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JEAN DUBUFFET (1901-1985) PARIS LA FÊTE signed and dated "J. Dubuffet 63" lower right; signed, t...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:1,500,000.00 - 2,500,000.00 USD
JEAN DUBUFFET (1901-1985) PARIS LA FÊTE signed and dated  J. Dubuffet 63  lower right; signed, t...
JEAN DUBUFFET (1901-1985) PARIS LA FÊTE signed and dated "J. Dubuffet 63" lower right; signed, titled and dated "J. Dubuffet Paris La Fête 25 août 1963" on the reverse oil on canvas 763/4 x 59 in. (195 x 150 cm) painted in 1963 Estimate: - $1,500,000-2,500,000 PROVENANCE Galerie Daniel Cordier, PARIS Collection Robert B. Mayer, CHICAGO Collection Beyeler, BASEL EXHIBITED DALLAS, Museum of Fine Art, JEAN DUBUFFET, March 16-April 17, 1966, no. 69 (illustrated) MADRID, Fondation Juan March, JEAN DUBUFFET, February 9- March 31, 1976, no. 33 (illustrated) BERLIN, Akademie der Künste; VIENNA, Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts and COLOGNE, Kunsthalle, JEAN DUBUFFET, September 7-October 26, 1980, p. 220, no. 69 (illustrated) BASEL, Galerie Beyeler, JEAN DUBUFFET, October 1985-January 1986, no. 24 (illustrated) NEW YORK, Urban Gallery, JEAN DUBUFFET, November 11-December 1986 BASEL, Galerie Beyeler, HOMAGE TO FRANCIS BACON, June-September 1992, no. 18 (illustrated) MUNICH, Haus der Kunst, RÉSERVE DU PATRON, July 8-August 28, 1994 SAPPORO, Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art; NAGASAKI, Huis ten Bosch Museum of Art; KYOTO, Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art and TOKYO, Mitsukoshi Museum of Art, THE EXHIBITION FROM SWISS PRIVATE COLLECTIONS, COORDINATED BY ERNST BEYELER, BASEL, May 17-November 24, 1996, pp. 116-117, no. 50 (illustrated) SAARBRuCKEN, Saarlandmuseum, JEAN DUBUFFET, September 12-November 14, 1999, p. 127, no. 53 (illustrated) LITERATURE A. Franzke, JEAN DUBUFFET, BASEL, 1975, no. 74 (illustrated) M. Loreau, ed., CATALOGUE DES TRAVAUX DE JEAN DUBUFFET: L'HOURLOUPE I, Fasicule XX, LAUSANNE, 1966, p. 92, no. 170 (illustrated) I want my street to be crazy Paris La Fête is a monumental and important picture bridging Dubuffet's acclaimed Paris Circus and L'Hourloupe series. Executed in August 1963, the painting contains the bright colors and loud and raucous cacophony of everyday Parisian street life characteristic of his Paris Circus pictures, as well as the red, white and blue, striated puzzle-like forms of L'Hourloupe. Dubuffet returned to the city of Paris in 1961 after a seven-year absence, during which time he resided in the French countryside nearby to Vence. Paris was undergoing a cultural revolution in the 1960s with rapid commercialization, prosperity and development-a far cry from the environment the artist left in 1954. The Paris Circus series resulted from Dubuffet's reintroduction to the city with its abundance of cars, shops, cafés and sidewalks, providing him with new vigor, humor and energy in his oeuvre. Peter Selz writes of the paintings from Paris Circus: "He portrays his fellow humans eating in cavernous restaurants, walking in the streets with purposeless hurry, displaying themselves in department stores, driving in octopus-shaped little Fords and Citröens with the compulsive anxiety of trapped animals. "These recent, brightly painted city scenes resemble the views of Paris and subway pictures of the early forties although texture, space and deployment of figures have become much more complex. These people, generally without arms, are presented either in a schematic front view or in a conspicuous profile.... The result is a jumbled panorama effect of the city in which people, cars, lettering, all make up a wild flat pattern-not unlike a crazy quilt or a jigsaw puzzle." (P. Selz, The Work of Dubuffet, New York, 1962, p. 160.) The present work is a visual jumble, markedly different from the views he produced of the city 18 years earlier in his Texturology and Materiology series, which instead had focused on organic texture and earthy, natural tones. To the contrary, Paris La Fête is a wildly colorful and chaotic evocation of city life. Everything is jammed together in Dubuffet's unique, humorous fashion and all components have been flattened into a schematic, hieratic arrangement. Dubuffet's delight in the city is evident; he writes: "I want to fill the site of the painting with a sense of the phantasmagoric and this can only be achieved by jumbling more or less real elements with interventions of an arbitrary character which aims towards the unreal. I want my street to be crazy, my pavements, shops and buildings to join in a mad dance, which is why I deform and denaturalize their contours and colors." (Quoted in A. Franzke, Dubuffet, New York, 1981, p.148.)