尚·杜布菲

Georges Roger, Europe (a gift from the artist)

World House Galleries, New York

Palais Galliera, Paris, 21 June 1966, Lot 220

Frank Perls, Beverly Hills

Donald Morris Gallery, Detroit

Galerie Maeght, New York

Christie's, New York, 13 May 1980, Lot 79

Waddington Galleries, London

Private Collection, Europe (acquired from the above in 1982)

Thence by descent to the present owner 

New York, World House Galleries, Recent Acquisitions, November - December 1959, n.p., no. 8, illustrated

New York, World House Galleries, J. Dubuffet, October - November 1960, n.p., no. 1, illustrated in colour 

Detroit, Donald Morris Gallery, Dubuffet: Paintings, Drawings, Gouaches, 1946-1966, March 1974, n.p., no. 1, illustrated

Martigny, Fondation Pierre Gianadda, Dubuffet, March - June 1993, p. 29, no. 5, illustrated in colour

Neuss, Langen Foundation; Munich, Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung; and Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz, Museum Lothar Fischer, Jean Dubuffet: ein Leben im Laufschritt, February 2009 - January 2010, p. 8, no. 1, illustrated in colour 

E. C. Goossen, 'The Texturology of Jean Dubuffet', Art International, Vol. 4, No. 8, 25 October 1960, p. 34, illustrated in colour

Max Loreau, Catalogue des Travaux de Jean Dubuffet, fasc. I: Marionettes de la Ville et de la Campagne, Paris 1966, p. 112, no. 205, illustrated

Hugo Schmale, Marianne Schuller and Günther Ortmann, Wissen/Nichtwissen, Munich 2009, illustrated in colour on the front cover

Colour:The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate.Condition:Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
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Strewn with striations of vivid green, dominated by fields of hot peachy orange and delineated by lines of cool waxy blue, Personnage au Bicorne is a dramatic work of immense chromatic impact. It was executed at the very beginning of Jean Dubuffet’s artistic career, only a year after he left the family wine business to pursue a career in art. In its evocation of everyday Parisian life as much as in the obvious influence it takes from outsider-art categories like children’s art and the art of the mentally ill, it should be considered a primary exposition of the themes that would not only dominate Dubuffet’s 1940s facture, but also reverberate throughout the entirety of his career.

It would be easy to ascribe a mood of patriotic vitriol to the present work; to say that, through such prominent inclusion of the bicorn hat, the artist was making deferential reference to Napoléon Bonaparte, of whom that sartorial detail is such an immediately redolent motif. 1943 would have been a particularly poignant moment to make such an artistic statement, as Dubuffet’s beloved Paris was still quashed under the horrific spell of Nazi occupation. However, such a grandiose message of historic significance seems directly at odds with the central tenets of Dubuffet’s oeuvre. He was most interested in capturing Parisian daily life in a simple yet beautiful way. His art was an homage to the every man: “It is the man in the street that I’m after, whom I’m closest to, with whom I want to make friends and enter into confidence and conviviance, and he is the one I want to please and enchant by means of my work” (Jean Dubuffet, Prospectus aux amateurs de tout genre, Paris 1946, p. 17).

Moreover, this painting seems stylistically opposed to a traditional history painting or portrait of a notable public figure. Across the entirety of the composition, Dubuffet rejects a noble mode of depiction and shows utter disregard for those conventional painterly values of three-dimensional perspective, volumetric illusion, foreshortening, and modelling. His figure is distorted, cropped and close, pressed up against the background which itself has devolved into a swirling field of bright green. The holistic effect of the work is much more redolent of a child’s painting than grandiose nationalistic propaganda; not in the sense of any particular inaccuracy or inability, but rather in the manner in which it finds solutions to representational challenges that completely circumvent traditional artistic techniques.

However, even more than from children’s art, Jean Dubuffet took influence from the art of the mentally ill. He had discovered this little-known tranche of production as early as 1923, in Dr Hans Prinzhorn’s seminal tome on the topic – Bildnerei der Geisteskranken. Prinzhorn contended that artworks executed by asylum inmates were worthy of serious aesthetic consideration; that they manifested a universal creative urge which had been stifled by cultural inhibitions and sensibilities. His writings were instrumental for Dubuffet, and in the years surrounding the present work’s execution, he invented the now famous collective term for an ideology of outsider-art: Art Brut. Comprising not only the art of the insane, but also the work of children, prisoners, primitive art, and graffiti, Art Brut championed an approach to art marking untrammelled by convention. As wonderfully announced by the present work, the raw expression and a non-hierarchical attitude to subject matter embodied by Art Brut, was the perfect foil for Jean Dubuffet’s own desire to capture the mores and tropes of daily life. In this manner, Dubuffet’s praxis served as inspiration to countless artists: in the present work, the swirling background certainly leads us to think of Cy Twombly’s painterly style, while the bold figure, executed with bravura representational force, exemplifies the manner in which this artist served as one of the principle precedents for Jean-Michel Basquiat’s paradigm shifting oeuvre.