A city rediscovered
Paris Circus is the name Jean Dubuffet gave to a cycle of paintings made in 1961 and 1962, after his return to the French capital from the countryside at Vence, where he had lived since 1955. The Paris he had left was a war-scarred and melancholy city; the one he found in 1961 had been transformed, its gloom replaced by optimism and cosmopolitan bustle. That new atmosphere had an immediate and explosive effect on his work. Where his paintings of the preceding Vence years had taken nature as their field of investigation, the Paris Circus pictures turned to city life itself: the teeming boulevards, shops and boutiques of the capital, and the animated crowds who fill them. The cycle marked the beginning of a new phase in Dubuffet’s work and pointed forward to the Hourloupe cycle that occupied him from 1962 to 1974.
The world of the boulevards
The subject of the series is urban commotion. Its inhabitants are pedestrians, drivers and shopkeepers, drawn as a bustling panorama of streets in which people, cars and lettering jostle one another. The figures appear to swell and sway, and each seems absorbed in his or her own small, hieratic act, giving the crowds something of the compulsive energy of trapped animals. Individual works from the cycle take the names of actual Paris streets and places — Trinité-Champs-Elysées, Rue Boissy d’Anglas (au Boudin Mystique), Maison Fondée, Légende du Bonheur — and treat them as dense microcosms rather than as views. The paintings reconnect with the Paris and Métro scenes Dubuffet had painted in the early 1940s, though the texture, the handling of space and the arrangement of figures are markedly more complex.
Flat panoramas and deliberate awkwardness
Visually, the cycle is built on kaleidoscopic reds, blues, greens and yellows and on a flattened, panoramic organisation of the canvas. In Trinité-Champs-Elysées, for example, the crowd, traffic and street signage are compressed into a single flat pattern of interlocking forms, with distance collapsed and a bird’s-eye viewpoint that crops the figures along the bottom edge — compositional devices that recall the conventions of naïve art. This is a deliberate pictorial vigour rather than a polished one: the art historian Max Loreau described the effect as “totally non-intentional,” and the cycle as a whole as a sort of whirlwind, magnetic and extravagant, a restless source ready to throw off flakes of chaos. The paintings carry forward the anti-academic, Art Brut conviction Dubuffet had championed, and he had long held that only solitary psychopaths and mediums could trace the real path of artistic creation; the Paris Circus figures, in Loreau’s account, allowed him to see a little more clearly into his own aspirations.
From matériologie to the Hourloupe
The cycle is best understood as a break as much as a continuation. Coming after the Texturologies and Matériologies of the Vence years — where Dubuffet had celebrated life on a minute scale through dust-like surfaces and thick, worked matter — the Paris Circus put aside those enigmatic material researches in favour of city effervescence and humanity on a monumental scale. The transition can be seen within a single canvas: Légende du Bonheur, painted on 7 September 1961, is the first of Dubuffet’s Personnages des Légendes and one of the few executed on canvas; part of the Paris Circus cycle, it opened the way to the Hourloupe. Rue Boissy d’Anglas (au Boudin Mystique), made in the middle of the winter of 1961 and shown by the Daniel Cordier gallery a few blocks from the street it names, likewise belongs to this moment of exuberant, polychromatic city painting.
Documentation, standing and influence
The cycle is recorded in the nineteenth fascicle of the catalogue of Dubuffet’s works, edited by Max Loreau and itself titled Paris Circus; Trinité-Champs-Elysées, painted in March 1961, appears there as catalogue number 24. Auction commentary has described the cycle as widely regarded as Dubuffet’s absolute masterpiece, and individual pictures from it are noted as rare on the market — Maison Fondée being among the few major works of the series still in private hands, while Rue Boissy d’Anglas (au Boudin Mystique) was first acquired by the collector Jean Planque, who kept it for many years. The cycle’s influence has also been traced across the Atlantic: Sophie Berrebi’s study of Dubuffet and Claes Oldenburg between 1959 and 1962 argues that Oldenburg anticipated his own critical reception by claiming Dubuffet’s influence and turning it into a creative tool, transposing and rewriting Dubuffet’s postwar vision of the common man for early Pop art, with the Paris Circus paintings serving to illustrate a notion of influence as productive anachronism.
