Jean Dubuffet

Galerie Daniel Cordier, Paris
Stephen Hahn Gallery, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art (On long-term loan: 1995 - 2012)

Max Loreau, Catalogue des Travaux de Jean Dubuffet, fasc XIX: Paris Circus, Paris 1989, p. 192, no. 424, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the colours are brighter and more vibrant in the original. There are artist's pinholes to all 4 corners. The sheet is attached to the mount on the top edge with unadhesive paper. Condition: This work is in very good condition.
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Chérubin Ouistiti is one of the most enthralling and enchanting works from Dubuffet's most highly esteemed and consequential series, Paris Circus and from 1995 to early 2012 was on long-term loan to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Executed in 1962, it is inspired by the frenetic heartbeat of urban commotion that he witnessed on returning to Paris after residing in the countryside in Vence since 1955.

 

When Dubuffet left Paris, he abandoned a war-scarred and melancholy city. Upon returning in 1961, he found a metropolis transformed: optimism and cosmopolitan bustle had replaced the gloom and despondency that had formerly prevailed. This vibrant atmosphere was intoxicating for Dubuffet and had an immediate, explosive effect on his work, culminating in the exuberant Paris Circus pictures. Where formerly - for instance in his Texturologies - nature had been the source of his investigations, now city life itself dominated his paintings. Where previously he had celebrated life on a minute scale, he now celebrated humanity on a grand scale. Inspired by the city's teeming boulevards and animated dwellers, Dubuffet transformed their energetic spirit into the subject of his art. There is something quintessentially Parisian in the crowds of people who populate this broad panorama of city life: the picture hums with movement, with the joie-de-vivre of a burgeoning era of prosperity that has usurped the post-war era of rationing and shortages. Painted in kaleidoscopic reds, blues, greens and yellows, the pedestrians each tell a tale - each is involved in his or her own arcane and hieratic act.

 

The bustling panoramas of the Paris Circus resemble the Vues de Paris and the subway pictures that Dubuffet painted in the early 1940s, although the texture, space and deployment of figures have become more complex. Artists throughout history have been captivated by the Parisian cityscape. The Hungarian photographer Brassaï, often referred to as "the eye of Paris", was also entranced by the bustling streets and bourgeois society.  In his 1930s night photographs of the city, his camera angle was at a high vantage point to achieve the effect of flattening the perspective. Similarly, in Dubuffet's Chérubin Ouistiti, the result of the view point is a jumbled panoramic view of the city in which people, cars and lettering make up a flat pattern of forms perfectly distilling the chaos of the scene. This flattened perspectival plane, compressed distance and unnerving bird's-eye viewpoint which ruthlessly crops a sign and a gentleman's nose at the right edge, are all compositional devices redolent of naïve children's art and most importantly the raw vision of psychotic art that so vitally informed Dubuffet's oeuvre. Categorically opposed to 'cultivated' art taught in schools and museums, Dubuffet denounced the selective character of official culture. First among a group of post-war artists to dismiss repressive convention, Dubuffet nurtured the concept of a spontaneous art that rejected any effect of harmony or beauty in a bid to break free of tradition.

 

Firmly believing that styles and schools hamper rather than train our artistic understanding of the world, here Dubuffet tapped into the unrefined vitality that is lost through teaching and discipline. His early, pre-War works tended to be influenced by artists like Suzanne Valadon, but he managed to "unteach" himself everything that he had learnt and in so doing to rediscover a potent vision of the world. In Chérubin Ouistiti, he translated this vision onto paper. The heads of the individuals appear as bubbles, disproportionate and child-like; each wide open face conversely a closed and concealed world in itself. Dubuffet's interest in sound and music, which he especially developed over the next two years, intrudes into Chérubin Ouistiti - the sounds of the traffic and engines that bustle along the top are almost palpable. When examining Dubuffet's career and the Paris Circus pictures specifically, one can draw clear comparisons to Jean-Michel Basquiat, who 20 years later would amply demonstrate his gifts as the 1980s art world's enfant terrible. In Basquiat's paintings we see a similar naïveté in style incorporating emblematic symbols from his personal lexicon of imagery such as the crown, modes of transportation, heroism and the street. For both artists, layers of different meanings and contexts co-exist on the same pictorial plane. A mélange of concerns weaves itself together, each idea or notion informing (and deconstructing) the next.  The relationship between word and image can also be addressed as both artists punctuate the painted plane with language. 

 

The inscriptions in the present work satirise the street signs, shop fronts and advertisements of the new economy and mimics circus design. Each shop's sign boldly titles a figure standing in the doorway, as if presenting a feature act on the fairgrounds: the bearded lady, the two-hundred-year-old man. Dubuffet's choices are more abstract but equally playful: Le Cage à Puces (The Cage of Tiddlywinks), À la débacle (Unto collapse) and - titling the present work - Chérubin Ouistiti (Cherub Monkey - "ouistiti" being a type of small monkey, and the word used in France to incite subjects to smile for a photograph). Under these headlines, the figures loom large over the pedestrians, suggesting a phantasmagorically inflated and brightly lit spectacle designed for their viewing pleasure. In a typical conflation of official and outsider culture, the relationship of the figures to text also recalls Dubuffet's interest in early fifteenth-century woodcuts in which pictures and didactic text are combined in a single print, a tradition that continued in popular twentieth-century imagery with the comic-strip. 

 

The sheer density of life in this work is emphasized by the rough density of contrasting layers and colours of paint. When looking at Chérubin Ouistiti, the viewer's eyes scatter across the surface, retrieving and attempting to absorb the concoction of images and test our process of memory and seeing. Like a tapestry of urbanity, Dubuffet's figures are woven together sharing no relative size or stylistic consideration, recreating the various scenes along a Parisian boulevard.  With no central focus to the composition, we are forced to explore and re-explore once and again the stories.