NEW YORK.- Four large-scale sculptures by Jean Dubuffet were installed this week along Park Avenue in New York City between 54th and 57th Streets where they will remain on public view through November 15, 2003.  This public exhibition of artwork is made possible by The Fund for Park Avenue and New York City’s Parks & Recreation Department in association with PaceWildenstein, New York and the Waddington Galleries, London.

This is the second installation of Dubuffet’s work on Park Avenue.  The first, a single sculpture entitled "Milord la Chamarre," was on view in 1974 on the plaza in front of the landmark Seagram Building at 52nd Street on Park Avenue.

Dubuffet’s sculpture has also been a fixture in lower Manhattan at One Chase Manhattan Plaza since 1972.  David Rockefeller commissioned and then gifted to Chase "Group of Four Trees," a five-story (43 ft.) sculpture, as a permanent landscape for the plaza, a space spanning two city blocks.

Dubuffet conceived the four sculptures currently on display along Park Avenue -- "Redingoton," "Calamuchon," "Tour aux membrures," and "Tour aux scriptions" -- the following year.  They were cast last year in accordance with the Dubuffet Foundation, the artist’s estate and with the same fabricator who realized Dubuffet’s other monumental sculptures, such as "Group of Four Trees."

Jean Dubuffet (b. 1901 - d. 1985) was one of the most enigmatic, influential, and prolific artists of the 20th century.  A student of the Academie Julian in Paris in 1918, Dubuffet left school to pursue his own study of art and developed an appreciation for literature, language, and music. After fulfilling his military service in France, traveling, and pursuing an occupation in his family’s wine business, Dubuffet returned full-time to painting in 1942 and exhibited in American galleries and museums shortly thereafter.

Like many of his generation in Europe in the wake of World War II, Dubuffet sought artistic authenticity not within the confines of formal European tradition, but rather he looked to those on the margins of art: the socially isolated and to a limited degree, the art of children.  Influenced by those perspectives on art, Dubuffet incorporated similar visual language into his own work.  Dubuffet referred to this painting style as "Art Brut".  He coined the term, a predecessor to outsider art, in the late 1940s.

The sculptures on view along Park Avenue are from the artist’s "Hourloupe" cycle, a series of works characterized by the use of red, white, and blue, with sinuous black lines.  Dubuffet believed that art should be a matter of permanent revolution and the Hourloupe works, ranging from figures and towers to architectural structures, created an alternative reality.  "The cycle itself is conceived as the figuration of a world other than our own or, if you prefer, parallel to ours, and it is this world which bears the name L’Hourloupe," the artist remarked about work from the "Hourloupe" cycle in 1972 at the unveiling of the Chase Manhattan Plaza installation.

In his lifetime Jean Dubuffet was the subject of twelve major museum retrospectives including The Museum of Modern Art (1962), which traveled to The Art Institute of Chicago and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Tate Gallery, London (1966); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1966); Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas (1966), which traveled to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Musee des Beaux-Arts, Montreal (1969-70); and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1973, 1981).