“Perhaps it was the time I spent in the deserts of White Africa that sharpened my taste […] for the little, the almost nothing, and, especially, in my art, for the landscapes where one finds only the formless.”
—Jean Dubuffet

A pivotal work within Jean Dubuffet’s early oeuvre, Arabe au désert, 1948 marks a decisive moment when the artist's practice shifted toward raw materiality and a bold departure from European artistic conventions. Painted shortly after his second trip to the Algerian Sahara, this oil on canvas is one of only eighteen works Dubuffet produced during a concentrated burst of creativity in Paris between May and June of 1948.ⁱ Of these, only twelve directly reflect his experiences in the North African wilderness, while the remaining six belong to a sub-series of portraits titled Grandes têtes. The rarity of Arabe au désert is underscored by the fact that paintings from this exclusive group of Saharan oils are held in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne and the Staattiche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe in Germany. Moreover, the painting stands apart for its exceptional provenance: it has remained in private ownership since it was acquired directly from Dubuffet by Édouard Bret, the brother of the artist’s first wife, Paulette Bret. Beyond his familial connection, Édouard was the director of the Dubuffet family’s wine and spirits business, where the artist worked before fully committing to his art practice in the 1940s. Since Bret’s passing in 1982, the painting has remained within the family collection, untouched by public exhibition. Having never been exhibited publicly and held privately for over seventy years, Arabe au désert offers a rare and compelling glimpse into a transformative period in Dubuffet’s career, when his artistic philosophy evolved in response to the austere landscapes and timeless culture of the desert.

 

Arabe au désert forms part of Dubuffet’s broader cycle of Sahara-inspired works, collectively known as Roses d’Allah, Clowns du Désert (‘Sons of Allah, Clowns of Islam’), produced between his first visit to Algeria in February 1947 and his final trip in March 1949. The evocative title, conceived by French Surrealist poet Georges Limbour for a proposed exhibition at Galerie R. Drouin around 1953 that never took place, captures Dubuffet’s fascination with the elemental forces of the desert and the figurative visual language of its Bedouin inhabitants.ⁱⁱ This cycle, also includes a range of works created in situ—including drawings and gouaches—is represented in prestigious institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago and The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., highlighting the enduring significance of this period within Dubuffet’s oeuvre.

The Sahara as a Catalyst for Transformation

 

Dubuffet’s fascination with the Sahara began in 1947, driven by a need to escape the hardships of post-war Paris, where a severe coal shortage had made winter conditions nearly unbearable. Together with his second wife, Emilie ‘Lili’ Carlu, Dubuffet traveled to the dunes of Algeria in search of warmth and respite, but the journey quickly evolved into a transformative artistic pilgrimage. The artist immersed himself in Bedouin culture, living among the nomadic tribes for several months in relative isolation, learning Arabic, and adapting to the customs of desert life. For Dubuffet, the oases of El Goléa, Beni-Abbes, and Timimoun offered ‘a bath of simplicity.’ⁱⁱⁱ Writing to Jacques Berne, he described how he returned from his excursion ‘absolutely cleansed of all the intoxications, really refreshed and renewed, as well as enriched in the ways of savoir-vivre.’^iv

 

Unlike his predecessors—Eugène Delacroix, Henri Matisse, and Auguste Renoir—who had also spent time in the Maghreb region and approached their novel environs through a romanticised and exotic lens, Dubuffet was driven by a desire to strip away the constructed narratives of Orientalism. Instead, he sought to experience the raw, unmediated reality of the desert and its people. The barren, uncompromising landscape of the Sahara offered Dubuffet an escape from the stifling traditions of Western art, which he viewed as burdened by affected heroics and cultural inhibitions. The simplicity and austerity of the unmarked sands, in conjunction with his imposed solitude and deliberate immersion, inspired a new visual language, one that rejected the traditional artistic values of perspective, realism, and idealized beauty. As Dubuffet himself noted, ‘Perhaps it was the time I spent in the deserts of White Africa that sharpened my taste […] for the little, the almost nothing, and especially, in my art, for the landscapes where one finds only the formless.’^v

“Dubuffet's observation of life in the remoteness of the desert, a life that follows its own rhythm of everyday activities and routines, was given expression in pictures… Observing the real-life situations, [he] entered into their spirit with sympathetic appreciation and then transposed them into his own personal idiom.”
—Andreas Franzke

Materiality and Technique

 

Arabe au désert is a masterful example of Dubuffet’s early experimentation with texture, a hallmark of his mature work. The painting’s surface is dominated by thick impasto, into which the artist used a palette knife to incise a rugged, tactile topography—a negative relief outlining a man and a smaller figure, possibly a child, in a sunbaked landscape of sand and palm trees. This technique embodies Dubuffet’s broader artistic philosophy of challenging the conventional hierarchy between surface and form. Rather than creating an illusionistic space with depth and perspective, he emphasizes the material presence of the paint itself, allowing the figures to appear both embedded in and emerging from the landscape. Indeed, the composition’s tactility serves as a physical testament to the artist’s assertion that ‘Mud, waste and dirt, which are man's companion throughout his life, should they not be his most treasured possession and is it not a service to him to remind him of their beauty?’^vi

 

The painting’s earthy palette—featuring shades of ochre, umber, and rich sandy browns—further enhances its connection to the desert. Dubuffet employs colour not to depict reality but to evoke the arid, desolate essence of the Sahara. The scene possesses the spontaneity of a quick sketch made on-site, while the high horizon line, pushed almost to the top edge of the canvas, compresses the pictorial space and creates a sense of boundless, ever-shifting vastness. Rejecting European traditions, Dubuffet draws instead on non-Western and pre-modern artistic practices. Consistent with his Art Brut sensibilities, the flattened perspective and abstracted, almost primitive figuration within Arabe au désert evoke his interest in the pictographic style of children’s art while recalling ancient art forms—such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, cave paintings, and Roman frescoes—as well as contemporary influences like the spontaneous aesthetics and ephemeral nature of graffiti.

“Man writes on the sand. This suits me well; effacement doesn’t bother me. When the tide goes out, I begin again.”
—Jean Dubuffet

Critic Peter Schjeldahl captured this raw quality in Dubuffet’s desert works, noting how the artist ‘wrecks the conventions of exoticism by subjecting them to eruptions of the primal, levelling energy that informs all his art."^vii This ‘levelling energy’ is palpable in the present composition, where the landscape and figures are treated with equal emphasis, blurring the boundaries between the natural world and human presence. The painting’s textured surface and gestural marks evoke the unpredictability of the desert, offering a physical and sensory reflection of Dubuffet’s conceptual shift away from Western aesthetic norms. Anticipating the nearly abstract Texturologie and Matériologie series of the 1950s—where Dubuffet would push the expressive potential of surface and texture to new heights—Arabe au désert stands as a powerful early expression of these ideas, deeply rooted in the artist’s firsthand experiences of untouched wilderness.

 

Collector’s Digest

 

• Painted shortly after his second trip to the Algerian Sahara, Arabe au désert is an important early work by Art Brut proponent Jean Dubuffet. Highly prized, it is one of only eighteen works Dubuffet produced between May and June of 1948, of which only twelve reflect on his time in North Africa. Testament to their significance, paintings from this exclusive group of Saharan oils are held in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne and the Staattiche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe in Germany
   

• Unseen in public for decades, Arabe au desert is presented with exceptional provenance, remaining in private ownership since it was acquired directly from Dubuffet by Édouard Bret, the brother of the artist’s first wife, Paulette Bret. Édouard had been the director of the Dubuffet family’s wine and spirits business, where the artist worked before fully committing to his art practice in the 1940s.
   

• Having never been exhibited publicly and held privately for over seventy years, Arabe au désert offers a rare and compelling glimpse into a transformative period in Dubuffet’s career, when his artistic philosophy evolved in response to the austere landscapes and timeless culture of the desert.

 

 

ⁱ Max Loreau, ed., Catalogue des travaux de Jean Dubuffet, fascicule IV: Roses d’Allah, Clowns du Désert (1947-1949), Lausanne, 1967, pp. 7-11.

ⁱⁱ Max Loreau, ed., Catalogue des travaux de Jean Dubuffet, fascicule IV: Roses d’Allah, Clowns du Désert (1947-1949), Lausanne, 1967, pp. 7-11.

ⁱⁱⁱ Jean Dubuffet, quoted in Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, vol. 2, Paris 1995, pp. 247-248

^iv Jean Dubuffet, quoted in Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, vol. 2, Paris 1995, pp. 247-248

^v Jean Dubuffet, quoted in Mildred Glimcher, Jean Dubuffet: Towards an Alternative Reality, New York, 1987, p. 9.

^vi Jean Dubuffet, quoted in Max Loreau, Catalogue des travaux de Jean Dubuffet. Fascicule II: Mirobolus, Macadam et Cie, Paris, 1966, p. 13.

^vii Peter Schjeldahl, “1942 and After: jean Dubuffet in His Century,” Jean Dubuffet 1943-1963: paintings, sculptures, assemblages: an exhibition, Washington, D.C., 1993, p. 17.