1960s Jean Dupuy Abstract Acrylic on Canvas, Framed

Description

Jean Dupuy RARE Abstract Minimalist Acrylic on Canvas, Circa 1960s, Framed.

White wooden frame. Signed on the back.

We believe … more Jean Dupuy RARE Abstract Minimalist Acrylic on Canvas, Circa 1960s, Framed.

White wooden frame. Signed on the back.

We believe this to be a 1960s work (of which there are very few remaining in existence) because before leaving France for New York in 1967 he destroyed most of his early works by throwing them in to the river Seine.

In 2016, before Dupuy died, a painting from this collection was sold for around $11,000.

Dupuy dripped acrylic paint of various colors in unidirectional lines on smooth white grounds. But upon closer inspection, Dupuy’s secret was revealed. These canvases were not at all the product of some wannabe Pollock. In fact, each “drip” had been carefully painted in, the immediacy of the gesture being a calculated illusion in which a photograph of an originally much smaller work on paper had been projected at large scale onto a canvas that Dupuy then meticulously filled in with color. As a result, the work has much more in common with that of other deconstructors of the pictorial mark working in Paris in the early to mid-1960s, people like Simon Hantaï, Martin Barré, or even Daniel Buren, than it does with art informel.

Jean Dupuy (born November 22, 1925-2021) was French-born in Moulins in the Allier. He was a pioneer of work combining art and technology. He worked in the fields of conceptual art, performance art, painting, installations, sculptures and video art. In the 1970s he curated many performance art events involving different artists from Fluxus, the New York's avant-garde and neo-dada scene. Many of his works are part of important collections such as Centre Pompidou in Paris and MAMAC of Nice. Dupuy started his career as an abstract painter, but in 1967 he destroyed most of his works by throwing them into the Seine. On moving to New York he exhibited his installation Heart Beats Dust at the Museum of Modern Art and Brooklyn Museum, as part of the 1968 exhibition "The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age". His 1971 installation FEWA FUEL was made in collaboration with engineers at Cummins. In 1974 he organised the "Soup & Tart" performance event, which included contributions from Philip Glass, Gordon Matta-Clark, Joan Jonas, Richard Serra and Yvonne Rainer. From 1976 he worked in close collaboration with George Maciunas. His works for Judson Church, Artists Space, P.S.1 and the Musée du Louvre were created in collaboration with artists such as Nam June Paik, Claes Oldenburg, Charlemagne Palestine, George Maciunas, Carolee Schneemann, Joan Jonas, Richard Serra, Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Filliou, Charles Dreyfus, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass and Charlotte Moorman. In 1978 he invited 40 artists to contribute "One Minute Performances" in front of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. The event was held on a Sunday, the day of free admission to the museum. In 2003 he had a solo exhibition at the Emily Harvey Foundation, where he exhibited anagrammatic texts and works made out of found stones.

“As a young painter in postwar Paris, Jean Dupuy witnessed the rise of musique concrète and electronic music while showing regularly and frequenting new galleries such as Denise René, Iris Clert, etc. By 1960, his close friendships were less with painters than with sound poets and performance-oriented artists—some from Nouveau Réalisme, others, then unclassifiable, soon to join Fluxus—including François Dufrêne, Brion Gysin, Bernard Heidsieck, and Robert Filliou. Dupuy persevered ambivalently with painting into the 1960s before creating a breakout series of ironic abstractions verging on Pop. Based on projected enlargements of elongated drips seemingly arrested in midair and transposed in acrylic onto canvas, these painterly quips questioned the fetishization of the expressive mark in the then-dominant ‘abstrait lyrique’. The travesty was not lost on the guardians of that increasingly compromised “style,” including Dupuy’s erstwhile mentor Jean Degottex, who never got over it. In 1967, Dupuy tossed all his paintings into the Seine and departed for New York.” Julia Robinson in Artforum, Summer 2021 less