Displayed at the legendary exhibition, Tableaux et dessins de Jean Dubuffet, at Galerie René Drouin on the Place Vendôme in October 1944 and extensively exhibited since, Quatre Notables forms part of the commercial blooming of Jean Dubuffet’s revolutionary career. Completed on 29^th of June 1944 – the same year that, having been greatly moved by Jean Fautrier’s Otages, Dubuffet began to use his distinctive thick mixture of tar, gravel and sand – Quatre Notables depicts ‘four noblemen’ whose roughly-textured bodies are integrated with their environs. A satire of the classical bas-relief, the present work was rendered in the Surrealism-derived grattage technique, in which marks are made by scraping a surface pre-prepared with a coat of oil paint or ink. In viewing the present work, the viewer has a tangible sense of an artist, who, at the age of forty-three, was enjoying a self-assured and highly creative period following his self-proclaimed dedication to artistic practice two years earlier. Profiting from the community of an unprecedentedly militant and subversive Paris circle of gallerists, writers, poets, artists and critics including gallerist René Drouin, Georges Limbour, Max Jacob, Jean Paulhan and Pierre Seghers, Dubuffet expressed in Quatre Notables the hallmarks of his Art Brut project. This wonderful work on paper broke free from traditional artistic tropes in favour of a staggeringly original and liberated form of representation.

Wry and irreverent, Quatre Notables mocks the putative noblemen it depicts, in much the same way as his work Haut Négoce – made just three months prior to the present work – ridiculed a set of haughty suited men participating in a negotiation. Directing a comical, critical eye over the way in which contemporary political decisions are made by people who are at heart base and absurd, Dubuffet’s staunch rejection of accepted aesthetic standards in Quatre Notables and Haut Négoce has both a personal and historical cause. Having repeatedly attempted to fashion a successful career as an artist, Dubuffet had, by 1942, “lost all interest in the art shown in galleries and museums”, and instead “loved the paintings done by children”, with his “only desire…to do the same for [his] own pleasure” (Jean Dubuffet cited in: Valérie de Costa and Fabrice Hergott, Jean Dubuffet: Works, Writings and Interviews, Barcelona 2006, p. 11). With an oft-overlooked, exceptionally diligent work ethic, Dubuffet formulated his own version of art history by focusing on supposedly ‘bad paintings’ and commenting of his own practice that “the most important thing is to be against things” (Ibid., p. 11). The origins of Dubuffet’s project, however, are also indissociable from its wider historical context. The supremacist prescriptivism of the Nazi ideology that imposed itself on Paris embodied, for Dubuffet, just an extreme form of the censorious injunctions upheld by the traditional art world: both delineated a charmed circle of accepted forms and excluded the rest as ‘degenerate’. In a bold act of defiance, Dubuffet concerned himself with depictions of ordinary people; eschewing any vestige of the kind of idealisation that the Nazis took to monstrous extremes. 

Without doubt among the most important French artists of the Twentieth Century, Dubuffet is a perfect counterexample to the trope of the individualistic male artist – as epitomised by Pablo Picasso. Dubuffet’s choice of subject-matter, from ordinary citizens in Métro (1943), glimpses of redemptive jubilance in Nazi-occupied Paris in Vue de Paris – La vie de Plaisir (1944), as well as rural practices in Grande traite solitaire (1943), defeats this myth. In effect, Dubuffet reveals in Quatre Notables the very same love of the ordinary and the democratic as that expressed by his friend Jean Paulhan in the Nouvelle Revue Française: “man’s worth lies in what he has that is natural, immediate and naive, rather than in what he acquires. A great scholar has merit: but an ordinary man in and of himself is more valuable and even more extraordinary than a great scholar” (Jean Paulhan, ‘La démocratie fait appel au premier venu’, Nouvelle Revue Française, 1 March 1939, n.p.).