Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985)
Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985)

L'Erratique

细节
Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985)
L'Erratique
signed and dated 'J. Dubuffet 61' (upper right); signed again, titled and dated again 'L'Erratique J. Dubuffet Sept. 61' (on the reverse)
oil on masonite
21½ x 18 in. (54.6 x 45.7 cm.)
Painted in 1961.
来源
Galerie Daniel Cordier, Paris
Private collection, Paris
Cordier and Ekstrom, Inc., New York
Perls Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner, 1980
出版
M. Loreau, ed., Catalogue des travaux de Jean Dubuffet: Paris Circus, Fascicule XIX, Paris, 1965, pp. 82 and 225, no. 149 (illustrated).

拍品专文

er rat ic
[ih-rat-ik]
--adjective

1.
deviating from the usual or proper course in conduct or opinion; eccentric; queer: erratic behavior.
2.
having no certain or definite course; wandering; not fixed: erratic winds.
3.
Geology: noting or pertaining to a boulder or the like carried by glacial ice and deposited some distance from its place of origin.
4.
(of a lichen) having no attachment to the surface on which it grows.


In 1961, Dubuffet returned to the streets of Paris after spending years in the countryside. In striking contrast to the Post-War city he left, the artist was immediately intoxicated by the raw and vibrant life of the city around him. His renewed interest in depicting humanity exploded onto the canvas in a firework-like display of intense color. Painted in late 1961, L'Erratique is filled with color and vigor, capturing the creative frenzy that marked Dubuffet's art during this period.

During his time in the countryside, Dubuffet's art had pursued several paths, tending in many cases towards abstraction. Likewise, the countryside had inspired him to explore organic themes, attempting to capture some quality of the earth in his painting. Much of his work, even into 1960, was painted in the browns and yellows of the earth. On returning to Paris, the lights, sights and colors of the city immediately found their way into Dubuffet's paintings, be it in the crowds of his famous Paris Circus pictures, or in works showing single figures as here. Dubuffet was still distilling a feeling of the world around him, but this different world, this metropolitan world, needed a new visual language.

Dubuffet's art aims to create a more direct, more intense evocation of the sights in the world around us, leading us to a more authentic understanding. For why would we merely look at a figurative replica? What would such 'realism' teach us? Instead, inspired in part by the art of children, of the insane, and of other civilisations, Dubuffet explored his themes in styles that are at once idiosyncratic and immediately accessible. His theme remains the splendor of the world around us, the glories of the everyday to which we are too accustomed to notice. As stated by the artist in 1961, shortly before L'Erratique was painted:

"My fare is the commonplace. The more banal it is, the more I like it. Fortunately, I don't feel that there's anything exceptional about me. What I want to find in my paintings is the gaze of the average man in the street. Thus, without adding to the simple means available to an ordinary person's hand (I don't want anything but the rudimentary techniques of the layman, they seem quite good enough for me), I've tried to produce huge, high celebrations. Festivities are a lot more worthwhile when we stick to everyday life rather than going to areas foreign to it. That is the only way the intrinsic virtue of festivities--to commute our workaday life into a wondrous celebration-- can truly function. I am referring to celebrations of the mind. Please understand: I mean celebrations achieved by moods and deliriums...Art addresses the mind, certainly not the eyes. Too many people think that art addresses the eyes. What a poor use of it that would be!" (J. Dubuffet, 1960, quoted in Jean Dubuffet: Towards an Alternative Reality, ed. M. Glimcher, New York, 1987, p. 181).

The materiality of the paint surface, with its peaks and troughs and impasto, tells its own tale, but also creates the feeling that the picture itself is somehow organic, that the matter with which it has been painted has a life of its own. In this way, the picture appears to be an emanation of life itself, as though Dubuffet has captured not an image, but an actual chunk of our existence. The artist repeatedly insisted that art was for the mind, and not the eyes. Despite this, his works have an intensity and immediacy that renders them, albeit in their unorthodox and even shocking way, aesthetic. But the idea of painting for the mind was one that continuously occupied Dubuffet. His painting aims not at the intellect, but hopes to create some firework in the mind, some intense and pleasurable recognition.