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Artist or Maker: Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985)
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Provenance: Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris.
The Pace Gallery, New York.
Anon. sale, Phillips New York, 18 May 2000, lot 31. (sold for $662,500) Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.
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Literature: M. Loreau (ed.), Catalogue des travaux de Jean Dubuffet: L'Hourloupe I, fasc. XX, Lausanne 1966, no. 181 (illustrated, p. 97).
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Notes: With its electric colours and scribbled vitality, Dubuffet's La route du Pas-de-Calais, painted on 3 September 1963, shows the important confluence of several strands of his work. Dubuffet had for some time experimented in various landscape paintings of the Pas-de-Calais with the contrast between a black background and bright, almost neon lines of colour, clearly evident in this painting. These fill La route du Pas-de-Calais with zesty immediacy, the lines singing with energy and bustle.
It was precisely in September 1963 that Dubuffet went, with the collector Werner Schenk, on a sort of Grand Tour of institutions throughout Europe that held mental patients who produced 'psychotic' art. The art of the mentally ill intrigued Dubuffet. In it he perceived an authenticity, a directness, more focused than that, say, in children's pictures. There is a frantic aesthetic, or lack of, that parried directly with his concepts of Art Brut. The frenetic application of the oils in La route du Pas-de-Calais also reflects this interest, directly transmitting his own enthusiasm, as well as the enthusiasm of the presumed holidaymakers in the Citroen shown. Likewise, the flattened representation, the direct and non-objective association between the artist and his subject shows Dubuffet exploring the unfettered, uncritical perspective of patients diagnosed with certain disorders.
Dubuffet had long been interested in, and had long collected, various forms of 'authentic' Art Brut (as opposed to the Art Brut that he and his colleagues created). One of the aspects of the art of the mentally ill that interested him was its compulsive nature, and the extent to which this resulted in an image that was quasi-automatic. Dubuffet himself had made an important discovery of the visual potential of automatism the previous year: according to legend, while he was on the phone, idly doodling with his biro, he began to be interested in an aesthetic quality in his scribbles and in their random shapes that he soon explored deliberately. La route du Pas-de-Calais reveals the evolution of this technique especially in the shaded areas, where the artist's rouch hatching is in evidence. This style would soon be filtered and refined into one of Dubuffet's most recognized signature styles, evident in pictures and sculptures and buildings throughout the world. Here, though, we see an intriguing off-shoot of L'Hourloupe, as it became known, that combines its novel cartoonish formality with the eclectic and energetic painterly quality of his Informel painting.
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