A Catalogue of Dubuffet’s Animated Painting
A Book Built Around a Moving Painting
Coucou bazar is a French-language exhibition catalogue devoted to Jean Dubuffet’s hybrid stage work of the same name. It was produced for an exhibition at the Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris, presented under the title “Coucou bazar, Jean Dubuffet.” The volume reconstructs the history of Dubuffet’s tableau animé—an animated painting—through photographs, posters, texts, and archival documents. An appendix gathers Dubuffet’s own writings on Coucou Bazar under the heading “Écrits sur Coucou bazar.” The book therefore serves as both a visual record and a documentary companion to a work that existed primarily as a live, time-bound event.
The Animated Painting and the Hourloupe Cycle
Coucou Bazar belongs to Dubuffet’s L’Hourloupe cycle and is described as its culmination. Dubuffet conceived it not as a painting that had evolved into monument or architecture, but as one that had turned toward theatrical figuration—or, more precisely, toward a moving picture. He described it as an animated painting and as an ensemble of paintings: a large-format painting composed of many planes set one before another, with depth suggested by the compressed, foreshortened arrangement of those planes. Its figures could combine in apparently unlimited ways. The work also carries the subtitle Le Bal de l’Hourloupe.
In performance, the stage was filled with a forest of some fifty forms and creatures from the Hourloupe style. Across ten tableaux—taking in subjects such as traffic, dogs, and bicycles—jigsaw-like cutouts came to life, lifting, sliding, and jumping, either motorized or moved by barely visible black-shrouded figures.
Blurring Actor, Scenery, and Painting
The staged appearance of Coucou Bazar depended on a deliberate confusion between media. Costumed characters—among them Le Grand Malotru, La Simulatrice, Chimerus, Marie Tremblote, and Nini la Minaude—moved among painted cutouts, while several performers wore padded costumes covered in Hourloupe patterns, making them resemble clown suits. Dubuffet wanted the costumed figures to be few, to move slowly and sometimes almost stand still, and to be scattered rather than grouped, so that they merged with the fixed painted elements and became hard to distinguish from them. At rest the figures read as facades; in motion they became multidimensional and seemed to change shape.
The stated aim was to abolish the distinction between objects and grounds, between actors and scenery—and, by extension, between painting and performance. A contemporary account noted that the scenery seemed to do the acting while the actors looked like scenery, and that the piece sat closer to kinetic art than to theater.
Perceptual Doubt as the Work’s Theme
Dubuffet gave Coucou Bazar a philosophical dimension. He identified its subject as the questionable truth of our perceptions and interpretations—and therefore of thought itself. What we take to be reality, he argued, is made up of doubtful mental projections; the other projections we accept as substitutes possess the same questionable truth. The consequence is that the usual opposition between the real and the imaginary collapses, and no firm distinction can be drawn between them. This line of thought gives the spectacle the character of a philosophical exercise. The book’s inclusion of Dubuffet’s writings on the work makes that interpretive framework part of its documentary record.
Music, Stagings, and the Archival Record
Music was central to Coucou Bazar. Dubuffet wanted a massive presence of music and worked with the electroacoustic composer Ilhan Mimaroglu, whose score was electronic and discordant. The work was staged only three times: at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1973, a few months later at the Grand Palais in Paris, and in 1978 at the Palazzo della Promotrice delle Belle Arti al Valentino in Turin. The Turin staging returned to a sound texture closer to Dubuffet’s earlier musical experiments, and the last staging was filmed.
Because the work can no longer be performed in full for conservation reasons—only two costume figures may still be moved—the book’s photographs, posters, and archival documents preserve a record of an ephemeral event. A 1973 review in The New York Times found the piece hypnotically fascinating but also repetitive and cold, relieved only by rare moments of warmth; it stressed that the work demanded complete concentration. Such responses underline how far Coucou Bazar was from conventional theater: it asked viewers to attend to painting as a live, spatial, and temporal experience.
Jean Dubuffet was born on 31 July 1901 in Le Havre and died on 12 May 1985 in Paris. He was a French painter, sculptor, collage and action artist, counted among the prominent representatives of French postwar art, and he coined the term Art brut.
Publication Record and Exhibition Dates
The exhibition at the Musée des Arts décoratifs ran from 23 October to 1 December 2013. The catalogue’s legal deposit date is given as 2013, and its record describes a 29 cm volume of 119 pages plus four inserted pages and six foldout pages, illustrated in black and white and in color, with ISBN 978-2-916914-45-9. Wikidata records France as its country of origin. Catalog metadata assigns subject terms including exhibitions, performance art, dance, and stage-setting and scenery, and gives a first publication date of 1973.
Coucou Bazar as a Total Work
Dubuffet created Coucou Bazar in 1972 as a total work of art combining painting, sculpture, theater, dance, and music. In it, several costumed figures act with one another as well as with the stage elements. The catalogue’s back-cover description characterizes the work as a challenge to the conventions of theater, dance, and the fine arts.
The Hourloupe Series and Its Sculptural Extension
After 1962 Dubuffet developed the Hourloupe series, whose cell-like structures are restricted to red, white, black, and blue. In the late 1960s he transferred the series’ graphic elements into sculpture, producing painted rock-like forms in polyester, large-format free-standing sculptures, and partly walkable labyrinths such as Jardin d’Email (1972/1973) at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo.
Earlier Sound Experiments and Later Costume Display
Dubuffet’s musical experiments in the early 1960s included work with Asger Jorn and, occasionally, Henri Michaux or Alain Vian. He was influenced by jazz and by encounters in the Maghreb in the late 1940s, and by flutes and plucked-string instruments; he described his practice as a music that was “débraillée et sale.” In 2016, the Fondation Beyeler exhibition showed the two costume figures that may still be moved.
