![](data:image/svg+xml;utf8,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" version="1.1" height="1600px" width="2400px"></svg>)
20th Century Art in 20 Unforgettable Works: Jean Dubuffet’s ‘Gambade à la rose’
A seminal work of Art Brut, Dubuffet’s “Gambade à la rose” challenges idealized standards of feminine beauty.
Emily Fisher Landau was, simply put, one of the greatest collectors and patrons of the twentieth century. Her legacy is set apart for her deep and longstanding involvement with leading institutions, in particular the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as her profound engagement with the art and artists of her time and her unerring instinct as a collector at the highest level. Fisher Landau assembled one of the greatest collections of modern and contemporary art – over 100 works of which are coming to auction at Sotheby’s on 8–9 November.
Join us over the next 20 days leading up to the Emily Fisher Landau Evening Auction on 8 November as our specialists spotlight 20 key works from the Collection, celebrating their impact on twentieth-century art. Here, Ashkan Baghestani reflects on the significance of Jean Dubuffet’s Gambade à la rose as part of our series The Emily Fisher Landau Collection: Twentieth Century Art in Twenty Unforgettable Works.
Jean Dubuffet’s ‘Gambade à la rose’
An early and quintessential manifestation of Jean Dubuffet’s inimitable aesthetic revolution, Gambade à la rose from 1950 demonstrates the raw and textured tactility that characterizes his most important work. Painted in 1950, the same period during which he developed his now iconic “Corps de Dames” series, these works are celebrated for their revolutionary approach to the female form.
Click the hotspots below to learn more.
- The Rose Invokes Idealized Feminine Beauty
Dubuffet’s female figures sit alongside Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Willem de Kooning’s “Woman” paintings as some of the most important renditions of the female figure in the 20th century. These radically different interpretations were the artists’ response to the classical tradition which had dominated art for centuries.
The titular rose, with its blooming head and prominent thorns, acts as a visual metaphor for the challenges of idealized standards of feminine beauty.
Willem de Kooning, Two Women with Still Life, 1952. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Art © 2023 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York - The Faces Evoke Ancient Figures
Like ancient hieroglyphs carved into coarse stone, Dubuffet’s crudely etched monochrome figures seem to float in an undefined landscape, their anti-aesthetic forms swelling in protest against traditional standards of artistry and convention.
Brassaï, Sans titre, from the series Graffiti [Masques et visages], 1945-55, printed circa 1960. Sold Sotheby’s Paris, 7 June 2017. © Estate Brassaï – RMN-Grand Palais - His “Raw” Forms Gave Rise to the Term “Art Brut”
Dubuffet pursued the idea that art should be a direct reflection of emotion and instincts, without being sullied by the distorting effects of what he called art culturel – academic training and historical conventions. Instead, he turned away from the traditions of the past and looked to the instinctual, unrefined creative expressions of the unaffected, such as graffiti, work by prisoners, children, of the mentally ill and so-called primitive art.
Influenced by Hans Brinzhorn’s book Artistry of the Mentally Ill, Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut, meaning “raw” or “outsider” art, to classify a mode of creation that functioned outside the aesthetic norm and celebrated, instead, the quotidian and the commonplace.
Venus of Willendorf, 24,000–22,000 BCE. Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna - The Scored Paint Furthers the Emotional Effect
Dubuffet’s radically depicted women are further emphasized by his treatment of pigment: the scored, scraped and carved surface, thickly rendered in viscous oil paint, accentuates the raw, distorted lines of the flattened figures. Like the work of his peer Alberto Giacommetti, Dubuffet used the texture of his surfaces to add an emotional or psychological effect to his figures.
