The 1960 Berggruen volume on Dubuffet’s Série des Phénomènes
Berggruen’s Volume on the Série des Phénomènes
Lithographies — Jean Dubuffet is an illustrated book issued in Paris by Berggruen. It is catalogued more fully as Jean Dubuffet, lithographies: série des Phénomènes and also under the shortened title Dubuffet lithographies. The volume consists of 34 pages and measures 22 cm. It is catalogued as a book about Jean Dubuffet, the French painter and sculptor who named and first theorized art brut.
The work’s focus is announced by its title: it concerns Dubuffet’s lithographs and, more specifically, the series named in the subtitle as the Série des Phénomènes. The catalog record classifies the publication under Dubuffet himself, while the alternate title Dubuffet lithographies reinforces the identification of both artist and medium. The combination of an illustrated text and a compact format distinguishes the item as a small book devoted to this body of graphic work.
Jean Dubuffet was born on 31 July 1901 in Le Havre and died on 12 May 1985 in Paris 6e. The source also calls him a plasticien. It defines art brut as productions by marginals or mentally ill people—paintings, sculptures, and calligraphies—and states that Dubuffet recognized having been largely inspired by them himself.
He was the author of vigorous critiques of dominant culture, notably the essay Asphyxiante culture (1968), which created a polemic in the art world. For the first exhibition of his art brut collection, organized in 1949, he wrote the treatise L’Art brut préféré aux arts culturels. A landmark exhibition in liberated Paris at the galerie René Drouin was described as showing his works while he was still an unknown painter, and it provoked a veritable scandal.
A retrospective of 400 paintings, gouaches, drawings, and sculptures held at the Musée des arts décoratifs de Paris from 16 December 1960 to 25 February 1961 propelled him to the forefront of the artistic scene. The source calls him the French artist both most contested and most admired of the postwar period and says the event created the event of that beginning of the year. He became an inspirer of numerous artists, adepts of “art autre,” a variant of art brut, including Antoni Tàpies, as well as of artistic contestation such as the Spanish group Equipo Crónica.
His oeuvre is composed of paintings, assemblages often wrongly qualified as collages, sculptures, and monuments, the most spectacular of which are part of the ensemble L’Hourloupe (1962–1974), as well as architectures: la closerie Falbala and la villa Falbala. He was the subject of retrospectives at the palais Grassi in Venice and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. His personal collection—which since 1945 had grouped artists discovered in prisons, asylums, and marginals of all sorts—was then the property of the Compagnie de l’art brut founded in 1948. It was supposed to remain in Paris, but delays by the French administration led Dubuffet to accept the offer of Lausanne, Switzerland, where it was installed at the château de Beaulieu and definitively donated to the museum named the Collection de l’art brut.
Earlier Lithographic Albums
A separate album, Matière et mémoire, ou les lithographes à l’école, comprised a series of thirty-four proofs composed by Dubuffet from September to November 1944; it was preceded and “prefaced” by a text by Francis Ponge. It was published in November 1945 at the Atelier Fernand Mourlot and was pulled in only about sixty copies before the lithographic stone was destroyed. The source describes its relationship between text and image as inverse to that of the traditional illustrated book, because the image preexisted and the text was elaborated from the lithographs. Jean Paulhan took a non-negligible part in the elaboration of the common work.
Les Murs (1950) was published by Éditions du Livre in Paris and contained 15 lithographs by Dubuffet illustrating poems by Eugène Guillevic; the lithographs were printed at Mourlot in 1945. A described tête copy was on Japon impérial with four suites and 46 plates. The source states that these lithographs were printed at the Mourlot atelier in 1945 when Dubuffet was trying to master the process for the first time, and that their texture effects—“walls” before which some figures are silhouetted—already evoke studies he began in painting in 1946 and that would lead to the Texturologies (1958) and Matériologies (1960).
The Fondation Dubuffet statement notes that with Les Murs the process was the reverse of Matière et mémoire: Dubuffet measured himself for the first time against an already written text. Guillevic entrusted his poems to Dubuffet, and the treatment of the stone in the Matière et mémoire suite, of which the poet had seen some lithographs, incited him to call on the artist as soon as his manuscript was finished. Dubuffet returned to the Mourlot atelier to make these new lithographs between January and March 1945.
Another lithographic artist’s book in the source is Anvouaiaje par in ninbesil avec de zimaje. It contains 9 original lithographs, 6 in color, printed on Rives paper, and was issued in a limited edition of 20 copies on handmade paper. Its title is written in Dubuffet’s invented phonetic language, often associated with his experimental “Pataphonie”; the source says the title reflects a deliberate rejection of conventional academic language, turning words into a raw, instinctive, antibourgeois form. The lithographs are described as showing textured surfaces, primitive signs, stylized anthropomorphic figures, and a deliberately raw visual language. The source characterizes such publications as art objects in which text, image, paper, and language form an experimental universe, and says this work prefigures later developments in the artist’s book, concrete poetry, and avant-garde publishing.
Catalog Record Notes
The National Library of Australia record gives Bib ID 2293987. It notes that the item is in copyright, with a status determined as until 2071 [Creator Date of Death + 70 Years]; the material type is recorded as Literary Dramatic Musical, and the presumed latest date of the creator’s death is given as 2001. The record also includes a request note allowing the item to be viewed in the Library’s reading room.
