JEAN DUBUFFET | Deux figures dans un paysage

Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York
Sidney Janis Gallery, New York
Maurice E. Culberg, Chicago
Private Collection
Jean Planque, Paris 
Galerie Mathias Fels, Paris (acquired from the above in 1960) 
Galerie Ariel, Paris (acquired from the above in 1960)
Galerie Beyeler, Basel (acquired from the above in 1965) 
Pace Gallery, New York  
James Shapiro, New York (acquired from the above in 1968) 
Acquavella Galleries, New York (acquired from the above in 1990) 
Christian Fayt Art Gallery, Knokke le Zoute (acquired from the above in 1990)
Christie's London, December 2, 1993, Lot 20
Stephen Hahn, New York and Santa Barbara (acquired from the above)
Thence by descent to the present owner 

New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, XX Century Masters, October - November 1954 
Minneapolis, The Walker Art Center; Boston, The Institute of Contemporary Art; San Francisco, The San Francisco Museum of Art; Cincinnati, The Cincinnati Art Museum and Contemporary Arts Center; Baltimore, The Baltimore Museum of Art; and Buffalo, The Albright Art Gallery, Expressionism 1900-1955, 1956, n.p., illustrated
Basel, Galerie Beyeler, Jean Dubuffet, February - April 1965, no. 17, illustrated
Helsinki, Ateneum; Turku, Turun Taidemuseo; and Tampere, Tampereen taidemuseo, Peinture contemporaine en France, September - December 1965, n.p., no. 27 (text)
Stockholm, Svensk-Franska Konstgalleriet, Jean Dubuffet: Malningar 1944-1959, February - March 1967, n.p., no. 8 (text)

Max Loreau, ed., Catalogue des travaux de Jean Dubuffet, Fascicule V: Paysages grotesques, Paris, 1965, p. 35, no. 49, illustrated
Max Loreau, Jean Dubuffet, Délits, Défortements, Lieux de Haut Jeu, Paris, 1971, p. 74, illustrated

 “Portraits and landscapes should resemble each other because they are more or less the same thing. I want portraits in which description makes use of the same mechanisms as those used in a landscape – here wrinkles, there ravines or paths; here a nose, there a tree; here a mouth and there a house” (Jean Dubuffet cited in Exh. Cat., Riehen/Basel, Foundation Beyeler, Jean Dubuffet: Metamorphoses of Landscape, 2016, p. 13).  With its raw and textured tactility, Jean Dubuffet’s Deux figures dans un paysage from 1949, immerses the viewer in a mystical, almost prehistoric realm of crudely etched symbols and ciphers. Thickly rendered in oil paint mixed with sand on burlap, the painting portrays two primitive figures in a flattened landscape populated by meandering pathways, butterflies, trees, earth and sky. The work comes from the French artist’s celebrated series of Paysages Grotesques, which he began in 1949 after the last of a succession of three influential expeditions to the Sahara desert. Following in the tradition of artists such as Eugène Delacroix, Henri Matisse and Eugène Fromentin, Dubuffet left France for Algeria in search of artistic inspiration, where the scorching North African sunlight, vast expanse of sandy desert, and  vibrant culture and nomadic nature of the Algerian tribespeople captivated his imagination. Seeking to capture the essence of his invigorating experiences in paint, Dubuffet began to carve, scratch and scrape his canvases, filling them with unconventional materials such as sand, tar or gravel, and accentuating their inherent two dimensionality through employing a linear syntax of reductive and simplified form. Esoteric and visceral, the resulting compositions are instilled with a universal and timeless allure that recalls the primality of ancient cave paintings. As Dubuffet would later reflect, “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 cited in Mildred Glimcher, Jean Dubuffet: Towards An Alternative Reality, New York 1987, p. 9)

Dubuffet was deeply affected by the shifting and transmutable lifestyle of the nomadic tribes he encountered in Algeria. He admired the ephemeral quality of their existence which differed so greatly to the constraints and conventions of Western civilization. In June 1948, enthused by their unfettered, ritualistic way of life, Dubuffet established La Compagnie de l’art brut in Paris, alongside his contemporaries Jean Paulhan, André Breton, Charles Ratton, Michel Tapié, and Henri-Pierre Roche. With Dubuffet at the helm, the artists of the Art Brut movement strove to break with the staid traditions of the past by embracing an unrefined, unpretentious and wholly instinctual pictorial language. As Dubuffet explained in a letter to Jacques Berne after his first trip to Algeria: “We came back from there absolutely cleansed of all the intoxications, really refreshed and renewed, as well as enriched in the ways of savoir-vivre.” (Jean Dubuffet cited in Hubert Damisch, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, vol. 2, Paris 1995, pp. 247-248) 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. In working with the medium of sand in Deux figures dans un paysage, Dubuffet imbues his painting with a tautological sense of the organic world, heightening his poetic quest for an untutored and liberated art form.  

The land and the earth hold great symbolic significance for Dubuffet. In his paintings, forms and figures frequently undergo a process of metamorphosis as they diffuse into one another: “Portraits and landscapes should resemble each other because they are more or less the same thing,” he stated of his artistic process in 1947; “I want portraits in which description makes use of the same mechanisms as those used in a landscape – here wrinkles, there ravines or paths; here a nose, there a tree; here a mouth and there a house.” (Jean Dubuffet cited in Exh. Cat., Riehen/Basel, Foundation Beyeler, Jean Dubuffet: Metamorphoses of Landscape, 2016, p. 13) Indeed, in the present work, people and place compellingly converge: the two statuesque figures reach the height of the tree tops; the branches and leaves morph into winged creatures; a butterfly sprouts from the palm of the right hand figure. Dubuffet was fascinated by the innate characteristics of sand during his voyage to the desert, and recalled how the footsteps of men, women, children and animals would be imprinted in its malleable surface, only to disperse and disappear over time, in a potent mirroring of the very cycle of life itself. “They are not preserved for a long time,” he recorded; “they are erased by other footprints, equally radiant, from other feet. All the soil of the oasis so trodden and stepped on, full of marks and signs, is like an immense notebook of drafts, of improvisations… in which one lives, submerges, dissolves, and sinks.” (Jean Dubuffet cited in: Exh. Cat., Madrid, La Fundación “La Caixa,” Jean Dubuffet: Del paisaje físico al paisaje mental, 1992, p. 82) With its sandy physicality and dreamlike forms, Deux figures dans un paysage beautifully encapsulates Dubuffet’s existential contemplations.