“My desire is to make the site evoked by the picture something phantasmagoric, and that can be achieved only by jumbling together more or less veristic elements with interventions of arbitrary character aiming at unreality. I want my street to be crazy, my broad avenues, shops and buildings to join in a crazy dance, and that is why I deform and denature their contours and colors...”
Jean Dubuffet’s deliberate rejection of cultural pretensions and unique Art Brut aesthetic have brought him acclaim as one of the most celebrated artists of the Twentieth Century. Indeed, his candid critique of occidental cultural institutions and fervent dismissal of conventional artistic values have earned him critically lauded retrospectives at major museums such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum New York, the Museum of Art, Dallas, and the Walker Art Center in Milwaukee, among numerous others. The present work, Rue Tournique Bourlique, executed at the very peak of his artistic prowess, is brimming with a vibrancy that wholly exemplifies the compositional dynamism, painterly skill, and imaginative enthusiasm that define Jean Dubuffet’s highly esteemed L’Hourloupe cycle.
In 1955 Dubuffet left Paris, abandoning a war-scarred and melancholy city to take a house in Vence in the South of France. During this period, and exemplified by the Texturologies and Materiologies series, Dubuffet shunned any human presence from his work and turned to nature as the primary source of his investigations. When he returned to the French capital in 1961 however, there was a change in Dubuffet’s work that marked a complete departure from his explorations of the tactile qualities of organic material in the remoteness of rural life in Vence. In a revitalized Paris, Dubuffet found a city completely different to the one he had left; optimism and cosmopolitan bustle had replaced the gloom and despondency that had formerly prevailed under German occupation and in the post-war years. This new vibrant atmosphere was intoxicating for Dubuffet and had an immediate, explosive effect on his work, culminating in the exuberant Paris Circus pictures of 1961-1962. The bustling streets, busy restaurants, window displays, and advertising boards of city life came to dominate his paintings. Where he had celebrated life on a minute scale in the countryside, he now celebrated humanity in all is vast expanse, transforming its energetic spirit into the subject of his art.
The L’Hourloupe cycle started in the summer of 1962 immediately following the Paris Circus series, and was so rich in invention and creativity that it was Dubuffet’s preoccupation for the following twelve years. The early paintings of L’Hourloupe, such as Rue Tournique Bourlique of 1963, engaged much of the same subject matter as the Paris Circus street scenes, but represented a shift in Dubuffet’s aesthetic iconography; with increasing simplification, elements and experiences of the real world are eventually transformed into ciphers of the artist’s imagining. The stylistic mode increasingly relies on a linear pattern of structured cells, all presented frontally with no consideration for size or relative distance among the various elements. The later pictures of the Paris Circus also employed less specific references to the Paris locales, paving the way for the transition to the L’Hourloupe in which the focus is ultimately on the individual personnages. The isolated, solitary figures in Rue Tournique Bourlique, figures that lack individual identity as they represent the mass of humanity, mark the beginning of this transformation, in which there are no longer any discernable references to shops or buildings. The figures in the paintings are more heavily outlined and the pigment has less of the texture that is so apparent in the earlier Paris Circus paintings – both spatially and texturally the image has been flattened.
At the beginning of his career, Dubuffet favored an earthy tonality, but beginning with the Paris Circus, Dubuffet rendered his subjects with a spontaneous, explosive, and broad palette. In the present work we see saturated fields of blues, reds, and whites against a neutral black ground; it was this basic palette that was to become prevalent in the L’Hourloupe from late 1963 onward. In Rue Tournique Bourlique, its simplified palette – with carefully placed and energizing highlights of yellow, pink and orange – lends the abstracted figuration a clearer contour that elevates the caricature-like figures to an imposing presence within the composition. The agitated line of Rue Tournique Bourlique indicates a spontaneity and directness in keeping with the movement of Art Brut that is so commonly associated with Dubuffet. The flattened perspectival plane and the compressed distances are additional compositional devices, all redolent of naïve children's art and most importantly the raw vision of psychological art that so vitally informed Dubuffet's oeuvre.
Rue Tournique Bourlique broadcasts “not only a gripping visual program but also the heightened effect of painterly impulses and autonomous values.” (Andreas Franzke cited in Exh. Cat., Salzburg, Museum de Moderne, Jean Dubuffet, 2004, p. 162) The immediate force and vigor of execution in this painting demonstrates Dubuffet's intimate psychological response to the city and its inhabitants that stood before him, which he transmuted into a unique realm inspired by his ultimate appetite for the naïve and unreal. Although still placed within the iconographic context of the Paris Circus, Rue Tournique Bourlique and ultimately the L’Hourloupe series is a plunge into fantasy, into a phantom parallel universe – that of the artist’s own, extraordinary imagination.
