Jean Dubuffet
Le Chasseur, 1949

Artist
Jean Dubuffet

Title
Le Chasseur

Year of creation
1949

Technique and dimensions
oil on canvas, 88.8 x 116.4 cm

Year of acquisition
1987

Reference bottom left: J. Dubuffet / 49

Paul Klee had already discovered the chtonic, the “dark praise of the earth” (Werner Haftmann) in Emil Nolde's paintings, which is also inherent in Jean Dubuffet's “Art Brut” painting. From his “children’s doodles” and experiences with the art of the mentally ill, deep threads of the anti-academic Dubuffet lead back to Paul Klee’s profound, highly artificial “infantilism”.

In the course of his development, the musician and puppeteer Dubuffet repeatedly questioned painting, gave it up at times and turned to it again in 1942 after an interlude as a wine wholesaler in Le Havre. Since 1945, he increasingly mixed the pure oil paints with materials such as tar, sand, ash and charcoal in order to allow the physical presence of his imagined figures to emerge in relief from the cracked paint surfaces: “He crusts the paint substances, smears them wide, dries them out until “The cracked face of the earth emerges from the matter of mud, a chtonic being emerges or a pre-human landscape” (Werner Haftmann).

The picture Le Chasseur, painted in 1949, belongs to the cycle of “Paysages grotesques”, the grotesque landscapes that were created after Dubuffet returned from his last trip to the Sahara at the beginning of 1949. Winding paths and paths lead nowhere: the odd hunter finds himself besieged by spherical trees, the lines, thrown out like lassos, keep the figurative and topographical elements in the orbit of mutual entanglement. Dubuffet developed "a completely new type of image in these landscapes, a kind of overview landscape that dissolves the succession of things into a seemingly naive juxtaposition that conveyed a simultaneity and presence previously unknown in art." (Dieter Honisch, 1989).

A scrappy one Painting, applied impasto with a spatula, in warm sandy tones, with stripes of red and blue across it, scratched with traces that run into the sand. In the middle, the human being, caught without orientation in the labyrinth of nature and “unnaturalness”.

I

wanted to show that what many consider ugly and what they no longer see also has its wonders." (Jean Dubuffet) On the occasion of the club's anniversary, the opinions on the “anniversary purchase” were predominantly positive, but by no means unanimous. The board saw the painting, which came from the Rothschild collection, at the “art” in Basel, and it spontaneously thrilled Pietzsch, Stober, and Marx and rough. The price that was called for: 1.8 million DM. Walther Scharf, on the other hand, “considered this Dubuffet to be a second-rate work and could not share the enthusiasm of the others for this work” (Peter Raue), he considered the price to be extremely excessive. As a “birthday present” at the end of August 1987, Peter Raue presented director Dieter Honisch with Dubuffet’s Le Chasseur as well as Jean Fautrier’s Swirls, two masterpieces of French Informel worth a total of 2.5 million DM. Roland März