Jean Dubuffet’s L’Hourloupe: From Doodle to Architecture

ART & CULTURE · PARIS

Reading time: 9 min

A red ballpoint pen, a telephone call, and a decade later a 13-metre fibreglass sculpture standing outside a Gordon Bunshaft tower in Lower Manhattan. Jean Dubuffet’s L’Hourloupe cycle is usually read as a painting style. Opera Gallery Paris’s fortieth-anniversary retrospective made the case that it was always closer to an architectural proposition, and the works on the walls, one of them a fragment of an actual building, showed the working.

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Opera Gallery Paris marked the fortieth anniversary of Jean Dubuffet’s death with L’Hourloupe et son sillage (1962-1982), a retrospective devoted to the cycle that occupied the last two decades of the artist’s working life. The exhibition ran from 16 October to 12 November 2025, timed to Paris Art Week and overlapping with Art Basel Paris, and was curated jointly by Gilles Dyan, the gallery’s founder and chairman, and Marion Petitdidier, director of its Paris space.

The show gathered works on paper, paintings, a painted cutout from Dubuffet’s 1973 theatre piece Coucou Bazar, and late collage from the final years of the cycle, drawing on Max Loreau’s catalogue raisonné of Dubuffet’s output to trace the full arc from the first automatic drawings to the fragmented, chance-based compositions Dubuffet was still making in 1982, three years before his death.

The instinct with a show like this is to describe L’Hourloupe as a distinctive graphic style, all red, blue, black and white cellular forms, and stop there. That undersells what actually happened to it. Within ten years of its first appearance, the same visual language had left the page entirely and become full-scale architecture and public sculpture, including one piece built to stand in the plaza of a bank tower designed by one of the twentieth century’s most rigorous modernists. The Opera Gallery retrospective, whether or not it set out to, told that story too.

What the exhibition actually showed

Six works anchored the exhibition, spanning the full twenty years of the cycle. Personnage I-X (Pour ‘Mordicus’), a group of ink drawings from 1962, captured the style at its point of origin: loose, hatched figures built from continuous, wandering lines. Passe cortège (La Procession), an oil on canvas from 1965, showed the vocabulary at full scale and in colour, a procession of interlocking cellular forms rendered in Dubuffet’s signature red, blue and black.

Échec à l’être, from 1971, was the exhibition’s most unusual object: a painted cutout, one of the 175 large-format “practicables” Dubuffet built for Coucou Bazar, his 1973 stage piece. Later works traced the cycle’s final phase. An untitled felt-tip and collage piece from 1979, Site aléatoire avec 6 personnages (1982, acrylic and paper collage) and Site au Défunt (1982), from the Sites Aléatoires series, showed the style breaking down into fragments, ideogram-like figures scattered across abstracted ground, closer to a private notation system than a picture.

Between those points, the exhibition’s structure followed the cycle’s own internal chronology: L’Hourloupe I and II (1962-1974) as the foundational body of drawing, painting, sculpture and ceramic; Roman Burlesque and Sites Tricolores (1974-1975); the child-like coloured pencil drawings of Crayonnages (1974); the rapid, improvised paintings of Lieux Abrégés (1975); the assembled, memory-based compositions of Théâtres de Mémoire (1975-1978); the acrylic Partitions of 1980; and the final Psycho-Sites (1981) and Sites Aléatoires (1982).

The line on the phone

The cycle has a precise, well-documented origin. In July 1962, Dubuffet began doodling with a red ballpoint pen during telephone calls, letting the pen wander across scraps of paper while he talked. He barred the resulting drawings with red and blue stripes, and found in the half-automatic results a vocabulary he wanted to pursue at scale: continuous black outlines, cells filled with flat colour or hatching, and no reference to real-world light, perspective or proportion. Dubuffet’s stated aim, consistent with the direction he had been pushing since the 1940s, was to build a pictorial world derived entirely from his own invention rather than from observation.

He named it himself, and the name repays attention. L’Hourloupe is a coinage, and Dubuffet built it from several sources at once: the verbs hurler (to howl or shout) and hululer (to hoot, as an owl does), the word loup (wolf), an echo of Riquet à la houppe, the tufted hero of a Charles Perrault fairy tale, and Guy de Maupassant’s 1887 horror story Le Horla, about an unseen presence that gradually possesses its narrator. There is also a nod to entourloupe, French slang for a dirty trick. The word carries a slightly feral, faintly sinister charge that the paintings do not obviously have on first look, and that is arguably the point: a style built on automatic drawing and chance procedure, named after words for howling, wolves and possession, rather than anything decorative.

The philosopher Hubert Damisch, writing about the cycle, called it one in which Dubuffet’s entire artistic project is summed up. Read against what came next, that claim holds up better than it might sound. L’Hourloupe was never just a way of drawing. It became, over the following decade, a method Dubuffet applied to sculpture, theatre, and eventually to buildings people could walk inside.

From paper to plaza

The migration off the page started early. Tour aux Figures, a tower Dubuffet built in 1967, was his first experiment with the L’Hourloupe vocabulary as an inhabitable structure rather than a flat image, and it fed directly into everything that followed. Between 1968 and 1970 he built Jardin d’Hiver, an enclosed, walk-in sculpture now installed at the Centre Pompidou, its interior surfaces painted in the same black-outlined cells as the drawings that started the cycle.

The most ambitious of these projects was Closerie Falbala, begun in 1971 at Périgny-sur-Yerres, southeast of Paris, and largely complete by 1976, with technical refinements continuing afterwards. An outer enclosure covering 1,610 square metres and standing eight metres high surrounds a central structure, the Villa Falbala, measuring 20 by 15 by 8 metres, built from shotcrete concrete finished in epoxy resin and polyurethane paint in the cycle’s black, white, red and blue. Inside the villa, Dubuffet built the Cabinet Logologique, a private chamber where he worked and, by his own account, retreated to think. It became his most personal built work, and the Fondation Dubuffet, which now manages his archive, is sited immediately alongside it.

The clearest demonstration that L’Hourloupe was always latently architectural sits not in France but in Lower Manhattan. In 1969, the banker David Rockefeller commissioned Dubuffet to make a sculpture for the plaza of One Chase Manhattan Plaza, the headquarters tower Gordon Bunshaft had designed for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in 1961, a building that remains one of the clearest statements of postwar American corporate rationalism: a glass-and-steel grid set on an open podium. Dubuffet’s response, Groupe de Quatre Arbres, was installed in 1972: thirteen metres tall, weighing 25 tonnes, fabricated from fibreglass over a steel armature and finished in the cycle’s black-and-white polyurethane paint. It was built in pieces at Dubuffet’s studio in Périgny, shipped to New York, and reassembled on site over eight weeks. Set against Bunshaft’s grid, a sculpture built from the same wandering, cellular lines that started on a scrap of paper during a phone call became a deliberate disruption of the plaza’s geometry, at a scale that made the disruption impossible to miss. It is still there, now on the plaza at 28 Liberty Street.

When the paintings started moving

Coucou Bazar, the work represented at Opera Gallery by the painted cutout Échec à l’être, pushed the same logic into performance. Conceived from 1971, it combined 175 “practicables”, modular pieces built from painted wood, resin and vinyl, some worn as costumes by performers and others moved and arranged as freestanding sculpture, into what Dubuffet described as an animated painting: a stage on which the L’Hourloupe vocabulary moved, rearranged itself and cast shadows in real time rather than sitting fixed on a wall. It premiered in May 1973 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, alongside a Dubuffet retrospective, transferred to Paris that autumn, and was revived in 2013 at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs.

Seen next to Tour aux Figures, Closerie Falbala and Group of Four Trees, Coucou Bazar reads less as a one-off theatrical experiment and more as the connecting piece: the moment Dubuffet worked out how to move a two-dimensional vocabulary through three-dimensional space, a problem that architecture and sculpture would go on to solve permanently rather than for the length of a performance.

Before the doodle: Art Brut and the outsider instinct

Dubuffet was born in Le Havre on 31 July 1901, into a family of wine merchants, and trained briefly at the Académie Julian in Paris before largely rejecting formal art education. He ran the family wine business into his forties, returning to Le Havre in 1925, and did not commit fully to painting until 1942, at the age of forty-one. His first solo exhibition, at Galerie René Drouin in Paris, followed in 1944, and by 1946 he was working with mud, sand, tar and other unconventional materials in the thickly built-up “Hautes Pâtes” that established his reputation.

In June 1948, Dubuffet co-founded La Compagnie de l’Art Brut in Paris, alongside the writer Jean Paulhan, André Breton, Charles Ratton, Michel Tapié and Henri-Pierre Roché, dedicated to collecting, documenting and exhibiting the work of untrained makers, self-taught artists, psychiatric patients and others working entirely outside academic or market structures. The commitment that drove Art Brut, a distrust of inherited convention and a preference for work built from its maker’s own internal logic rather than external reference, is the same commitment that produced L’Hourloupe fourteen years later. The 1962 doodle was not a break from his earlier practice so much as its most complete expression.

Opera Gallery’s own history with the artist

The 2025 retrospective was not Opera Gallery’s first engagement with Dubuffet. It followed Bal des Figures, a 2021 exhibition at the same Paris gallery, and continued a curatorial relationship with the artist’s work that the gallery has maintained across multiple locations. Opera Gallery was founded in Paris in 1994 by Gilles Dyan, who co-curated the 2025 show with Marion Petitdidier, the Paris gallery’s director since November 2021 and an Opera Gallery art advisor since 2015. The gallery’s Paris space sits at 62 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, in the 8th arrondissement, and the group now operates spaces across cities including Monaco, London, New York, Miami, Geneva, Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Seoul, having grown from that single Paris address over three decades into one of the more geographically extensive commercial gallery networks handling twentieth-century material.

Final thoughts

It is easy to describe L’Hourloupe as a style: red, blue, black and white, cellular, instantly recognisable on a gallery wall. That description is accurate and it is also incomplete. Dubuffet spent the decade after 1962 testing how far the same vocabulary could travel, off the page and into costume, then into concrete, fibreglass and steel, until a version of the pattern he first drew while talking on the telephone was standing thirteen metres tall in a Manhattan plaza designed by one of the defining architects of American corporate modernism.

Opera Gallery Paris’s retrospective told that story in miniature, through six works that ran from the earliest ink drawings to the final fragmented collages of the 1980s, with a genuine piece of Coucou Bazar sitting between them as the hinge. The exhibition closed on 12 November 2025. What it leaves behind is a clearer account of what L’Hourloupe actually was: not a painting style that Dubuffet happened to apply to a few sculptures late in his career, but a spatial idea from the outset, one that took him roughly a decade to build at the scale it had always implied.