Dubuffet’s invented pictorial language and the parallel world it built
A Body of Work That Resists Classification
L’Hourloupe is the name Jean Dubuffet gave to the longest-running of the distinct, self-contained cycles into which he organized his production. The works gathered under the title were made between 1962 and 1974, and they are so unusual that they slip past the usual categories and comparisons. L’Hourloupe was not confined to one medium: it moved between drawing, painting, sculpture, theater and architecture, and it experimented with techniques that deliberately left room for chance and the unexpected. Taken as a whole, the cycle constructs a parallel version of the world—a doubled reality stocked with its own figures, objects and places. Dubuffet treated the enterprise as a conceptual and material instrument for remaking reality, and it was through L’Hourloupe that he arrived at the manner that would become the signature of his art.
The Telephone Doodles Behind a New Script
The cycle began in an almost accidental way. While talking on the telephone, Dubuffet would trace random forms with blue or red ballpoint pens. He then cut these sheets out and pasted them onto a black ground, accompanying them with a private jargon of his own invention. From these scraps he developed a personal pictorial script: flat, graphical cells and parallel hatchings held within a narrow range of colors. He thought of this script as a consistently uniform notation that could be applied indifferently to whatever it depicted.
A Visual Language of Flat Cells and Bold Outlines
The works of L’Hourloupe are recognizable by their flattened shapes, delineated with dark or black outlines, and by a palette generally restricted to red, white, blue and black. The large forms are often filled with smaller, neatly outlined, puzzle-like cells, many of them white and hatched with parallel lines. Dubuffet’s painting Courre Merlan (Whiting Chase) is a clear example: an abstract, free-form shape nearly fills the canvas against a dark, heavily textured background, and within the interlaced shapes a boat and fishermen can just be discerned, pursuing whiting. Contrepoint aux Outils, executed in 1964, shows the method applied to an assembly of tools, woven into a dense puzzle of primary colors, black and Breton stripes; the result is a deliberately recondite composition that resists easy reading and forces the viewer to investigate its forms.
Simulacra: Objects That Never Existed
A central device of the cycle is what Dubuffet called simulacra—illusory objects for which no reality has ever existed. The things depicted may have a concrete presence in the painting, yet they are effectively ghosts or apparitions, deliberate fictions to which the artist has given shape, substance and form. Rendered flat and two-dimensional, with no attempt at spatial depth, they confound the eye. Through this method Dubuffet subverted and redirected the still-life tradition: the objects on show are neither records of real things nor pure abstractions, but invented presences that hover between the two.
The Mind, Not the Physical World
Behind the visual puzzles lies a conviction about what art is for. Dubuffet believed that art addresses the mind rather than the physical world, and in paintings such as Courre Merlan, where objects are shown with little or no reference to their actual colors or dimensions, he set out to demonstrate that the world inside the painting can be just as real as the world outside it. Individuals, he argued, can create their own versions of reality. The uniform script of L’Hourloupe was meant to serve this end by dissolving the categories the mind habitually uses to make sense of things, so that thought could move more freely from one object or category to another.
Art Brut, the Unconscious, and a Path Between Figuration and Abstraction
The cycle reflects Dubuffet’s long-standing affinity for art brut—art produced by children, psychiatric patients and other untrained makers. He saw a parallel between their imagery, which points to another level of experience, and his own invented forms. His aim was neither straightforward figuration nor pure abstraction, but a new mediation between the two, of the kind he associated with untrained artists. Although Dubuffet did not consider himself a Surrealist, he was also influenced by the Surrealist interest in the unconscious, which fed into the semi-automatic origins of his Hourloupe drawings.
From Paintings to Monuments
L’Hourloupe did not stay on the canvas. The cycle extended into three-dimensional sculpture and installation, and into theatrical and architectural work on a monumental scale. Among its large achievements are La Closerie Falbala, covering some 1,610 square meters, and the Tour aux figures, standing 24 meters high. The cycle also produced paintings now counted among Dubuffet’s undisputed masterpieces, including La route d’Etaples (oil on canvas, 1963) and Site domestique (vinyl on canvas, 1966). Dubuffet began this outpouring at the age of sixty-one, and the range of media and formats it embraced testifies to the creative energy of his mature period.
A Cycle That Became a Style
Over its twelve-year span, L’Hourloupe grew from a set of telephone scribbles into a whole artistic idiom, and its influence spread through everything Dubuffet made. Its distinctive flattened cells, dark outlines and limited palette became so closely identified with him that the cycle effectively became the style of his oeuvre. Singular enough to evade classification and reference, it stands as the most sustained and expansive of his self-contained series, and as the vehicle through which he pursued his belief that art could remake, rather than merely record, the world.
The book was first published in 1964. Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet (31 July 1901 – 12 May 1985) was a French painter and sculptor of the École de Paris. His idealistic approach to aesthetics embraced so-called “low art” and eschewed traditional standards of beauty in favor of what he believed to be a more authentic and humanistic approach to image-making. He is perhaps best known for founding the art brut movement and for the Collection de l’art brut that this movement spawned. Dubuffet enjoyed a prolific art career, both in France and in America, and was featured in many exhibitions throughout his lifetime.
Provenance, Scale, and Description
Courre Merlan is an oil painting, and it has been at the Indianapolis Museum of Art since 1992. Contrepoint aux Outils is an outstanding early and large-scale example of the series, rendered in a rare multi-coloured palette. The dimensions given for La route d’Etaples are 150 by 195 cm, and those given for Site domestique are 125 by 200 cm. The series marked a decisive turn away from the conventions of contemporary painting, establishing a novel vernacular in celebration of the banal objects of everyday life.
Dubuffet on the Effect of Such a Painting
Dubuffet wrote in Prospectus: “When one has looked at a painting of this kind, one looks at everything around one with a new refreshed eye, and one learns to see the unaccustomed and amusing side of things. When I say amusing, I do not mean solely the funny side, but also the grand, the moving and even the tragic aspects [of ordinary things]” (Jean Dubuffet, Prospectus, vol. 1, p. 47, quoted in Jean Dubuffet: A Retrospective, New York 1973, p. 23).
Exhibition Context
Galerie Jeanne-Bucher mounted an exhibition exclusively devoted to L’Hourloupe. At the first edition of Artparis, held under the Grand Palais, the gallery’s stand was exclusively devoted to the cycle, in echo of a particular homage to contemporary sculpture. The gallery presented Dubuffet as considered one of the greatest artists of the second half of the twentieth century.
