Jean Dubuffet

Collection Jean Paulham, Paris (acquired directly from the artist)
Galerie Krugier, Geneva
Galerie Haas, Gstaad
Galerie Beyeler, Basel
Private Collection
Acquavella Contemporary Art, Inc., New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Max Loreau, ed., Catalogue des travaux de Jean Dubuffet, Fascicule II: Microbolus, Macadam et Cie, Paris, 1964, cat. no. 140, p. 93, illustrated

This work is in very good condition. Please refer to the following condition report prepared by Amann + EstabrookConservation Associates.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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"A painter's basic action is to besmear...to plunge his hands into brimming buckets or basins and then rub his palms and his fingers across the wall offered to him. He has to...impress upon it the most immediate traces of his mind, of the rhythms and impulses that drum through his arteries and course along his innervations."
Jean Dubuffet, 1945

Portrait d'homme au nœud de cravate papillon, 1946, crystallizes a critical moment in the genesis of Jean Dubuffet's remarkable artistic dialect and stands as a paragon within his oeuvre. Epitomizing the artist's fundamental ambition to animate and inject life into raw material, this wonderful portrait emerges out of an incredibly sculptural and variegated media. The sumptuous texture evokes ancient ruins and archaeological excavations, the art of children and the insane, and the haphazard aesthetics of street graffiti. By locating his character inside the kernel of this thick hautes pâte topography, the artist manifestly integrates subject and material. Sunken and incised into a faceted slab of pigment-laden plaster, Dubuffet's masterful yet rudimentary signifiers conjure a captivating personality, beaming an unforgettable grin and sporting a distinctive papillon bow tie.

Consumed by the need to rid visual art of its affected heroics and cultural inhibitions, at this decisive time Dubuffet was abandoning traditions of three-dimensional perspective, volumetric illusion and prescribed color relationships in search of a new kind of art. His vocation to revolutionize these outmoded preconceptions was highly controversial, however, and his second major exhibition, Mirobolus Macadam & Cie/ Hautes Pâtes at the Galerie Drouin, caused a scandal in the Parisian art world at exactly the time of this work. Indeed, nowhere is his re-invention of the expressive possibilities of the matière more apparent than the present painting, which broadcasts all the insatiable joy and energy of his interpretation of the visual world around him and anticipates the entire course of his remarkable career.