Jean Dubuffet, lithographies
This is a slim illustrated volume of thirty-four unnumbered pages devoted to Jean Dubuffet’s lithographs in the series he titled Les Phénomènes. It was issued in connection with the Paris dealer Berggruen & Cie, and it belongs to the category of the gallery or dealers’ catalogue rather than the monograph: its substance is the reproduction of prints, together with the identifying information needed to distinguish and locate the individual plates, rather than an extended critical or biographical essay. The book’s own focus is therefore narrow and specific — a body of lithographic work by Dubuffet, presented as a coherent series.
The Phénomènes lithographs belong to Dubuffet’s engagement with printmaking as an extension of his interest in raw materiality and surface. In these works the lithographic stone is used to generate dense, all-over textures: turbulent, granular, and stratified passages that recall geological formations, mineral crusts, vegetable and organic matter, and the incidental markings of the physical world. The plates are characteristically without conventional subject matter in the traditional sense; what is presented is texture itself, worked and reworked so that the grain of the stone, the transfer of material, and the accidents of the process become the content. The lithographic medium suited this project precisely because it registers fine grain, pressure, and chance with great fidelity, allowing Dubuffet to build up surfaces that hover between drawing and imprint.
Within the catalogue, these prints are treated as a series — the série des Phénomènes named in the volume’s title — and the reproductions are ordered so as to make the coherence of the group legible to a viewer. The book thus functions as a documentary record of the series as it stood at the time of issue, a working inventory of images for collectors, dealers, and students of the artist’s graphic work. Its value lies in that documentary function: it fixes the state of the Phénomènes project at a particular moment and supplies the plate-by-plate information that later catalogues raisonnés of Dubuffet’s prints would depend upon.
The volume is not a biography and contains no narrative of the artist’s life. It does not survey Dubuffet’s painting, sculpture, or writings, nor does it attempt a general account of his career. Its scope is confined to the lithographs of the Phénomènes series, and its principal contents are the plates themselves. Readers should expect a compact, utilitarian publication — an illustrated checklist with reproductions — rather than a comprehensive study, and it should be consulted as a primary document of Dubuffet’s printmaking rather than as an introduction to his work as a whole.
