New to the Olla Art collection is a signed and numbered lithograph by Jean Dubuffet, made on the occasion of the second edition of the Festival d’Automne, held from 28 September to 20 December 1973 in the Grand Palais in Paris. Festival d’Automne is an annual festival in Paris, featuring theatre, music, dance, visual arts and film. It is still organized and attracts many thousands of visitors.
Coucou Bazar
The 1973 festival featured a retrospective of Dubuffet’s work and a ‘spectacle’ by Dubuffet, entitled Coucou Bazar. The retrospective had already run at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, from April to July 1973. The ‘spectacle’ was a choreographic animation in the form of a series of tableaux vivants, conceived by Jean Dubuffet and performed by the American theatre group Liquid Theatre. The tableaux vivants were accompanied by electronic music (Ilhan Miraroğlu) and lighting effects (Bruce Bassman). Especially for Coucou Bazar, Dubuffet created so-called ‘practicables’, paintings on wheels.
Hourloupe
For the lithograph, Dubuffet used the style he called ‘hourloupe’. This style arose from a doodle he drew while on the telephone. He was inspired by the flowing lines that demarcate surfaces and suggest movement. For his hourloupe-style works, Dubuffet – in addition to black and white – mainly used the colours blue and red. This can be seen in the lithograph.
Dubuffet believed that the hourloupe style reflected how images arise in the mind; a physical representation of a spiritual process. In 1972 he stated: ‘With my works in the hourloupe style, I try to create an alternative reality, a parallel world.’
Painted reinforced concrete plus glass fiber reinforced epoxy resin, approx. 600 m2
Edifices
Dubuffet worked in the hourloupe style from 1962 to 1974. Around 1966 he switched from canvases to three-dimensional versions in hourloupe style. He did this to give his work more scope; later he called them monumental paintings.
In 1967 he started his architectural projects, which he called ‘édifices’ and which initially were designed as a scale model. A large-scale realization of one of these models can be found in the garden of Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo (the Netherlands) – the recently restored Jardin d’émail.