Période : XXe siècle

Ecole : Française

1970

Collage

54 x 27

Monogrammé et daté, en bas à droite, J. D. 70

Arbre is one of a playful series of cut-out drawings of trees, monuments and other stele-like vertical structures that Jean Dubuffet made repeatedly in December 1970 in his ‘L’Hourloupe’ style. Begun in 1963 as a series of semi-conscious doodles while talking on the telephone, Dubuffet’s meandering ‘L’Hourloupe’ style of drawing was an ever-expanding graphic medium that came to dominate his creative output for longer than any other of his many shifts in style lasting from 1962 to 1974.

 

As this work illustrates, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, Dubuffet was heavily engaged in extending the playful possibilities of the ‘L’Hourloupe’ style into all areas of life and also into the realm of three dimensions. This expansion of ‘L’Hourloupe’ was ultimately to culminate in 1973 with the creation of an entire ‘L’Hourloupe’ environment in his theatrical extravaganza Coucou Bazar.

 

At the time that he created Arbre, Dubuffet was also engaged in a project for the creation of a vast, outdoor, ‘L’Hourloupe’ sculpture for the Rockefeller Center in New York. Completed in 1972, this sculpture was ultimately to take the form of four life-size ‘L’Hourloupe’ trees whose ambiguous meandering graphism would, the artist hoped, contrast directly with the austere logic and strict geometry of its architectural surroundings.  

 

Arbre is one of series of playful, vertical ‘L’Hourloupe’ assemblages that Dubuffet drew, then cut out and laid down on paper in a manner that deliberately approximates sculpture and ancient, vertical standing monuments. It is a work whose lyrical, building-block-like collation of black and white graphic forms, hovering on the edge of recognizability, is intentionally aimed at confusing the supposedly separate fields of abstraction and figuration in order to convey the idea of an entire, alternate, ‘L’Hourloupe’ nature. This whimsical and alternate ‘L’Hourloupe’ world was one that Dubuffet hoped would, by its very existence, throw into question our conventionally accepted ideas about what can be called real and what not.

 

As the artist explained at the inauguration of his L’Hourloupe tree sculptures for the Rockefeller Center in 1972, ‘the works originating in [the ‘L’Hourloupe’] cycle are in the form of sinuous graphisms responding with immediacy to spontaneous and, so to speak, uncontrolled impulses of the hand which traces them. Within these graphisms, imprecise, fugitive, and ambiguous figures take shape. Their movement sets off in the observer’s mind a hyperactivation of the visionary faculty. In these interlacings all kinds of objects form and dissolve as their eyes scan the surface, linking intimately the transitory and the permanent, the real and the fallacious. The result, (at least, this is the way it works for me) is an awareness of the illusory character of the world which we think of as real, and to which we give the name of the real world. These graphisms, with their constantly shifting references, have the virtue, (to me, I should add again) of challenging the legitimacy of what we habitually accept as reality. This reality is, in truth, only one option collectively adopted, to interpret the world around us – one option among an infinity of equally legitimate possibilities…Thus you can see a philosophic humour presides over the works of the ‘L’Hourloupe’ cycle – introducing a doubt about the true materiality of the everyday world. It too may only be a mental construct.’[1]

[1] J. Dubuffet, ‘Remarks on the Unveiling of the Group of Four Trees,’ New York, October 24, 1972, in M. Rowell and J. Dubuffet, Jean Dubuffet A Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, The Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1973, pp. 35-36.

 

 

Bibliographie :

M. Loreau, Catalogue des travaux de Jean Dubuffet. Dessins 1969/1972, Paris, 1975, cat. n. 127, illustré    

Provenance :

Collection privée, Paris, depuis 1971