What Do You See? The Collection of Sidney Rothberg, Part I

We gratefully acknowledge the Fondation Dubuffet for their assistance in cataloguing this work.Lots 59 and 60 are representative of two distinct periods and themes in the career of the French Art Brut master extraordinaire, Jean Dubuffet. Respectively, they are his Assemblages of Imprints developed in the 1950s, and his ink on paper (some also include collage) landscapes (paysages) with one or more characters from 1980, which are late examples of his l’Hourloupe work. To create Site et Menace (1957) Dubuffet took sheets of paper–first pressed atop an ink- covered surface upon which such varied materials as threads, grains, plants, and sugar had been placed–and then carefully cut into fragments (to which ink was sometimes later added) to produce a haunting composition. Dubuffet regarded his working method as “an extremely efficient means of invention.”The expressive, free-spirited, doodle-inspired Paysage avec un Personage (1980) is a continuation of the artist’s l’Hourloupe theme he began in the early 1960s. Dubuffet not only invented l’Hourloupes, he also coined the term by combining three French words: hurler (‘to shout’), hululer (‘to howl’), and loup (‘wolf’). It has been noted that Dubuffet also found inspiration in Guy de Maupassant’s 1887 short-story, Le Horla in creating the term l’Hourloupe. Dubuffet not only created ink on paper l’Hourloupe drawings with his late Paysage series, but also created l’Hourloupe sculpture, paintings, and costumes. “The works connected with the Hourloupe cycle are linked closely to one another in my mind: each of them is an element intended for insertion into a whole. That whole aims to be the depiction of a world unlike ours, a world parallel to ours, if you like; and this world bears the name l’Hourloupe,” Dubuffet said.Despite differences in the two Jean Dubuffet works on offer here, there are commonalities between the two works which were created twenty-three years apart: each is a testament to the varied visual experiments and techniques Dubuffet employed in his vast and prolific career, all the while eschewing academic art, and in each, the viewer is made aware of a lone figure, or character placed toward the center of the picture, and who inhabits a busy, fluid, non-representational field, all very consistent with the artist’s self-described interest in “anything produced by persons unscathed by artistic culture."