The sale offers two paintings by Jean Dubuffet on behalf of the Museum, each estimated to achieve $2.5/3.5 million. Bursting with vibrancy, Le Messager presents one of the most accomplished personnages from the artist’s esteemed Paris Circus series. Dating from October 1961, the year marked the beginning of a new cycle for Dubuffet when he arrived in Paris from Vence. Having escaped the battered atmosphere of the post-war capital in the mid-1950s, Dubuffet returned to find a city teeming with people, energy and color. Influenced by his new surroundings, the artist quickly abandoned the earthy, melancholic works that had characterized his output to make way for theatricality and joie de vivre. Featuring a sensory overload of joyful colors and shapes, the present work bears witness to Dubuffet’s masterful handling of paint application and structural composition.

Executed in 1963 at the peak of Dubuffet’s artistic powers, Rue Tournique Bourlique exemplifies the painterly skill and imaginative enthusiasm that define his highly esteemed L’Hourloupe cycle. Started in the summer of 1962, the L’Hourloupe cycle was so rich in creativity that it became Dubuffet’s preoccupation for the following twelve years. The early L’Hourloupe paintings featured much of the same subject matter as his Paris Circus street scenes, but represented a shift in Dubuffet’s aesthetic iconography – although placed within the iconographic context of the Paris Circus, Rue Tournique Bourlique and the L’Hourloupe series is a plunge into a fantasy parallel universe within the artist’s extraordinary imagination.

The Contemporary Art Evening Sale will also feature a historic masterpiece by Carlo Mollino – a highly important and unique Dining Table (estimate $1.5/2 million). This extraordinary work was created by Mollino in 1950 for the Brooklyn Museum’s seminal exhibition, Italy At Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today, which was organized as an international effort to showcase the breadth and ingenuity of contemporary Italian Design in the post-war reconstruction period. The Table stands as a masterwork that is as important historically as it is ambitious artistically, representing one of the most important singular works created by Mollino during his illustrious career. Transcending the definition of a utilitarian form, this Table is a tour-de-force in the technical ingenuity of its molded plywood technique and the synthesis of its organic and anthropomorphic formal qualities. The Table traveled to eleven different museum venues in 1950, and was gifted to the Brooklyn Museum by the Italian government at the end of the exhibition tour. Aside from its original international debut and select exhibition venues in recent years, this great icon has been largely unseen by the public for decades.