JEAN DUBUFFET | Pommettes Rouges

Galerie Daniel Cordier, Frankfurt
Private Collection, Europe (acquired from the above in 1959)
Thence by descent to the present owner

Max Loreau, Catalogue des travaux de Jean Dubuffet, fascicule XIII: Célébrations du sol I, lieux cursifs, texturologies, topographies (1957-1958), Lausanne 1969, p. 132, no. 193, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the red tonalities are slightly more pink in the original and the illustration fails to fully convey the textured nature of the painted surface. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
"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. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
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."

Comprising a wonderfully textured surface inimitable to Jean Dubuffet’s late 1950s output, Pommettes Rouges is an exquisite example of the artist’s Art Brut ideology that marks a key moment in the career of this post-war master. Turning his back on urban life, Dubuffet eschewed the Parisian metropolis during the mid-1950s in favour of the simple life of rural France. He settled in Vence in 1955 and with this focussed his attention on agricultural life, homing in on the elemental stuff of existence as a means to achieve a more primal symbiosis with the natural world. The body of work that followed put forth a vision of raw landscape populated by figures and animals, or devoid of both, articulated in his archetypally naïf or ‘rough’ manner. For these works Dubuffet’s incorporation of non-normative materials into his pigments, such as gravel and sand, engendered a corpus of densely impastoed ‘topographies’ of heightened natural veracity. Including the present painting, the works produced during this period comprise the most rebellious, innovative, and revolutionary of his entire production; examples of which today reside in the most prestigious of museum collections worldwide. The four red-cheeked and happy figures that inhabit Pommettes Rouges appear as a jovial band of brothers at one within the flat perspectiveless expanse of raw earth that contains them. Compounding Dubuffet’s style of execution, the smiling countenances and bright blue eyes of these youthful individuals conjure an idyllic past, before the arrival of a mechanised industrial age and the onset of war. This painting is bittersweet: imbued with nostalgia, it is replete with reminiscence for a bygone era and a simpler time. Although punctuated by apple-like bursts of red on the figures’ cheeks, the predominant monochromatic palette of this painting undoubtedly conjures a winter scene. The speckling of white, black and pale earthy pigments set the seasonal tone of this painting and herein call to mind Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s canonical genre scene Hunters in the Snow (1565). Aligned with Breughel’s painting, which portrays peasant-life during the winter months, Dubuffet’s scene of figures in the snow is similarly provincial, revelling in the simplicity of the countryside in which humanity and nature share harmonic equilibrium. Indeed, as redolent in the organic nature of Dubuffet’s use and application of paint, the present work teems with the artist’s enthusiasm for the primal substance of the earth: the soil.

Dubuffet’s relocation away from Paris was spurred by a desire to focus on the most unpretentious and unassuming subject matter for his paintings; an impetus that celebrated the quotidian and somewhat mundane aspects of rural life. Conceived as ‘forgotten landscapes’ or a view of the natural world that had been ignored or disparaged, Dubuffet’s work between 1955 and 1959 embodies a sequence of distinct, though interconnected and overlapping, series focussed on a distinctly unheroic and unmagisterial depiction of ‘the land’. Using various strategies and materials Dubuffet created abstract collage works that incorporated organic plant matter (Elements Botaniques), compositions that utilised synthetic materials such as metal foil (Matériologies), and paintings of entirely flat and nebulous pictorial detail (Texturologies). Familiar to all of these works was Dubuffet’s disavowal of the grand landscape genre, instead choosing to focus on the matter beneath his feet. Together, these works have been collectively defined as a ‘celebration of the soil’ and portray all-consuming Jackson Pollock-esque patches of ground as though viewed from above. Having distanced himself from the urban metropolis, Dubuffet focused his energies on this simple embrace of nature and for him the soil was emblematic of the most primal and pure forms of earthly being. As the artist wrote in 1959: “A roadway free of any unevenness or peculiarity, a dirty floor, a bare and dusty terrain, that no one would ever dream of looking – at least deliberately – (and much less in painting) – are reaches of intoxication and jubilation for me” (Jean Dubuffet cited in: Mildred Glimcher and Jean Dubuffet, Jean Dubuffet: Towards an Alternate Reality, New York 1987, p. 167). Beyond this however, soil provided Dubuffet with an aesthetic model that dissipated traditional divisions between form and formlessness, object and space.

Of the works created in 1958, Pommettes Rouges stands out for its strong figurative composition. Painted on 1^st April 1958 amidst Dubuffet’s focus on all-out abstraction, Pommettes Rouges appears in the artist’s catalogue raisonné sandwiched between major iterations of the Texturologies. Nonetheless, the flattened perspective, almost monochromatic palette, and delicate layering-up of paint, is entirely in keeping with the abstract planar compositions of this boundless and pictorially inchoate series. Akin to the Texturologies this painting teems with matter and sparkles with natural verve; its ground could just as easily represent an infinite galaxy or nebula as a snow covered field in rural France. Incised and embedded into this matter and situated under a shallow skyline, the poignant reddened-cheeked individuals thus pin-point the very heart of Dubuffet’s truly radical, ingenious, and lifelong interrogation of the relationship between figure and ground.