One of the, fullest, most complete and best gouaches by the artist ever to come to auction, Le Bon Marché I belongs to a small group of works on paper from Jean Dubuffet’s most highly esteemed and consequential series: Paris Circus. An exquisite work capturing the energetic spirit of the whole series, its companion work, Le Bon Marché II (fig. 2), hangs in the permanent co🅷l๊lection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Executed in early 1961, the present work was inspired by the pulsating heartbeat of urban life that Dubuffet witnessed on his return to Paris after several years spent in the countryside at Vence. Dubuffet had left Paris in 1955, abandoning a war-scarred and melancholy city. However, when he returned to the French capital in 1961, he found a city completely different to the one he had left behind. Optimism and cosmopolitan bustle had replaced the gloom and despondency that had formerly prevailed. This new vibrant atmosphere was intoxicating for the artist and had an immediate and explosive effect on his work, culminating in the exuberant Paris Circus pictures, which today rank amongst h𝔍is most acclaimed and sought-after 🅷works.

Inspired by the city’s teeming market places and animated street-vendors, Le Bon Marché I depicts a quintessentially Parisian panorama humming with life and movement.  In this jubilant theatre of city life, painted in kaleidescopic pinks, reds, blues and yellows, the market-goers appear to swell and sway, ennervated by the joie-de-vivre of a burgeoning era of prosperity that had usurped the post-war era of rationing and shortages. Amid the chaotic hubbub of commerce, we identify vendors of silk, wool, ribbons and lace, and to the right of centre a smiling tradesman ringing the cash till on a profitable day’s business. Where formerly - for instance in his Texturologies executed in Vence - nature had been the source of his investigations and inspiration, now city life itself comes to dominate. Where he had formerly celebrated life on a minute sc♐ale, scrutinizing patches of soil and details of walls, he now celebrated humanity on a monumental scale.

The bustling panorama of the present work resembles the views of Paris that Dubuffet painted in the early 1940s, although in the interim city life has become more complex and rich. In Le Bon Marché I the texture, space and deployment of figures have become significantly more complex resulting in a jumbled view of the marketplace in which people, architectural space and lettering make up a flat pattern of imbricated forms perfectly distilling the chaos of the scene. This flattened perspectival plane, compressed distance and unnerving bird’s-eye viewpoint which ruthlessly crops the figures along the bottom edge, are all compositional devices redolent of naïve children’s art and most importantly the raw and unfettered vision of psychotic art that so vitally informed Dubuffet’s entire oeuvre. Categorically opposed to ‘cultivated’ art taught in schools and museums, Dubuffet denounced the selective and repressive character of official culture. First among a group of post-war artists to dismiss asphyxiating convention, Dubuffet nurtured the concept of art informel, a spontaneous and i🎃maginative art that rejected any eff♛ect of harmony or beauty in a bid to break free from the shackles of tradition.

In Le Bon Marché I the heads of the individuals – viewed frontally or in profile – appear as bubbles, disproportionate and child-like, each wide open face conversely a closed and concealed world in itself. Dubuffet's interest in sound and music, which he especially developed over the next two years, intrudes into Le Bon Marché I – the imagined sounds of the street-vendors’ patter and the bartering for goods is almost palp🌟able. The legible inscriptions, drawn from the stall signs and advertisements of the new economy, consist of plays on words which have associative as well as formal functions. In their relationship to the figures they recall Dubuffet’s interest in early fifteenth-century woodcuts in which pictures and didactic text are combined in a single print, a tradition that continues in popular imagery into the twentieth century with the comic-strip. This fusion of low-brow, ‘base’ media into the sacrosanct realm of Fine Art is consistent with Dubuffet’s irreverent, anti-cultural perspective and provides an interesting European analogue to contemporaneous developments in the nascent American Pop movement, particularly in the work of Claes Oldenburg. Despite the child-like reduction and simplification of the human forms in this painting, the density of detail and activity is itself incredible, the product not of the untrained but of a consistent and assiduous artistic project.