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Date: 1901-1985

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Description: signed and dated 54; signed, titled and dated Novembre 54 on the reverse

oil on canvas

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Dimensions: 45 5/8 by 35 in. 116 by 89cm.

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Provenance: PROPERTY OF A PRIVATE AMERICAN COLLECTOR

Galerie Krugier et Cie., Geneva
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1967

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Exhibited: Washington, D. C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Jean Dubuffet 1943-1963. Paintings, Sculptures, Assemblages, 1993, plate no. 59, illustrated in color
Paris, Musée d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Dubuffet, September - December 2001, p. 183, illustrated in color
Zurich, Fondation Beyeler, Expressive!, March - July 2003, p. 139, illustrated in color

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Published: Catalogue des Travaux de Jean Dubuffet: Vaches - Petites Statues de la Vie Précaire, fasc. X, Lausanne 1969, p. 87, no. 114, illustrated
John Canaday, "Art: Witty, Entrancing Dubuffet Cows", The New York Times, October 28, 1972, illustrated
Michael Kimmelman, "Dubuffet's Rude, Universal Charm", International Herald Tribune, July 3, 1993, p. 7, illustrated
Michael Kimmelman, "Jean Dubuffet, Giving Pleasure Despite Himself", The New York Times, July 4, 1993, p. H29, illustrated
Helen Dudar, "Art that can 'make people laugh and frighten them, too'", Smithsonian Magazine, Spring 1993, p. 79-86, illustrated
Robert Hughes, "An outlaw who loved laws", Time Magazine, July 26, 1993, p. 62, illustrated in color
Kenneth Baker, "Dubuffet took bad road to good work", San Francisco Chronicle, August
1, 1993, p. 54, illustrated
Rex Weil, "Doubting Dubuffet", City Paper, August 13, 1963, p. 44, illustrated

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Notes: "The sight of this animal gives me an inexhaustible sense of well-being because of the atmosphere of calm and serenity it seems to generate." (Peter Selz, The Work of Jean Dubuffet, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1962, p. 103)

Vache La Belle Muflée is one of only thirteen paintings Jean Dubuffet executed which focused on the subject of a solitary cow. As a group, these works represent one of the artist's most important series, painted at a time which many writers and critics consider to be his 'golden years'. Robert Hughes notes that "The funniest and most agrestic of all his paintings were, undoubtedly, the cows - a snook cocked at Picasso's heroic Spanish Bulls. Kippered there on the canvas in their dense yet somehow airy paint, yearning, dumb and absurdly coquettish, they are among the most memorable animals in modern art. Several of them, like Vache La Belle Muflée, 1954 also contain some of the most inspired and wristy drawing of Dubuffet's career, formed by the brush - or its handle - dragging through the thick paint" (Robert Hughes, "An outlaw who loved laws", Time Magazine, 26 July 1993, p. 62, illustrated in color).

Nothing better than the Vaches exemplifies Dubuffet's search for a new definition of the theory and practice of art. This definition, which defied the conventional aesthetic and iconographic values of Western Art, is described by Dubuffet here, "Art... instrument of knowledge, instrument of expression" (Jean Dubuffet, Notes for a lecture given at the "Arts Club of Chicago", December 20, 1951), adding later in 1983, "What I expect from any work of art is that it surprises me, that it violates my customary valuations of things and offers me other, unexpected ones." (Jean Dubuffet in Valère Novarina, "Interview with Jean Dubuffet", in Flash Art, no. 100, January 1983).

The opportunity of dealing with the subject of the cow and the countryside, painted previously in 1943-44, was offered to Dubuffet in the summer of 1954, when he was forced to spend time near Clermont-Ferrand, where his wife was recovering from tuberculosis. Dubuffet recalls: "From the beginning of July 1954, as my wife, for reasons of health, was living on the outskirts of Clermont-Ferrand, I often had occasion to drive along the road between Paris and the Auvergne, and to take long solitary walks in the countryside around the village where she was being cared for. In this village I had at my disposal a little place which I fitted up as a studio. Once more I became preoccupied with country subjects - fields, trees, grassy pastures, cattle, carts and the work of the fields - all things I had already treated with enthusiasm in 1943 and 1944. As formerly, I loved to spend hours watching the cows and afterwards drawing them from memory..." (Peter Selz, The Work of Jean Dubuffet, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, p. 97). Eschewing the traditional bucolic associations of the cow in the countryside, Dubuffet handles the subject with a delightful sense of humor and extraordinary visual vigor, turning the cow "... into a kind of preposterous puppet and all the elements of the countryside into a sort of grotesque theatre of circus clownishness" (Andreas Franzke, Dubuffet, New York, 1981, p. 94).

Vache La Belle Muflée is situated in a landscape rendered as a lively, animated surface endowed with frank emotional impact. Into the heavier impasto of the background, the artist has scratched the white area of the cow's body, rendered as a patchwork. Both the background and animal have the same importance, each displaying a bravura of brushwork and a chromatic lushness, so that, technically, their construction is barely distinguishable. Years later, object and landscape would be fused together completely, becoming the mental landscapes of the Texturologies, and later reaching its logical conclusion with the Hourloupe series. The daring nature of the artist's construction is continued in his choice of color. Bright and brutal, yet appealing and sensuous, Dubuffet's fleshy pinks and emerald greens enhance, yet deny the reality of his image. Direct in their expression and subtle in their variations, the colors of Vache La Belle Muflée are supremely evocative and largely unexpected, due to the radical nature of Dubuffet's materials. Here, oil paint is transformed - Dubuffet creates emulsions, thickens it with sand, applying to the canvas a gritty paste that consistently defies the material's traditional identity. As Michel Tapié said, Dubuffet worked with "... a sort of living matter [that] work[s] its perpetual magic". (Michel Tapié, in Exh. Cat., Tate Gallery, Paris Post War: Art & Existentialism, 1945-1955, London, p. 79)

Typical of Dubuffet's works of the 1950s, Vache La Belle Muflée emphasizes its two-dimensional surface. The cow dominates its surrounding ground, none of which allows any illusion of overlapping or depth. The charming, amusing creature is treated as a flattened silhouette and is interlaced into Dubuffet's organic composition as an uninterrupted pattern of line and color, so that animal and landscape become one. Space therefore becomes a two-dimensional surface. Indeed, this deliberate attempt to 'flatten' the composition comes from Dubuffet's desire to "... animate a surface which is by definition two-dimensional and without depth... Let us seek... ingenious ways to flatten objects on the surface; and let the surface speak its own language and not an artificial language of three-dimensional space which is not proper to it... I feel the need to leave the surface visibly flat." (Jean Dubuffet in Hubert Damisch, Ed., Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, Paris, 1967, Vol. I, p. 74).

Jean Dubuffet's genius lies in his ability to turn a banal, almost trivial subject, ("I am not interested in what is exceptional... I feed on the banal. The more banal a thing may be, the better it suits me... he declared, in 1967, [Jean Dubuffet in Damisch, Ed., Op. Cit., Vol. II, p. 62]) into a masterful example of his amusing visual vocabulary. Freeing himself from everything that he had learnt through teaching and discipline, Dubuffet rediscovers a potent and unrestrained vision of the world, reaching child-like reduction and simplification of forms. "For what is more important is not reaching objects of reputed beauty after long days of travel, but learning that, without having to move an inch, no matter where you are, all that first seemed most sterile and mute is swarming with facts which can entrance you even more." He declared in 1968 (Lucy Lippard, Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, Berkely 1968, p. 611) Like the comedies by Absurdist writers such as Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco and Jean Genet, the inanity and wildly caricaturist quality of Vache La Belle Muflée provides Dubuffet with the only means of properly investigating the human condition. This vital, gnomic work takes the human situation, rather than the directly expressive possibilities of pure painting, as its point of departure, yet remains a dazzling and charming painting.