“It is not in fact painted sculpture itself, but rather a monumentally erected painting.”
—Jean Dubuffet 

Created in 1972 and evolving from the artist’s highly celebrated L’Hourloupe cycle, Buste aux envols is one of the Statuaire du vêtement costumes produced by the artist as part of his animated painting or ‘spectacle’ Coucou Bazar, bringing the wildly imaginative and immersive world of Jean Dubuffet’s graphic universe into striking, three-dimensional reality. Executed in the same year as Dubuffet’s monumental public sculpture Group of Four Trees, installed in Manhattan’s financial district and commissioned by American banker and philanthropist David Rockefeller, and the year before his premiere of Coucou Bazar at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the present work exemplifies the artist’s desire to extend his ‘unleashed graphisms’ beyond the two-dimensional picture plane and into public space.ⁱ 

 

L'Hourloupe and Coucou Bazar

 

Characterised by a frenetic, wandering lines set against a crisp white ground and animated by bold sections of primary colour, Dubuffet first embarked on the L’Hourloupe cycle in 1962 in what would prove to be his longest-running body of work. Recalling Surrealist experiments in automatic drawing, the distinctive visual qualities of the series arose by chance, their origins found in the absent-minded doodles, Dubuffet found himself making in a four-colour ballpoint pen while on the telephone. Starting off as drawings, these ‘fluid shapes and figures, which he embellished with blue and red stripes and then cut out and placed against a black backdrop […] became the gateway for an all-consuming series – featuring paintings, sculptures, architectural environments and performances – that would occupy him for more than twelve years, making it his longest continuous period of work.’ⁱⁱ  

 

Rejecting the restraints of representational painting, the interlocking forms move well beyond the limits of their own compositions to connect with one another in an expansive, all-encompassing Gesamtkunstwerk. As the artist explained, ‘The works connected with the Hourloupe cycle are linked closely to one another in my mind: each of them is an element intended for insertion into a whole. That whole aims to be the depiction of a world unlike ours, a world parallel to ours, if you like; and this world bears the name l’Hourloupe.”ⁱⁱⁱ 

 

The desire to move beyond modes of expression proscribed by Western art historical canons had long formed a major focus of Dubuffet’s practice and his pioneering of Art Brut – work by self-taught or otherwise socially marginalised artists whose seemingly crude renderings and restless experimentation more genuinely captured the raw texture of real life. In his war on official ‘high culture’ Dubuffet challenged the received notion that art could only be made within the limitations of the academy, aligning with the anti-bourgeois aims and intentions of the international Dada movement and their rejection of so-called ‘civilised values’ in the wake of the horrors of the First World War. Tellingly, while Dadaists produced a wide variety of work across a range of mediums, the roots of the movement were in performance, concentrated in Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire under the guidance of Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings following its founding in 1916. Iconoclastic, irreverent and virulently anti-war, anti-bourgeois, and anti-nationalistic, performances typically involved cacophonous, sensorial sound poems delivered by artists dressed in costumes constructed of cardboard and other assemblage elements that combined a 19^th century tradition of tableaux vivants with non-western performative modes. Rejecting the rational, these soirées both reflected the chaos of the era and radically opened up new expressive modes of artmaking, embracing the immediacy and affect of performance to challenge and destabilise established artistic and social codes. 

 

Engaging with the fundamental irrationality of Dada in extending his drawings into three-dimensional form, Dubuffet was not simply experimenting with sculptural form, but seeking out ways to endow his work with ‘a body, that is, corporealised, objectivated painting.’^iv In this sense Buste aux envols, like the other constructions related to the L’Hourloupe series and Coucou Bazar performance, becomes a living object, challenging boundaries between painting, sculpture, and performance – and between art and life itself -  ‘in order to remind us that the distinction between the so-called real and the imaginary is both arbitrary and false.’^v 

 

Working in his Vincennes studio, Dubuffet used cut out drawings from the L’Hourloupe series, blowing them up to a human scale and before projecting them onto polyurethane foam boards reinforced with polyester and fibreglass, cut with hot wire and finished in his reduced palette of red, white, and blue. In total, Dubuffet produced one hundred and seventy five individual free-standing Practibles and forty three more complex Statuaire du vêtement costumes some of which featured in the debut performance of Coucou Bazar, designed to coincide with the opening of the artist’s major retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1973. Recalling the Dada soirées at the Cabaret Voltaire, the ‘spectacle’ not only involved these sculptural objects – some designed to be worn or brought to life via electrical mechanisms – but included a discordant musical score by avant-garde composer İlhan Mimaroğlu that Dubuffet had specified should be ‘brutally loud and with abrupt interruptions of silence.’^vi Testament to the inventive and radical spirit of Dubuffet’s work, Buste aux envols brings the vibrant world of the L’Hourloupe and Coucou Bazar into striking, three-dimensional life.    

 

Collector’s Digest 

 

• With recent major retrospectives held at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel in 2016 and the Barbican Centre, London in 2021, Jean Dubuffet’s work continues to attract significant critical attention and remains foundational to art-historical discussions of Post-War and contemporary art.

 

• Examples of works from this series reside in major institutions around the world including the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen. Following its first performance at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1973 and the Galeries Nationales de Grand Palais in Paris the following year, the ‘spectacle’ has also been staged in Turin in 1978, and more recently at Musée des Arts décoratif, Paris in 2013, to mark the 40^th anniversary of its debut. In 2021, Pace staged a capsule performance of the work in London.

 

• Developing the concept of Art Brut in the 1940s, Dubuffet turned to the production of those operating outside of the narrow definitions of the Beaux Arts tradition including work made by prisoners, children, so-called ‘primitive’ artists, and the mentally ill in his search for a richer, more expressive model for artmaking. Radically decentring certain dominant art-historical narratives, Dubuffet pioneered more contemporary approaches to both the production and discussion of painting in the West.

 

ⁱ Jean Dubuffet, quoted in Marina Harrison and Lucy  D. Rosenfeld, Artwalks in New York: Delightful Discoveries of Public Art and Gardens in Manhattan, Brookly, the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island, New York, 2004, p. 6. 

ⁱⁱ Charlotte Flint, ‘L’Hourloupe’, in Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty, exh. cat., The Barbican, London, 2021, p. 197. 

ⁱⁱⁱ Jean Dubuffet, quoted in Jean Dubuffet: Metamorphoses of Landscape, exh. cat., Foundation Beyeler, 2016, p. 166. 

^iv Jean Dubuffet quoted in, Mildred Glimcher, ‘Jean Dubuffet: Towards an Alternative Reality’, Letter to Arnold Glimcher, 1969, New York, 1987, p. 16.

^v Charlotte Flint, ‘L’Hourloupe’, in Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty, exh. cat., The Barbican, London, 2021, p. 197. 

^vi Charlotte Flint, ‘Coucou Bazar’, in Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty, exh. cat., The Barbican, London, 2021, p. 207.