Issue link: https://read.uberflip.com/i/1545173
Personnage et paysage, 1962 Signed and dated 'JD 62' lower left Gouache on paper laid down on canvas 18 ⅞ x 16 ⅛ in, 48 x 41 cm Provenance Galerie Daniel Cordier, Paris (acquired in 1962) Galleria del Naviglio, Milan (acquired in 1963-4) J Krugier Gallery, New York Dennis Hotz Fine Art, Johannesburg Private Collection (acquired from the above) Exhibitions Rome, Marlborough Galleria d'Arte, Dubuffet, March – April 1963, no.67 Venice, Palazzo Grassi, Visione colore: mostra internazionale d'arte contemporanea, July – October 1963, illus. Milan, Galleria del Naviglio, Jean Dubuffet, March – April 1964 Literature M. Loreau, Jean Dubuffet: Catalogue des travaux de Jean Dubuffet, fascicule XIX, Paris Circus, Paris, 1989, no. 351, p. 163, illus. Personnage et paysage belongs to Dubuffet's distinctive 1962 series Personnages des Légendes, part of his highly important Paris Circus cycle, which includes some of his greatest and most influential works. Having just returned to Paris after seven years in the countryside, this series is a homage to the city and its people. Dubuffet described how "The presence in them of the painter now is constant, even exaggerated. They are full of personages, and this time their role is played with spirit." In Personnage et paysage, Dubuffet distils the scene, focusing on a singular figure in the midst of the bustling city. It is a painting brimming with life, quintessential of the art brut he championed. Having rejected conventional practice after only six months at the Académie Julian, Dubuffet was drawn to art brut, his term for the art of the insane, children and "primitives". He believed it offered "truer" modes of expression than classical art. In 1962, the year he created Personnage et paysage, MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago and LACMA jointly held a major retrospective of his work. It was also in July of that year that he began his famous Hourloupe series, which evolved from a chance doodle whilst on the telephone. The figure in Personnage et paysage is a direct precursor to the Hourloupe, with its interlocking jigsaw of forms, though it steps away from that series' limited palette of white, red and blue, instead embracing a vivacious assembly of tones. Dubuffet believed this style – a tangle of lines filled with unmixed colour – evoked the way images appear in the mind. Personnage et paysage was first exhibited at Galerie Daniel Cordier in 1962 and shown the following year at Palazzo Grassi, Venice. Jean Dubuffet 1901-1985 38