“Dubuffet was a self-proclaimed iconoclast, consciously looking for ways of breaking the mould.”
Artwork: © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2021
Executed just two years after the liberation of France and debuted at Dubuffet’s legendary 1946 exhibition Mirobolus, Macadam & Cie, Hautes Pâtes de Jean Dubuffet at Galerie René Drouin in Paris, La cavalière au diamant (The Dancing Partner with Diamonds) is a test.mes nt to the artist’s radical art brut style, and his enduring protest against conventional standards of beauty. Dedicated to fellow artist René Guiette – a figure central to the Parisian intelligentsia of the 1940s – the present work demonstrates the extraordinary range of techniques and media employed by Dubuffet at a pivotal, early moment in his career. Dealer René Drouin’s 1946 show was only Dubuffet’s second solo exhibition, but one that cemented his reputation at the forefront of the cultural scene in flourishing post-war Paris. Having remained in the same private European collects ion for over seventy years, La cavalière au diamant has been included in some of the artist’s most groundbreaking, early exhibitions, such as Jean Dubuffet: 1942-1960 at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris in 1960, and The Work of Jean Dubuffet at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1962, which then travelled later that year to the Art Institute of Chicago and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. A test.mes nt to the success and enduring value of the Mirobolus, Macadam & Cie paintings, eleven works from the series reside in prestigious museum collects ions: Archétypes, executed in May 1945 and the second iteration in the series, is held in the collects ion of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, along with Miss Choléra (January 1946), and perhaps one of the most recognisable works of the series, Volonté de puissance (January 1946). Other iterations are held in the permanent collects ions of the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Fondation Dubuffet, Paris, Fondation Gandur pour l’Art, Geneva, and Musée Rolin, Autun. Illuminating a dancing, perhaps newly engaged, couple, La cavalière au diamant underscores the simple hopes and joys of post-war life, and the intimate, every-day moments that were all but impossible during the turbulent years of the Second World War. Encapsulating the distinctive styles of Informel, art brut, and art autre dominant in Paris during the 1940s and prevalent within Dubuffet’s wider oeuvre – and indeed that of Jean Fautrier and Wols – La cavalière au diamant is a radical, painterly triumph.
Image: © PVDE / Bridgeman Images
The present work belongs to Dubuffet’s celebrated Mirobolus, Macadam & Cie series, which he began in April 1945. Comprised of 48 paintings, this striking group of works debuted at Drouin’s gallery at Place Vendôme in May 1946 to simultaneous derision and acclaim. Critics were provoked and disturbed, calling Dubuffet a “buffoon, charlatan”, while there were further cries of ‘cacisme’, ‘peinture a la merde’ and ‘peinture en excrements’ (J. Texcier, 1946: Exh. Cat., London, Tate, Paris Post War: Art and Existentialism 1945-55, 1993, p. 33). Yet the show was widely popular among collects ors, and every painting sold within a matter of days. In the words of Peter Selz, curator and director of Dubuffet’s acclaimed 1962 MoMA show, “His second exhibition [in France] in 1946 was a scandal among the critics, a success among collects ors who bought everything” (Peter Selz, ‘The Work of Jean Dubuffet’, The Museum of Modern Art, Press Release, 1962 (accessed online)). Signaling the significance of Drouin’s Mirobolus, Macadam & Cie exhibition, Michel Tapié – influential neo-dadaist writer and pioneer of un art autre (an other art) – penned the preface of the catalogue, which began with an epilogue: ‘One must have chaos within’. These words of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had particular significance in a moment of existentialist fervor across European cities after the war, and Dubuffet’s Mirobolus paintings are charged with the chaotic, gestural energy integral to this onerous moment in twentieth-century history.
The Informel movement signified a shift towards formlessness, abstraction, and a crucial emphasis on the artist’s chosen materials and media. Dubuffet described this in ‘Notes for the Well-Read’, a letter written to a circle of his closest friends – writers and philosophers – during the summer of 1945 while he was preoccupied with the Mirobolus series. He discussed the active and expressive role of materials, a role that was critical in the development of the theory and practice of art brut: “He argued that art should be the product of a competitive interaction between the artist, his tools and his medium, and that the finished work should retain the marks of that struggle. He favoured difficult, intractable materials because they heighten the adventure for the artist and introduce the element of chance” (F. Morris cited in: Exh. Cat., London, Tate, Paris Post War: Art and Existentialism 1945-55, 1993, p. 79). Dubuffet himself explained the crucial materiality of his work: “The essential gesture of the painter is to cover a surface… to plunge his hands into full buckets or bowls, and with his palms and fingers to putty over the wall surface with his clay, his pastes, to knead it body to body, to leave as imprints the most immediate traces of his thought, the rhythms and impulses that beat in his arteries and run along his nerves” (Jean Dubuffet cited: Exh. Cat., London, Tate, Paris Post War: Art and Existentialism 1945-55, 1993, p. 33).
(right) Exhibition Catalogue cover, Mirobolus Macadam and Cie, Galerie René Drouin, Paris, 1946, Image: © Archives Fondation Dubuffet / DACS, 2021.
The Mirobolus paintings encompass brutish compositions and a hastened, gestural application of media, such as sand, pebbles, glass, straw, plaster, asphalt, tar and lead. La cavalière au diamant is a crudely caricatured portrait in Dubuffet’s haute pâte composite medium, a radical alternative to the conventional use of oil paint: “Dubuffet’s development of the haute pâte as medium was part of his personal search for practices appropriate to a new era, with which to replace moribund traditions in Replica Handbags , traditions conditioned by what he saw as misguided but still prevailing notions of beauty and purpose in art” (Ibid., p. 79). The present work exemplifies a naïvely rendered couple, their anatomically disproportionate bodies intertwined in dance and fit tightly within the frame of the composition. Each caricature-like figure has the appearance of being compressed and wedged into the picture plane, a compositional element inherent to Dubuffet’s graphic vernacular. Set against a muted background, this lavish, dancing couple suggests the post-war economic boom in Europe, and indeed the Parisian bourgeoisie’s return to normalcy and leisure after the war. Dubuffet signifies the couple’s status via the ornate luxury items they wear: dress shoes, high-heels, a large pendant, a bow tie, crimson red lipstick, and most magnificently, a diamond ring and earrings which are conveyed by the use of glittering shards of mirror and vibrant gold pigment. Here is a couple captured in an intimate moment of joy and celebration; La cavalière au diamant is thus an image of euphoric exuberance, of elated hopes for a fruitful future, and the newly found joy of everyday life.
Dubuffet’s La cavalière au diamant: Selected Exhibition History
A significant work within the Mirobolus series, La cavalière au diamant exemplifies the aesthetic language of the Informel, in which traditional conceptions of beauty are addressed, and indeed invalidated. As Selz noted, “These figures of 1945 to 1946 are shocking only if approached with preconceived notions of classical ‘beauty.’ Ugliness and beauty do not exist for Dubuffet as he becomes fascinated with the relation of nature (his material) to man (the emerging image)” (P. Selz, ‘Jean Dubuffet: The Earlier Work’, in: Exh. Cat., New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Jean Dubuffet, 1962, p. 30). Executed at a moment of renewed hope and aspiration in Paris, this exuberant, early portrait exemplifies Dubuffet’s investigation into quotidian life, in turn affirming the artist’s unfailingly optimistic commitment to capturing the uplifting resolve of the human spirit at the close of the Second World War.