Botanique au petit spectacle recalls the luscious flora and fauna of the South of France with kaleidoscopic vivacity and extraordinary visual complexity. Belonging to Jean Dubuffet's Tableaux d'assemblages, created between November 1955 and December 1956 in Vence, Botanique au petit spectacle embodies the artist's career-long interest in the metamorphic qualities of landscape. An important body of work, in which Dubuffet explored the concept of pre-painted canvas collage, the Tableaux d'assemblages allowed the artist to experiment with newfound textures and depths in the picture plane, while excavating the mythological properties of the earth.

That this work is formerly from the collects ion of E.J. Power adds to its importance immensely: Power was one of Britain’s leading collects ors of the post-war period. He almost single-handedly brought Abstract Expressionism to Britain’s shores, and was undoubtedly Dubuffet’s most important British patron. He also played a crucial part in the instigation and curation of Dubuffet’s landmark retrospective at the Tate in 1966, in which the present work featured. His significance in the history of British collects ing was best adjudged by Nicholas Serota, the former director of the Tate galleries on the occasion of the 1997 Tate exhibition, Brancusi to Beuys: Works from the Ted Power collects ion – an extensive survey which honoured Power's legacy: “during the 1950s and 1960s, the main period of his collects ing, he was quite simply Britain’s foremost collects or of contemporary art” (N. Serota cited in: Exh. Cat., London, Tate, Gallery, Brancusi To Beuys: Works from the Ted Power collects ion, 1997, p. 7). Power went on to acquire more than 80 works by Dubuffet in five years, and eventually placed a large quantity of them in prominent museum collects ions, including three, which are now owned by the Tate. Over the years, the relationship between Power and Dubuffet developed. They became more than mere collects or and patron and engaged in lengthy correspondence discussing the nature and relative merits of art and artists. It can be judged that, at the t.mes , Power had one of the most intimate understandings of Dubuffet's output in Britain.

Bedecked with jewel-like emerald tones, the central band of collage in Botanique au petit spectacle gives the effect of a stained glass mosaic in its shimmering translucency. Appropriating the colour spectrum of a rural landscape, the overall mineral palette reflects Dubuffet’s fascination with the natural world. The rectangular pieces of speckled and pebbled canvas are arranged like puzzle pieces, emulating the variegation of an archetypal countryside through their layering and accumulation. Dubuffet’s experimentation with assemblage began in the summer of 1953, when, following a trip to the Savoie with Pierre Bettencourt, the artist began to produce small collages from butterfly wings. The artist continued his interest in non-art materials the subsequent year, using raw coal and sponges to make a small group of figurative sculptures. Dubuffet’s methods of chance and spontaneity reached a climax in the years of 1955 and 1956, when he began preparing lengths of canvas with strongly dense patterns of stains, imprints, and smears: after cutting these canvases into an inventory of random shapes and sizes, Dubuffet would assemble various pieces into landscapes and figures. The artist described his attachment to assemblage: “I can affirm that that technique, for anyone willing to consider it as at least a factor in improvisation and experimentation, as a means of sparking off the imagination… is in all events extremely stimulating and fertile… Moreover, this new technique of assemblage gave me, as soon as I started on it, the impression of lending itself perfectly to treating the subjects that had been so much in my mind… the roadbed, the grasses and little plants pushing through along the sides, the foot of a wall…” (J. Dubuffet cited in: M. Glimcher, Jean Dubuffet: Towards an Alternative Reality, New York 1987, p. 12). Furthermore, in its planar compositional division, the present work and works of this period, echo the formal economy of his Abstract Expressionist counterparts in the US. Akin to their reduction of painting to the chromatic and formal elements, Dubuffet flattened and compressed pictorial content into bands of colour.

In 1955, Dubuffet left Paris for a house in the town of Vence. Deeply affected by the horrific trauma and ravage caused by WWII, the artist turned his back on urban life in order to reestablish contact with nature. Motivated by the environment, Dubuffet’s paintings executed in this period took on the seductive appeal of the graphic textures created from naturally occurring phenomena found in the soil and topography of the landscape. His series of Tableaux d’assemblages was prompted by his rural environment, as well as his desire to transfer the technique of his earlier butterfly collages to painting. By cutting the canvas directly, he negated the need for pencil drawing and allowed the scissors to dictate his compositions, often solely by intuition. As Raphaël Bouvier explains of the Tableaux d'assemblages: “The anthropomorphic structure of the landscape and earth… may be read as an allusion to the myth according to which land and the landscape were created by the dismemberment of a monster’s body. In dissecting nature, the artist reveals not only an anatomical and geological perception of landscape, but also a mythological view of its essence. An underlying search for the archaic and the primeval” (R. Bouvier, in: Exh. Cat., Basel, Fondation Beyeler, Jean Dubuffet: Metamorphoses of Landscape, 2016, p. 17). With its geological strata of collage, the present work beautifully exemplifies the artist’s wholehearted appreciation for his surroundings, as well as the formal and technical liberation that defined his iconic Tableaux d'assemblages.