Dubuffet Paris Galerie Rene Drouin (1 results)

Poster, with manuscript text and portrait drawing at the center, printed on salmon-colored wove stock, in offset lithography. 580 x 400 mm. (22 7/8 x 15 5/8 inches). 2 cancelled taxe d'affichage stamps affixed at blank portion at lower left, as usual. Framed. The extremely rare, graphically riveting poster for one of the most radical exhibitions in postwar France, Dubuffet's art brut portraits of Parisian intellectuals, at the Galerie René Drouin in 1948. Initially, the series was based on personalities in the literary salon of Florence Gould, to which Dubuffet had been introduced by Jean Paulhan, including Paulhan himself, Pierre Benoit, Marcel Jouhandeau, and Paul Léautaud; it was then extended to include other friends and acquaintances, such as Antonin Artaud, Francis Ponge, Henri Michaux, and Jean Fautrier. "Dubuffet's aggressive, graffiti-style caricatural portraits of 1946-47 are in part caricature in the simplest sense, a mocking variant on the pantheons of artists that had become sober clichés of even 'radical' French art, as in Surrealist group portraits. But Dubuffet's portraits manifest the revolt, and revulsion, of intellectuals: mental energy and will are now all that matter, and the body can (indeed must.) go to hell. His writers and intellectuals are pathetic monsters, their features reduced to pop-eyed scrawls, their aplomb prodded into jumping-jack spasms. Yet since grotesque harshness and imbalanced disturbance are in Dubuffet's view tokens of authenticity, to be portrayed by him with scar-like contours and inept anatomy is, perversely, to be made glamorous" (High and Low). A few indetectible very short clean marginal tears mended on verso; a bright, unfolded copy.