As part of the "Daniel Varenne II Collection" session on Wednesday 28th October 2020, PIASA is presenting a collection of works of art by artists from the second half of the 20th century, including Jean Dubuffet.
As a major artist of the second half of the 20th century, Jean Dubuffet stood out for his fierce opposition to the dominant culture, to institutional art, and in return, for his commitment to art brut (art for children, the alienated, and all the marginalized rejected by the official circuits). His research on matter, textures and forms has given rise to a work free of all codes and stylistic constraints but no less ambitious, organised in series and accompanied by an intense literary production. After working as a wine merchant, and becoming passionate in the 1930s about Egyptian hieroglyphics, Chinese ideograms and Roman calligraphy, Dubuffet decided to devote himself exclusively to painting in 1942. He made a name for himself with the exhibition organised by the René Drouin gallery in Paris "Marionnettes de la ville et de la campagne" (1944), prefaced by Jean Paulhan, which caused scandal and controversy.
In search of authenticity and primitivism, Dubuffet made several trips to the Sahara from 1947 to 1949, an experience of the desert, extreme destitution and infinite space, which led him to create his strange landscapes of the "mind" and his works of textures ("Texturologies", 1957-1959), dense and saturated monochromes of which the "Matériologies" (1959-1960) are the culmination.
Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) Paysage avec un personnage, August 4th, 1980
Estimate : 25000 / 35000 €
Among Dubuffet's works that we present are "Landscapes with Two Characters, 30 May 1980", lot 2 and "Landscape with a Character, 4 August 1980", lot 3, which belong to the artist's last years of creation. They are not far from the Psycho-Sites (1980-1981) where all geographical landmarks (ground, sky, etc.) disappear while characters are inserted through collage. These works, executed at a time when Dubuffet was returning to work after a period of forced interruption, are emblematic of his new way of working, which is limited to the genre of drawing, the use of black felt pen and the theme of landscape. Alfred Pacquement wrote of them: "Here again, as in previous 'theatres of memory', the process consists in cutting out cut-out forms from previous drawings, but these are now applied to a network of lines in a two-stage operation, the fusion of which will reveal the space and the achievements of both. It is therefore no longer a question here of associating heterogeneous figurations, but rather of joining indeterminate linear textures (composing a background) and the superimposed cut-outs of figures (composing the figures) in an almost systematic way. As Dubuffet writes, in a letter to Claude Simon, "we observe man no longer reigning but embedded or rather encased within nature". Admittedly, the man Dubuffet describes has never shown a dominating relationship with nature; he is, as we know, "a man of the common man at work". But here he is effectively absorbed by the geological texture, and somehow confused with the landscape1."
Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) Paysage avec deux personnages, May 30, 1980
Estimate : 25000 / 35000 €
1Alfred Pacquement, « Sites aux figurines », in cat. exp. Jean Dubuffet. Les dernières années, Galerie nationale de Jeu de Paume, Paris, 1991, p. 113-114.
