“The essential character of this projection is violence, as if the painter knew that it is not gently that one can make an object pass from the world of volume to that of the surface and reduce it to having only two dimensions. By such a violent blow, the object, by flattening, deforms, and the lost relief does not cease to be inscribed in the image, as one sees in crushed or rolled bodies and as is precisely indicated in the drawings of descriptive geometry. Painting thus with a hammer…or with a hydraulic press, Dubuffet absolutely distinguishes his works from representations by children or by primitives…”
Taking up the mantle of Cubism and “painting with a hammer,” Dubuffet pushed the possibilities of line and color in their most minimal forms to reinvent the formal still life in his signature Art Brut style. Lampe et balance II, painted in 1964, exemplifies Dubuffet’s unique vision of the still life composition in as radical a way as Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque had done in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Here Dubuffet uses blue, red and white lines—radiating, twirling and swirling over a prepared black surface—to build the bottle, scale and tabletop creating an entirely new image from a theoretically traditional composition.
Following the completion of Lampe et balance II, Dubuffet continued his focused still life subseries. In 1966, the continued series of abstracted objects were referred to as Ustensiles utopiques, or utopian utensils. A test.mes nt to the importance of this specific era of the l’hourloupe period, works from the series are held in the collects ions of the the Art Institute of Chicago, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and the Louisiana Museum of Art, Denmark. Like the Surrealists and the Cubists working before him, Dubuffet’s conflation of the banal with idealized abstract form, as evidenced in Lampe et balance II, reevaluated the paraphernalia of daily existence and reinvigorated the traditional still life through the lens of l’hourloupe.
In Dubuffet’s breakthrough Paris Circus series of 1961, his raucous, flamboyant cityscapes dissolved figure, ground and perspective into a singular, hieratic plane as in Le Commerce prospère (see fig. 2). First depicted in cellular, bird’s eye views with the artist’s signature naive figures hurrying among roughly architectonic blocks, Dubuffet’s Paris Circus tableaus rapidly transmuted into magmous suggestions of the Parisian streets they alluded to. This brief but momentous series and the artist’s resultant experimentations with perspectival shift precipitated the evolution of his l’hourloupe period in 1962 and the evolution of his most recognizable visual tropes for twelve years thereafter. With a doodle sketched aimlessly during a phone call in 1962, Dubuffet revealed the basic motifs from which l’hourloupe emerged: patchworked regions of stripes, amorphous delineations of space and a restricted color palette of blue, red and white. Dubuffet’s neologism hourloupe, invented by the artist to imply a wonderful object or a grotesque creature, recalls both the French verbs hurler and hululer—meaning to roar and to hoot respectively—as well as the word loup, the French noun for wolf. In keeping with Dubuffet’s instinct-driven creative fervor integral to the Art Brut aesthetic, the unruly, simplified shapes and lines of l’hourloupe recalled primitive visual forms and exalted them over academic methods and formal style. From the cacophonous color of the Paris Circuses to Dubuffet’s automatic doodles, the artist’s deconstruction in color, line and form inaugurated a pretense for the longest enduring series of his career.
RIGHT: Fig. 5 Georges Braque, Bouteille et poissons, circa 1910-12, Tate, London. Art © 2024 Georges Braque / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
From the onset of the l’hourloupe period, Dubuffet’s descriptions of space and form flattened and deviated noticeably from their frequent inclusion of and allusion to the human figure. As Dubuffet’s nebulous, tricolor forms proliferated from edge-to-edge in his canvases and gouaches through 1963, vague facial signifiers vanished among the graphic, biomorphic cells. Over the course of the following year, outlined silhouettes and assemblages resembling classic still lifes took shape. In 1964, chairs, typewriters, boats, beds and in the case of Lampe et balance II, a lamp and scale, could be discerned from Dubuffet’s two-dimensional realms of abstraction. Just as Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and many of the modernist masters of the first half of the twentieth century had done, Dubuffet configured traditional still lifes and dismantled them to make them his own. Inexorably indebted to Cézanne’s glances of passage—or the use of parallel lines to subvert the contours of two dimensional forms and traditional perspective—Dubuffet’s patchworked juxtapositions of solid, one-dimensional planes and fragmented regions of diagonal lines in seemingly haphazard orientations in Lampe et balance II creates the purest linear suggestion of a representational scene (see fig. 4). In the painted jigsaw of Dubuffet’s still life, the same principles of assemblage mobilized in Picasso’s 1912 Compotier et fruits, and in Georges Braques’ Bouteille et poissons are discernible (see figs. 3 and 5). Held in the same private collects ion for nearly twenty years, Lampe et balance II comes to auction for the first t.mes .
