“I think portraits and landscapes should resemble each other because they are more or less the same thing.”
—Jean Dubuffet

Painted in November 1950, Tête de héros is a pivotal work in Jean Dubuffet’s Intermèdes series, anticipating the raw materiality and deconstructed figuration that would define his subsequent Corps de dames series and exemplifying his radical reinvention of painting. As one of the leading figures in Art Brut, Dubuffet sought to dismantle the conventions of Western artistic tradition, privileging raw textures, anti-academic techniques, and a deeply visceral engagement with the medium. With its thick impasto, earthy palette, and primal rendering of the human face, Tête de héros epitomises Dubuffet’s exploration of the grotesque and the elemental, existing at the threshold between abstraction and figuration. Notably, paintings from the Intermèdes can be found in the collections of major institutions worldwide, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts Lausanne, and the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, underscoring their significance in Dubuffet’s artistic trajectory.
 

First exhibited at Acquavella Galleries in New York in 2014 as part of Dubuffet / Barceló—a two-artist exhibition exploring the thematic and material affinities between the French postwar painter and Miquel Barceló through their portraits and landscapes—Tête de héros was a central work in the show, even serving as the lead image in The New York Times review.ⁱ This recognition speaks to the enduring power of Dubuffet’s vision, which continues to challenge and inspire contemporary artists. His radical approach to material and figuration laid the groundwork for movements such as Art Informel and Neo-Expressionism, influencing figures ranging from Anselm Kiefer to Jean-Michel Basquiat.

 

Intermèdes and Corps de Dames: Parallel Explorations of the Figure

 

Produced between January 1950 and February 1951, Dubuffet’s Intermèdes cycle, to which Tête de héros belongs, gave rise to his Corps de dames paintings—created between April 1950 and February 1951 and among the most emblematic works of his career. While Corps de Dames exaggerated the female form to the point of topographical distortion, the Intermèdes focused on the head and face, exploring how identity could be conveyed through texture, abstraction, and reduction. A subseries of mostly male portraits, the Intermèdes provided a counterpoint to the charged representations of the female nude in Corps de Dames, shifting from bodies as landscapes to heads as self-contained forms of expression.

 

Despite their differences, both series reflect Dubuffet’s radical rejection of conventional representation. As the figures in Corps de dames gradually dissolve, their heads morphing into their surrounding terrain, the Intermèdes emerges as an alternative—a gallery of faces untethered from bodies, where survival, physiognomy, and landscape blur into a single, unstable form. Dubuffet’s close friend and editor of his Catalogue Raisonné, Max Loreau, observed that the figures in Paysages grotesques, a precursor to both series, ‘continue to live here; quite simply, their limbs have faded, and they are nothing more than faces.’ⁱⁱ The present painting encapsulates this transition, distilling the human form to its most essential element: a face in which raw materiality supersedes anatomical definition and body and terrain collapse into each other.

“The essential gesture of the painter is to cover a surface… to plunge his hands into full buckets or bowls, and with his palms and fingers to putty over the wall surface with his clay, his pastes, to knead it body to body, to leave as imprints the most immediate traces of his thought, the rhythms and impulses that beat in his arteries and run along his nerves.”
—Jean Dubuffet

Materiality and Surface: Painting as an Object

 

In Tête de héros, Dubuffet eschews traditional notions of representation in favor of an assertive material presence. The heavily worked Masonite surface scored, scratched, and layered with thick passages of oil paint mixed with sand, transforms the painting into a tactile experience, where the image seems to emerge organically from the substrate itself. The artist’s signature use of an impasto technique, wherein the paint is not merely applied but seemingly sculpted, evokes textured surfaces reminiscent of dilapidated city walls, pitted roads, and natural crusts of earth and rock, further reinforcing Dubuffet’s belief that painting should be closer to geological formations than illusionistic representation.

 

This raw materiality aligns Tête de héros with Dubuffet’s overarching artistic philosophy. As he explained, ‘It amused me (and I believe this propensity to be almost constant in my paintings) to juxtapose […] the most subjective and the most objective, the metaphysical and the grotesquely trivial.”ⁱⁱⁱ In Tête de héros, this tension plays out in the way Dubuffet reduces the figure to its rawest state, stripping away conventional notions of portraiture in favor of an image that oscillates between human presence and geological form. The painting’s rugged surface and earthen tones—ochres, umbers, and charred blacks—exexplify the sedimented quality of his sand and gravel paintings, reinforcing his interest in material experimentation and the dissolution of boundaries between flesh, earth, and abstraction.

 

The Distorted Face: Heroism Redefined

 

Translating to ‘Head of a Hero’, the title, Tête de héros, carries an ironic weight within Dubuffet’s oeuvre. Rather than depicting a figure of classical heroism, the painting presents a disfigured, eroded visage that resists conventional ideals of beauty or nobility. The face appears both monumental and deteriorated, its eye reduced to a crude black mark, its mouth agape as if caught between a silent scream and an inarticulate cry. This ambiguity of expression, coupled with the deconstruction of recognizable features, places Tête de héros within the broader existential anxieties of postwar Europe.

 

Dubuffet’s heroes are not the statuesque figures of antiquity but rather crude, primordial beings—closer to cave paintings or outsider art than to the refined portraiture of the academic tradition. As art historian Margit Rowell observed, Dubuffet’s art ‘is the opposite of heroic. It is conceived in terms of the vision of the ordinary man, it aspires to the immediacy of the spoken word, and it rejects all art historical models.’^iv His subjects, she continues, ‘are not noble; furthermore, they are conspicuously limited’, drawn from three recurring themes: the human figure, the landscape, and the mundane object.^v Tête de héros embodies this ethos, standing as a challenge to the Western tradition of heroic portraiture and offering instead an image that is vulnerable, fractured, and deeply human.

“I prefer to avoid anything circumstantial in the subjects I paint; I would rather paint things generally. If I paint a country road, I want it to be an archetype of a country road, a synthesis of all the country roads in the world, and if I paint a man's profile I am satisfied if my painting evokes an image of a human face, without accidental and unnecessary particular characteristics.”
—Jean Dubuffet.

Collector’s Digest

 

• Dubuffet, pivotal to the post-war art scene, is acclaimed for pioneering the Art Brut movement. His work often disrupted the polished norms of art, favouring earthy expressions that tapped into more fundamental human experiences. Dubuffet's legacy continues to challenge and inspire the aesthetic boundaries of modern art.
   
• Jean Dubuffet's Intermèdes series, developed between January 1950 and February 1951, represents a significant phase in his artistic exploration. With Tête de héros as a highlight, this series reimagines portraiture through coarse textures and abstract forms, capturing the essence of human expression.
   
• Jean Dubuffet’s transformative Intermèdes series are featured in some of the world's most respected institutions. Notable holdings at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Moderna Museet, and the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts showcase the enduring relevance and impact of these pieces on the global art stage.

 

ⁱ Karen Rosenberg, 'Dubuffet/Barceló', The New York Times, 11 September 2014, online.

ⁱⁱ Max Loreau, Catalogue des travaux de Jean Dubuffet, Fascicule VI: Corps de dames, Paris, 1987, p. 12. Translated from the original French.

ⁱⁱⁱ Jean Dubuffet, quoted in Georges Limbour, L'Art Brut de Jean Dubuffet: Tableau bon levain à vous de cuire la pate, New York, 1953, n.p.

^iv Margit Rowell, 'Jean Dubuffet: An Art on the Margins of Culture', Jean Dubuffet: A Retrospective, New York, 1973, p. 23.

^v Margit Rowell, 'Jean Dubuffet: An Art on the Margins of Culture', Jean Dubuffet: A Retrospective, New York, 1973, p. 23.