Field notes — Northeast, summer 2026

All I could see was Dubuffet

Five collections between Manhattan and the Berkshires, and one potted Monstera that gave itself away in a window.

L'Hourloupe

In July 1962, on the telephone, Jean Dubuffet doodled with a red ballpoint on a scrap of paper. The cells he drew became a visual language he worked in for the next twenty-three years.

The rules are simple enough to state and hard to exhaust. Forms are divided into irregular cells. Every cell is bounded by a black contour of uniform weight. The cells are filled with white, with flat red, with flat blue, or with dense parallel hatching — and with nothing else.

By the mid-1960s Dubuffet was building the cells outward into three dimensions, cutting them in polystyrene and casting them in epoxy resin painted with polyurethane. The results are not sculptures of things so much as things that have been overtaken by the drawing. A tree, a figure, a doorway, all of them still legible, all of them converted.

Five collections

What each of these museums actually holds, and — just as usefully — what it doesn't. Of the five, only one has Dubuffet sculpture in any quantity. Two have no Dubuffet at all.

Museum of Modern Art — New York, NY7 sculptures

Study for Tower with Figures

Étude pour la Tour aux figures

The largest Dubuffet sculpture MoMA holds, and the clearest statement of what the Hourloupe became once it left the canvas: a walk-in cellular tower nearly ten feet high. It is the study for Tour aux figures, the monumental version eventually built on the Île Saint-Germain outside Paris and completed in 1988, after Dubuffet's death.

Date
Summer 1968
Medium
Polyurethane paint on epoxy
Size
299 cm high × 183 cm diameter
Credit
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. M. Riklis
Accession
1137.1969
Also here
Cup of Tea, II (1966) · Accumulation with Bread (1968) · The Anachronism (1973) · three 1954 slag figures · 1,439 Dubuffet objects in total, mostly prints

Wadsworth Atheneum — Hartford, CTOn view

Le Lion Rampant

The Rampant Lion

A genuine Hourloupe sculpture, cast in polyurethane in the middle of the cycle, its white cells bounded in black exactly as the paintings are. Barely a metre tall — and hanging in Hartford, which makes it the one Hourloupe sculpture in this group you can actually go and stand in front of.

Date
1969
Medium
Cast polyurethane and acrylic paint
Size
39¾ × 20⅝ × 12⅝ in.
Credit
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine, Sr.
Accession
1978.115
On view
Yes — seen in the galleries, summer 2026

Storm King Art Center — New Windsor, NYNot what you'd expect

Barbe au Menton

Beard on the Chin

Storm King is five hundred acres of monumental outdoor sculpture, so the reasonable assumption is a Dubuffet standing in a field. There isn't one. Its only Dubuffet is thirteen inches of papier-mâché from the Barbes series, three years before the Hourloupe began — acquired in 1962, when Storm King was still collecting at easel scale for its indoor galleries. It is in storage.

Date
1959–60
Medium
Papier-mâché
Size
13 × 6 × 4 in.
Credit
Gift of the Ralph E. Ogden Foundation
Accession
1962.9
On view
No

The Clark Art Institute — Williamstown, MANo holdings

Nothing in the collection

A search of the Clark's collection database returns zero Dubuffet records against 10,189 objects, which fits a collecting scope that stops at the early twentieth century. One Dubuffet has hung on these walls: Confiture matière lumière (Texturologie LIII), 1958, for ten weeks in 2014 — on loan from the National Gallery of Art, which owns it.

Records
0 of 10,189
Scope
Renaissance to early 20th century
Loan show
Make It New, 2 Aug – 13 Oct 2014

MASS MoCA — North Adams, MADoesn't collect

Nothing, by design

No Dubuffet — and no permanent collection for one to sit in. MASS MoCA works through commissions and long-term loans measured in decades rather than acquisitions, which is why LeWitt, Turrell, Bourgeois and Kiefer are installed there without being owned there.

Model
Commissions and long-term loans
Collection
None

The window

I caught the reflection of the plant in a window, and all I could see was Dubuffet.

A week of museums will do that. The glass flattened the plant into a silhouette, dropped the depth out of it, and left the white variegation sitting in hard-edged patches against the dark — cells, essentially, waiting for someone to draw the contour around them.

The plant is a Monstera deliciosa, still climbing its moss pole. What it has is heavy white sectoral variegation, which is the whole reason the reflection read the way it did.

Conversions

Six attempts at putting the plant through the Hourloupe. Four were generated by an image model working from the photograph; two were built from geometry, cell by cell. Each is labelled with which.

Conversion, tall

Image model · full palette

Closest to the plant's real proportions — the columnar habit, the leaves climbing the pole, the deep glazed planter. Stylistically it drifts: the leaves are painted rather than celled.

Conversion, spreading

Image model · full palette

The better Dubuffet of the pair. Confident cell network, resin volumes, real cast shadows. It invented a squat spherical pot the plant does not have.

Restricted palette, amoeboid

Image model · black, white, green

The truest cell structure of the four — irregular, lobed, every cell different. The leaves gave up their cells to get there, and fenestrated of their own accord.

Restricted palette, tall

Image model · black, white, green

Held the palette and the proportions. Read "jigsaw" too literally and gave the planter interlocking puzzle tabs, which Dubuffet never did.

Tessellation, full palette

Built from geometry · full palette

Every part is a real polygon, tessellated by Voronoi diagram and clipped to its own outline. Seeded separately per leaf, so no two repeat.

Tessellation, restricted

Built from geometry · black, white, green

The same geometry with red and blue removed and the green weighting raised. The variegation carries the colour alone.