Estimated Price:

   £   

Realised Price:

   £   

What is this symbol? This symbol indicates that this auction hose has verified this price result.

Log in or subscribe to view price data

charcoal fragments mounted on a cement base

Executed in 1954.
PROVENANCE

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner in 1961
EXHIBITED

Paris, Galerie Rive Gauche, Jean Dubuffet, Petites Statues de la vie Précaire, 1954, no. 42
New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Jean Dubuffet: A Retrospective, 1973, p. 107, no. 69, illustrated
LITERATURE AND REFERENCES

Exhibition Catalogue, Rome, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Jean Dubuffet 1901-1985, Milan 1989, p. 38, illustrated
Catalogue des Travaux de Jean Dubuffet, Vaches - Petites Statues de la Vie Precaire, fasc. X, Lausanne 1969, p. 39, no. 43, illustrated

CATALOGUE NOTE

Le Morvandiau emanates from an important series of roughly 43 sculptures which Jean Dubuffet created between March and October in 1954 called Petites Statues de la Vie Precaire (Little Statues of Precarious Life). As sculpted characters created from assemblages of found materials, these works followed on directly from the two dimensional works of collaged butterflies which he created in late 1953. With these works he wanted to point out the parallels between the fragility of human and material life and he therefore purposefully chose materials which were as natural as possible. Newspaper, steel wool, clinkers, sponges, grapevine stalks and, as in this case, charcoal were used to create beautifully expressive figures whose very existence seemed as unpredictable as life itself. As such very few of the works in the series have maintained their condition as well as Le Morvandiau.

As with most of the works, the sculpture radiates from a cement base and immediately the blackness of the charred wood stands out. Dubuffet bought all of his coal from a coal dealer in Morvan in the region of Burgundy, France and it seems that the title may imply that this is a portrait of that dealer. Its apparently crude appearance, gradually reveals an incredibly sophisticated construction and with its wrinkled face, furrowed brow and pouting lips, one can almost sense that this is a figure in the twilight of his life. By its very nature, charcoal is a tortured material and like the renowned court portraits of Giuseppe Archimbolo in which the human form is transformed into symbolic and allegorical compositions of vegetables, flowers and wildlife, Dubuffet here encourages the viewer to mentally deconstruct the human form into the sum of its organic components. He wanted to create a sculpture which might have appeared to have made and found itself in nature. There is an obvious linkage here between artist's historical use of the medium of charcoal to create studies on paper but in using the the raw material, Dubuffet creates a tactile crudeness of form which illustrates the artist's belief in the organic unity between man and nature, and his desire to reject inherited false notions of beauty. Dubuffet believed Western man was so preoccupied with occidental concepts like beauty and ugliness, that is was impossible to appreciate the inner soul and life of all things.

The earthy, primitive character of Dubuffet's earliest inscribed paintings and sculptures reveal a fervent passion and burning desire to explore all extremes of formal expression. Art, as Dubuffet saw it, should be the place where the major issues of society and existence were able to enjoy free expression; where materials, (matière), were empowered by their inherent natural properties to act as a medium between the artist and his subject matter. This hitherto unexplored relationship led Dubuffet's charge against what he saw as the 'false gods of culture' during the 1940s and 50s, and as Dubuffet's chronicler Max Loreau suggests in Jean Dubuffet: Délits, déportements, lieux de haut, these years of material exploration not only served to exhibit the artist's mandatory reliance upon his means, but also to elevate materials from their conventional inferiority to form.

From Dubuffet's irreverent, anticultural perspective, form was equated to the evils of culture and replaced by matière as the fundamental motive for creation. As is sublimely illustrated by Le Morvandiau, the organic materiality of Dubuffet's best works has a self-perpetuating logic in which the form and component materials are inseparable.