Dans Le Sable.

Around the same time, the artist’s already established sanctuary for the anti-cultural positions of his L’Art Brut ideology, “Foyer de L’Art Brut,” which was located in the basement of art dealer Rene Drouin’s gallery in Place Vendome, moved to a pavilion rented by the editor Gaston Gallimard where it became known as the “Compagnie de l’Art Brut.” Among the founding members was Dubuffet’s contemporary Edmond Bomsel. The present magisterial portrait, dedicated à Edmond Bomsel, emerges out of the variegated landscape of paint through faceted slabs of sumptuous color at a defining time in the Dubuffet’s career. At once reflecting on the artist’s trip to North Africa, the dedication of the painting in the upper right corner of the canvas speaks to the commitment with which Dubuffet carried over his experiences abroad and shared them with his colleagues.

One of only a handful of significant paintings from his Arab series, the textural depth and energy in this masterpiece exposes Dubuffet’s fascination with the flowing continuity of surface, which finds apt analogy with his experience of the Sahara’s endless, ever-shifting and desolate landscape. Here his treatment of the rolling sandy dunes that contextualize the figure are replete with visceral mark-making and an intense assault of texture and color, particularly in the scattered footprints, right up to the very high horizon line. These features of the painting amply demonstrate Dubuffet’s early interest in abstraction, which was, of course, finally to develop fully in his series the L’Hourloupe.