With its squiggling, black-outlined forms, and red, white, and blue color palette, Inspecteurs Sinoque et Dingue, 1967, is a summative example of Jean Dubuffet’s L’Hourloupe series. An expansive body of drawings, paintings, and sculpture created between 1962 and 1974, L’Hourloupe grew out of Dubuffet’s subconscious, originating in a ballpoint pen doodle that the artist drew absentmindedly while on the telephone. The series had a devoted exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, one year prior to the present work’s facture, indicating that Inspecteurs Sinoque et Dingue dates to a peak of Dubuffet’s international recognition for L’Hourloupe. Though it belongs to such a large body of work, Inspecteurs Sinoque et Dingue has a robust exhibition history, including three shows in three different countries in 1968 alone, indicating, from the start, that Inspecteurs Sinoque et Dingue has been seen as a representative L’Hourloupe work.

 

Inspecteurs Sinoque et Dingue encapsulates the virtuosic draftsmanship, humor, and embrace of disorder that defined Jean Dubuffet’s L’Hourloupe series, and his legacy as a grandfather of graffiti art. A playful expression of Dubuffet’s wandering imagination, the picture flows easily between figuration and abstraction, with the profiles of the titular inspectors nearly indistinguishable from the expressive forms of the background. It is only through a canny use of color and outline that Dubuffet pulls the white faces of his officers out of the painted shapes that surround them.

 

L’Hourloupe is a neologism, coined by Dubuffet to evoke the wild wonder and distortion of the series; the term recalls both the French verbs hurler (to roar or yell), and hululer (to hoot), as well as la loup (wolf). The term loupe, which in both French and English signifies a magnifying glass, speaks to the sense that each work in L’Hourloupe is part of a wider, imagined universe; if one zoomed out from Inspecteurs Sinoque et Dingue, perhaps, the entire world of the inspectors’ madness and fantasy might reveal itself.

 

The playful, inventive titling of L’Hourloupe applies to the present work as well; Sinoque and Dingue are not proper names, but pejorative, slang terms meaning stupid or crazy. Dubuffet’s combination of sinoque and dingue with the French title for a police detective picks up on the anti-authoritarian ethos of the 1960s, perhaps most acutely anticipating the Parisian student uprisings of 1968. Such wordplay and use of contradiction and disorder speak to the larger legacy of Dubuffet’s art brut on his artistic practice.

 

Dubuffet embraced the instinctive and indigent in art brut, which he developed in the 1940s as an elevation of outsider aesthetics in fine art. Drawing on so-called primitive arts, such as wooden figural sculpture from Africa and Oceania, as well as the art of the mentally ill, Dubuffet sought to create work that was more honest, more brutal, more real, which, in the process, revealed in a Surrealist sense the idiosyncrasies and everyday wanderings of the artist’s psyche. L’Hourloupe works like Inspecteurs Sinoque et Dingue were a new iteration of Dubuffet’s art brut goals. Per Dubuffet, L’Hourloupe “was characterized by a much more seriously arbitrary and irrational mood than anything I had done before. This was a plunge into fantasy, into a phantom parallel universe. My renewed interest in outsider art was no doubt not unconnected with this sudden new development.”ⁱ

 

Inspecteurs Sinoque et Dingue dates to a high point of L’Hourloupe, in the year after Dubuffet’s 1966 Guggenheim exhibition dedicated to the series. At the time of Inspecteurs Sinoque et Dingue’s creation in early 1967, the series was both benefiting from this international art world recognition, and undergoing a decisive conceptual shift. Beginning in late 1966, the visual lexicon of l’écriture logologique (logological writing) emerged in L’Hourloupe works, as Dubuffet took on the concept of logos as his artistic challenge. Logos is a term for the divine reason or predominant logic that orders and forms the universe, as articulated in Ancient Greek and Early Christian philosophy. Dubuffet sought to “endow this word with the opposite of its usual meaning” as a shorthand for the structures and belief systems that order contemporary life. As he explained, logos “commonly designates the mental operation of name and classification… my intention is, on the contrary, to wipe out categories and turn back to an undifferentiated continuum.”ⁱⁱ

 

Such an “undifferentiated continuum” exists within Inspecteurs Sinoque et Dingue, as the articulation of the painted surface does not discriminate between figure and form. The inspectors are rendered in the same black outline as the space around them; they are built from the same squiggling shapes, the same ellipses, bent ovals, rounded trapezoids. Dubuffet finds both humor and liberation in this breakdown of pictorial and philosophical order; through Inspecteurs Sinoque et Dingue, he says, he “reveal[s] the arbitrary and specious character of the logos with which we are familiar.”ⁱⁱⁱ

 

“The aim of these works is, by breaking down the conventional logos, to set up or, rather, to suggest a new [logos], to reveal the arbitrary and specious character of the logos with which we are familiar, and the enduring possibility of reinterpreting the world and basing our thinking on a logos of a very different kind.”
—Jean Dubuffet

 

Logos-as-chaos, then, is a utopian prospect for Dubuffet, an opportunity to create the world anew. Dubuffet takes this task seriously in L’Hourloupe works, as evidenced by the abundance of drafts and early drawings that go into each seemingly spontaneous composition. The present work, dated Jan. 23, 1967, takes its inspectors from two separate drawings done earlier that month, Personnage (buste), Jan. 3, 1967, and Personnage (buste), Jan. 4, 1967. The twenty days between these initial drawings and the final composition reflect the length and intensity of Dubuffet’s process, as he defines and redefines the terms of his écriture logologique.

 

Dubuffet’s intentional approach to Inspecteurs Sinoque et Dingue, and his wholehearted commitment to chaos, disruption, and unconventionality made him an inspiration for some of the greatest artists of the late 20^th century. His unpretentious art brut sensibility, intuitive draftsmanship, and acute social consciousness resonated with younger artists, particularly those working in the context of graffiti and street art. The scrawling, iterative shapes of Inspecteurs Sinoque et Dingue anticipate the way in which graffiti can take over a city surface, as a utopic reclamation of space. As Oliver Shultz explained, “for Dubuffet, it was always about disruption. Disrupting the normal circuits of your ability to perceive the world around you.”^iv

 

 

ⁱ Jean Dubuffet, quoted in Agnes Husslein-Arco, et al., Jean Dubuffet: Trace of an Adventure, exh. cat., Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, 2003, p. 174.

ⁱⁱ Dubuffet, quoted in Jean Dubuffet and Mildred Glimcher, Jean Dubuffet: Towards an Alternative Reality, New York, 1987, p. 223.

ⁱⁱⁱ Ibid.

^iv Oliver Shultz, quoted in Isis Davis-Marks, “By Way of Jean Dubuffet,” Phillips, 2022, online.