Dubuffet explored an archetypal, primordial, grotesque painting in the Europe that was reborn after the horrors of the war, exalting the individual in a phenomenological connection with existence.

One of the leading names in Art Informel, Jean Dubuffet made his debut in post-war Paris after twenty-five years of diverse artistic experience with an exhibition held in October 1944 at the Galerie René Drouin. Together with Jean Fautrier, Dubuffet was the protagonist of the informal material research that shocked the Parisian art scene after the war, together with the experimentation with signs conducted by artists such as Hans Hartung, Wols and Henri Michaux. Using one of Dubuffet’s expressions, the French critic Michel Tapié described all these new forms of Parisian painting as Art Informel and later as art autre.¹

With his a-cultural position, Dubuffet rejected the canons of traditional aesthetics and an idealistic approach in order to make painting a magical, anti-heroic operation, salvaging what is ordinary, ugly and informal, not in the sense of the meaning of “low materialism” ascribed to it by the French philosopher Georges Bataille, but as a possibility to go back to the raw material and turn it into a subject, thereby establishing a new linguistic discourse. Turning his back on abstract art and modern avant-garde movements, as well as on figurative art, deemed to be the backbone of the Academy, Dubuffet explored an archetypal, primordial, grotesque painting in the Europe that was reborn after the horrors of the war, exalting the individual in a phenomenological connection with existence.

In 1954, following a phase devoted to sculpture, that is to say the Statues de la vie precaire, created by manipulating scrap iron and volcanic stone, Dubuffet returned to painting with a series of works in cycles, including Hautes Pâtes, Sols et terrains and Chevaliers. As he himself recalled, it was “a sculptural painting – with often rather viscous paint, able to achieve the solidity of cement very quickly.”² In greater detail, Passant furtif (Furtive Passer-By) goes back to a style of composition already seen in some of his works from the 1940s. Renouncing any illusion of depth, the space becomes a sort of topography, a shapeless field of material, on which an archetypal figure is compressed as if it had been cut out of the thick textured mixtures. The undulating line of the horizon restricts the visual field. It crushes the space onto the surface, giving the sky a physical consistency comparable to the earth, in a chromatic contrast between the orange colour of the earth and the violet hues of the sky.

Passant furtif is dedicated to the writer and literary critic Jean Paulhan, a reference figure for French 20th-century literary history, editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française from 1925 to 1940.

The continuous propensity for the surface was the central objective of Dubuffet’s work. Indeed, he wrote: “The objective of painting is to animate a surface that is two-dimensional and lacking in depth by definition. It is not enriched by using shading to seek relief or trompe-l’oeil effects […] Instead, we seek ingenious methods of flattening the objects on the surface, allowing it to speak its own language and not an artificial language of three-dimensional space that does not belong to it […] I feel a desire to leave the surface looking flat. My eyes love to rest on a totally flat surface, particularly a rectangular surface.”³

As can be read in an inscription on the work, Passant furtif is dedicated to the writer and literary critic Jean Paulhan, a reference figure for French 20th-century literary history, editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française from 1925 to 1940. Dubuffet’s friendship with Paulhan probably dates to the end of 1943, thanks to the intermediation of Georges Limbour, a scholar from the Surrealist circle who had been friends with Dubuffet since childhood. As early as Dubuffet’s first exhibition with René Drouin (1944), the relationship between the artist and Paulhan had already become a deep “compagnonnage spirituel”.⁴ In fact, it was at Paulhan’s request that René Drouin organised Dubuffet’s first solo exhibition in his gallery in Place Vendôme – an exhibition that triggered lively debates on the Parisian art scene.

A detail of the painting Passant furtif can be seen in the foreground of a photograph by Albert Pik that shows Paulhan surrounded by the works in his collection. On the basis of the documentary evidence, it can be ascertained that Francesco Federico Cerruti purchased the work before 1993.

[Lara Conte]

¹ See Tapié 1952.

² Dubuffet 1971, p. 118.

³ Ibid., 1971.

⁴ Joffroy, in Paris 1974, p. XVI.