‘We came back from [the Sahara] absolutely cleansed of all the intoxications, really refreshed and renewed, as well as enriched in the ways of savoir-vivre’ – Jean Dubuffet

A vivid field of raw graphic sensation, Arabe sur son chameau (1947) is an exceptional early example of Jean Dubuffet’s revolutionary cycle of works inspired by his time in the Algerian desert. A lone figure sits on the hump of a dromedary camel, their lively outlines carved into thick, reddish paint like ancient graffiti on a rockface. They are surrounded by a richly marked terrain of golden ochre and earthy hues, blazing in the heat of the sun which hangs in a strip of bright, pale blue sky behind. Far from the constraints of Western tradition, the sands of Africa and their nomadic inhabitants had a profound impact on Dubuffet’s practice. His nascent interest in uncultivated, unprocessed visual languages—a phenomenon he termed art brut—was amplified by his engagement with the sprawling dunes and the tribal lifestyle of the Bedouin people. Embedded in the textures of his paintings like footprints in the sand, his figures became potent symbols of elemental wisdom: charged with the mystery of prehistoric markings, their forms embodied the deep relationship between man and nature. Merging perfectly with his environment, the present work’s wandering protagonist bears witness to the powerful union between figure and landscape, body and earth, that would go on to drive the development of Dubuffet’s practice.
Arabe sur son chameau was made shortly after Dubuffet and his wife Lili made their first trip to the small oasis of El Goléa, Algeria, in February 1947. Driven to its warmer climes by coal restrictions during a freezing Parisian winter, they returned periodically over the next two years. In the dreary aftermath of the Second World War, the desert offered the artist ‘a bath of simplicity’—an opportunity to escape the confines of convention and strip back his art to its most embryonic form. For Dubuffet, who had spent the past few years observing the art of children, psychics and mental health patients in a bid to liberate his hand from the teachings of the Western culture, the forms of representation he found in the Sahara resonated deeply with his aesthetic ambitions. In particular, the fluid tactility of sand—its ability to conjure forms and dissolve into nothing in the blink of an eye—had a great impact on his artistic outlook. As he later suggested, ‘Perhaps it was the time I spent in the deserts of White Africa that sharpened my taste ... for the little, the almost nothing, and especially, in my art, for the landscapes where one finds only the formless’ (J. Dubuffet, quoted in M. Glimcher, Jean Dubuffet: Towards An Alternative Reality, New York 1987, p. 9). Among the endless, ever-changing spaces of the Saharan landscape, the mind was free to roam, to expand, to reinvent itself: in a world that bore the recent scars of war, the desert’s wide-open planes offered an opportunity for spiritual rebirth. As horizons of possibility unfold around him, the present work’s splendid rider celebrates the primal power of mankind anew.