Jean Dubuffet - 20th Century & Contemporary Art & Design Evening Sale Hong Kong Saturday, May 26, 2018 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York
    Mr. and Mrs. Arthur J. Kobacker Steubenville, Ohio
    Sotheby's Parke-Bernet, New York, 28 October 1970, Lot 64
    Dr. Irving Stoner (acquired at the above sale)
    Robert Elkon Gallery, New York (acquired from the above in 1975)
    Marisa del Re Gallery, Inc., New York
    Waddington Galleries, London
    Mr. and Mrs. George Bloch, Hong Kong
    Private Collection, Connecticut
    Sotheby's, New York, 8 November 1994, Lot 42
    Collection Stanley J. Seeger (acquired at the above sale)
    Sotheby's, New York, 8 May 2001, Lot 35
    Private Collection (acquired at the above sale)
    Phillips, London, 14 February 2013, Lot 18
    Private Collection, Geneva (acquired at the above sale)
    Acquired from the above by the present owner

  • Exhibited

    New York, Pierre Matisse Gallery, Dubuffet Paintings – Assemblages d’Empreintes, 21 February - 17 March 1956, no. 16
    Hannover, Kestner Gesellschaft; Zürich Kunsthaus, Jean Dubuffet, 26 October - 4 December 1960, no. 62
    New York, The Museum of Modern Art; The Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Work of Jean Dubuffet, 19 February - 12 August 1962
    London, Tate Gallery, Dubuffet Paintings, 23 April - 30 May 1966, no. 72
    New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Jean Dubuffet, 26 April - 29 July 1973, then travelled to Paris, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais (no. 76); New York, Robert Elkon Gallery (no. 16), Dubuffet, A Selection, 27 September - 29 October 1975

  • Literature

    Peter Selz, The Work of Jean Dubuffet, New York, 1962, p. 114 (illustrated)
    Max Loreau, Catalogue des Travaux de Jean Dubuffet, Fascicule XI: Charettes, Jardins, Personnages Monolithes, Lausanne, 1969, no. 76, p. 64, pl. 76 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    In Jean Dubuffet’s Le Chien Rôdeur, the dog of the title is shown silhouetted against a slender horizontal sliver of sky, making its way cautiously across a flower- and rock-strewn landscape. The dog has been rendered with character and sympathy—it engages the viewer, serving as a bridge to draw our attention into the world of the picture itself. The landscape, depicted vertically as was so often the case in Dubuffet’s works, allowing him to give the sense of incident that is experienced when looking at the world around us, is crammed with detail. The wonder of life, of even the most humble landscape, is here captured through a range of techniques, as Dubuffet revels in the depiction of the wealth of rocks and plants that populate his arid surroundings.

    Le Chien Rôdeur was painted in Vence in August 1955. The artist had moved there earlier that year, following medical advice aimed at helping his wife Lili recover from a long-standing illness—the air there was meant to be particularly good for the lungs. They managed to rent a home there, but at first were unable to find a suitable studio for the artist to paint—he was limited to a smaller space where he could make works on paper. Later in the year, he managed to buy the lower floor of a house there and returned with gusto to painting. Le Chien Rôdeur dates from this moment, when he was able to plunge himself into the world of colour and impasto, introducing new elements from the world around him in Vence. After all, for this artist who had been so supremely interested in the soil and the earth, the fertile yet rocky landscape that surrounded his home provided an endless source of fascination, and this sings through Le Chien Rôdeur. During the months before he found his larger studio, he had spent time outside, meticulously drawing sections of the roadside in the surrounding area, fascinated by the infinite drama he was able to find within a few square metres of roadside rubble, with its wild flowers, weeds and tufts of greenery poking through the surface.

    Dubuffet recalled that his Prowling Dogs such as Le Chien Rôdeur were essentially pretexts for paintings using this natural material as its inspiration. The lower half of Le Chien Rôdeur is filled with their legacy, with its catalogue pebbles and flowers captured through a frenetic range of spots, circles and star-bursts of brushstrokes. Meanwhile, the dog itself has been rendered full of character, a slightly manic yet endearing presence. It recalls the charm of the Vaches, the cows that Dubuffet had painted the previous year when Lili was staying in the outskirts of Clermont-Ferrand. But where the cows were shown in their fields, usually against a single backdrop which they dwarfed and dominated, here Dubuffet has depicted the dog against a mottled blue sky. The paint surface thrusts the dog further into relief: the earth colours of its fur contrast with its background, which appears to have been deliberately flattened through the application of some textile, perhaps a cloth or a sleeve. It was not only in the motif of the prowling dog that Dubuffet explored these techniques—his painting Mon char, mon jardin from the same period and now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, shows a cart depicted in a similar way atop an inventory-like landscape akin to this.

    The fact that the dog and the landscape in Le Chien Rôdeur appear to have been conjured from the same material as each other illustrates a paradox that lay at the heart of much of Dubuffet’s work, his synchronous fascination with the tiny details of everyday life and its vaster panoply. ‘I think on one side I have this love for the sap and savour of life, with all its oddities,’ he would tell Michael Peppiatt in 1977, ‘whereas on the other I see the world in a more oriental way, as an undifferentiated continuum, and gradually the individuation in my work fades away’ (Dubuffet, quoted in M. Peppiatt, Interviews with Artists: 1966-2012, New Haven and London, 2012, pp. 293-94).

    It is a mark of the importance of Le Chien Rôdeur that it featured in a number of important lifetime retrospectives of Dubuffet’s work, including the 1962 show held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, for which the catalogue written by Peter Selz remains one of the key works written on the artist. Le Chien Rôdeur also featured in the 1966 exhibition at the Tate, London and the 1973 retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, which afterwards travelled to the Grand Palais, Paris. Le Chien Rôdeur has graced the walls of a number of prominent twentieth-century collectors, including Arthur J. Kobacker, of Steubenville, Ohio, who had made his fortune setting up a shoe outlet and was a prominent philanthropist; Mary and George Bloch, whose collection featured works by artists such as Alexander Calder, Alberto Giacometti, Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso as well as Chinese snuff bottles; and Stanley Seeger, the heir to an oil fortune who at one point owned 88 works by Picasso, alongside other masterpieces by artists such as Francis Bacon and Jasper Johns.

Property of an Important European Collector

6

Le Chien Rôdeur

1955
signed and dated 'J. Dubuffet '55' upper left; further signed and dated 'Vence, août '55' on the reverse
oil on canvas
81 x 99.3 cm. (31 7/8 x 39 1/8 in.)
Painted in August 1955.

Estimate
HK$7,000,000 - 9,000,000 
€753,000-968,000
$897,000-1,150,000

Sold for HK$7,540,000

Contact Specialist
Jonathan Crockett
Deputy Chairman, Asia and Head of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, Asia
+852 2318 2023

Isaure de Viel Castel
Head of Department
+852 2318 2011

Sandy Ma
Head of Sale
+852 2318 2025

20th Century & Contemporary Art & Design Evening Sale

Hong Kong Auction 27 May 2018