Peter Doig

Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York
Sale: Phillips de Pury & Luxembourg, New York, Contemporary Art, 18 May 2000, Lot 6
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is brighter and more vibrant in the original. There are more orange tones to the browns throughout the trees, and the greens are less opaque, particularly the lower band of paint across the bottom edge. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is very minor, stable craquelure in the yellow areas of the building and along the extreme bottom edge towards the right there are several scattered media accretions. No restoration is apparent under ultra-violet light.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

"When I went to see the Le Corbusier building for the first time, I never dreamed that I would end up painting it.  I went for a walk in the woods on one visit, and as I was walking back I suddenly saw the building anew.  I had no desire to paint it on its own, but seeing it through the trees, that is when I found it striking".  The artist cited in: Adrian Searle, Kitty Scott and Catherine Grenier, Peter Doig, London and New York 2007, p. 16

"Often I am trying to create a 'numbness'. I am trying to create something that is questionable, something that is difficult, if not impossible, to put into words"

The artist cited in: Adrian Searle, Kitty Scott and Catherine Grenier, Peter Doig, London and New York 2007, p. 124

The opening this month of a retrospective exhibition of Peter Doig at Tate, London which then tours major venues in Europe, is the latest significant development in the career of one of the most accomplished and studied painters of our time. He first gained recognition on the international scene with his nomination for the Turner Prize in 1994. That same year, he exhibited an extraordinary group of paintings from the series Concrete Cabin at Victoria Miro Gallery in London which became iconic within his oeuvre for their painterly treatment of the nature of the landscape against the hard edges of contemporary urbanity. The present work is from the same series and from the sheer scale and lovingly constructed painterly surface, one immediately senses the wonder of the first time that Peter Doig stumbled across the development in Briey-en-Forêt: "When I drove across France for the first time, I drove through graveyard after graveyard after graveyard from the First World War. . . Whereas other buildings had represented a family or maybe a person somehow, this building seemed to represent thousands of people" (The artist cited in: Adrian Searle, Kitty Scott and Catherine Grenier, Peter Doig, London and New York 2007, p. 16). Built in 1957, the Unité d'Habitation development in Briey, France was dominated by Le Corbusier's Cité Radieuse, a utopian, self sufficient urban project built in the middle of the forest. At the time this was seen as the height of modernity and the pillar of progress towards a new way of living. Emerging from the surrounding woodland, the subject of a utopian city set in perfect nature would appear to be classic Doig subject matter, amplifying as it does the stark contrasts between the traditions of the landscape and strong lines and minimalist forms of contemporary urbanity.

Dramatically composed across a monumental canvas, this painting is exemplary within Doig's repertoire of portentous landscapes. The glimpse of Le Corbusier's Unité de l'Habitation and its peeking through the trees constitutes the most immediately striking juxtaposition in a work replete with contrasts. Nature's dark, earthy palette is set against the bright primary colours of the Unité while the irregular rhythms and silhouettes of the trees punctuate the building's sun-bleached concrete and geometric uniformity. In this way Doig invests seemingly simple subject matter with loaded metaphor: architecture versus nature; order versus chaos; construction versus decay. The cycles of seasonal transformation are pitted against Modernism's paean to communal living in a clash between the transience of deciduous decomposition and the solid permanence of Le Corbusier's masterpiece.

As ever with Doig, there are references to art history woven into his tapestry of paint. Every inch of this composition is painstakingly constructed from the underlying surface of the Unité d'Habitation which, in keeping with Le Corbusier, is very much Modernist in manner, recalling the likes of Mondrian and van Doesberg, whilst over the top the trees which reach from the summit to the base of the canvas recall the landscapes of Gustav Klimt. Two very different painterly treatments, each treated with equal technical virtuosity and touch. The geometric sensitivity in the lines of the building contrasting beautifully with the dense abstraction and drips which populate the trees and foliage.

The horizon line in this picture is very low, struck just above the bottom quarter at a child-like eye-level. The viewer is positioned close to the ground as if hiding amidst the shadowy thicket, dwarfed by towering trees and engulfed by foliage. This implied concealment makes the scene heavy with suspense and drama. The spectator is cited both as fugitive and voyeur, simultaneously hiding from and spying on the sunlit scene beyond their camouflaged corner. Additionally the progression left to right from dark to light evokes narrative and furthers the expectation of imminent revelation. Doig has often referenced how films have been important to his work, most famously with his 'Canoe' series in which he quoted a still from the film Friday the 13th. In its suggestion of dramatic revelation, the atmospheric flavour of Concrete Cabin is unmistakably filmic. Its composition is rooted in the aesthetics of the snapshot and film, and it taps directly into a shared, cinematically-informed consciousness. Painting from photography using the vocabulary of film marks this Doig work out as seminally Post Modern.

Doig has discussed how his work deals "with peripheral or marginal sites, places where the urban world meets the natural world. Where the urban elements almost become, literally, abstract devices" and how there "are a lot of 'voids' in the paintings" (ibid., p. 139). Doig's portrait of Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation functions beyond the representation of a building: Concrete Cabin is filled with an emotional content as the 'abstract devices' of interlocking shapes generate a poetic emptiness. This is highly characteristic of Doig's canon and he has explained that "Often I am trying to create a 'numbness'. I am trying to create something that is questionable, something that is difficult, if not impossible, to put into words" (ibid., p. 124).

The palpable sense of emptiness and absence relates to the specific story of how the Concrete Cabin series came into being. There is no human presence in Concrete Cabin, yet Adrian Searle has described how buildings in Doig's oeuvre can themselves function as vehicles of human emotion: "As well as representing places where people can be found, they also substitute for the figure itself - as signs of human ingenuity, taste, a certain mentality. They invite speculation about the unseen, the lives going on inside their walls, the dramas and secrets they conceal" (ibid., p. 79). The rich history of the Unité de l'Habitation defines its character, and its hidden secrets are fundamental to Doig's fixation. The fact that in the 1970s it was abandoned and left virtually destitute means it becomes a powerful parallel to the hopeless abandonment of life in 1916. Doig's depiction of Modernism's icon of communal living is thus not only masterfully executed but also a profound and Post Modern meditation on life and death. Through the physical layering of surface upon surface, endemic to Doig's thoroughly worked canvases, the finished painting is replete with vestiges of memory and experience, and his search for 'numbness' is locked into those strata.