Paris

B68262-2 — <p>Paris 1947. Poster with manuscript text and portrait drawing at the center printed on salmon-colored wove stock in offset lithography. 580 x 400 mm. 22 7/8 x 15 5/8 inches. 2 cancelled taxe daffichage stamps affixed at blank portion at lower left as usual. The extremely rare graphically riveting poster for one of the most radical exhibitions in postwar France Dubuffets art brut portraits of Parisian intellectuals at the Galerie René Drouin in 1948. Initially the series was based on personalities in the literary salon of Florence Gould to which Dubuffet had been introduced by Jean Paulhan including Paulhan himself Pierre Benoit Marcel Jouhandeau and Paul Léautaud; it was then extended to include other friends and acquaintances such as Antonin Artaud Francis Ponge Henri Michaux and Jean Fautrier. Dubuffets aggressive graffiti-style caricatural portraits of 1946-47 are in part caricature in the simplest sense a mocking variant on the pantheons of artists that had become sober clichés of even radical French art as in Surrealist group portraits. But Dubuffets portraits manifest the revolt and revulsion of intellectuals: mental energy and will are now all that matter and the body can indeed must. go to hell. His writers and intellectuals are pathetic monsters their features reduced to pop-eyed scrawls their aplomb prodded into jumping-jack spasms. Yet since grotesque harshness and imbalanced disturbance are in Dubuffets view tokens of authenticity to be portrayed by him with scar-like contours and inept anatomy is perversely to be made glamorous High and Low. A few indetectible very short clean marginal tears mended on verso; a bright unfolded copy.</p> Paris, 1947.