Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985), Trime Burine. Painted in May, 1961. Estimate: €2,000,000-3,000,000. © Christie’s Images Limited 2016.

PARIS.- In its traditional contemporary art evening sale, Christie’s will offer an important painting by Jean Dubuffet coming from the personal collection of Marina Picasso. This painting was realised in 1961, at the very beginning of the Paris Circus period. This is the year when Jean Dubuffet returns to Paris after seven years spent in the countryside of Vence. The artist will get back to a completely different city since it was in the middle of “Trente Glorieuses”. At that time, Paris was full of energy, people were thirsty for life, making new discoveries and enjoying the prosperous city. Jean Dubuffet, inspired by this new life, began a new series of vibrant paintings, going back to colour and the human figure. This would be Paris Circus, of which Trime Burine is a brilliant exemple.  

There are no fewer than sixteen figures here, dancing and twirling around as if levitating over the entire surface of the painting. Their gaze directed here, there and everywhere, they seem busy, in a hurry: at the bottom, one of them, arms extended, seems to be hastening in who knows what direction known only to himself; another, top right, has his arms open as if to grasp an object for which he suddenly has a compelling need. All the urgency of these carefree boom years can be seen here. You can see at a glance how happy they all are and understand the euphoria they are feeling. It must be said that the Trente Glorieuses were decades of full employment and major projects in construction and industry. People everywhere worked extraordinarily hard and carved out their own path. 

Dubuffet too, worked extraordinarily hard and carved out his own path. The thick texture he used on his canvas vibrates like the life itself that he sought to depict. Here he chose to use a pure white, with an almost creamy appearance, whose crushed, furrowed, scratched and scraped surface reveals glimpses of a blue with turquoise tones. From this intensely bright background, whose decorative quality seems, in a number of ways, to anticipate the abstractions of Gerhard Richter, brown skinned figures spring out, enhanced by orange, reds and dabs of pink and dark blue that emphasise their contours – employing materials and textures in ways he devised during his years in the country, Dubuffet retained the all-over approach to composition, discarding the notions of foreground and background and letting his figures wander around to the edges of the paintings until they sometimes appear to want to escape. The determined observation of natural forms, of the irregular way in which soil, bark and stones are thrown into relief also infuses the works of Paris Circus, and are felt in Trime Burine by the way Dubuffet here treats the human figure as a material: “it led Dubuffet to perfect the handling of the hesitant, clumsy or careless line, and to strengthen his conviction that such faults, far from spoiling the work, could effectively help to ignite a frenzied activity in it and invigorate the dance to its maximum energy” (M. Loreau, “Of all the paintings that make up Paris Circus…”, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Centre Pompidou, Jean Dubuffet, September-December 2001, p. 229). 

Lastly, the history of Trime Burine is part of its exceptional character: owned by Marina Picasso, the work originally came from the Daniel Cordier gallery, who was Jean Dubuffet’s tireless defender in the post-war years. As such, it is central to a series of major works made between the end of May and mid-June 1961, the most emblematic examples of which are held by some of the most important public collections in the world, including Guette éclarcie, completed on the same day as Trime Burine (Fondation Dubuffet, Paris), Vire-Volte (Tate Gallery, London) and Le commerce prospère (Museum of Modern Art, New York).