Jean Dufuffet had for Maxime “Art must arise where it is not expected”. And with its “Tour aux Figures”, 24 meters high and installed on the island of Saint GermainDubuffet succeeded.
Multicoloring will say some, blue, white, red, faces circled in black, neo primitive totem, monumental compression, you have understood it, Jean Dubuffet is a total iconoclast, unloved by the general public. Discover in our podcast the reaction of passers-by in front of the “Tour aux Figures” on Saint Germain Island in Issy les Moulineaux.
Regarding contemporary art, everyone racks their brains a bit. By the way, Jean Dubuffet’s Tower is also hollow. We can visit it from the inside and there is the sidereal vacuum. But here it is, the message of the artist is there. “La Tour aux Figures” is an allegory of the fiasco of academic architecture and town planning of the post-war years, the formidable thirty glorious years.
But let’s come back to the story of the “Tour aux Figures”. 1983, François Mitterrand and Jack Lang, Minister of Culture, commission Jean Dubuffet to create a contemporary tower for Paris. Faced with the oddity of the work, it is an outcry : we plan to install it in Place Victor Hugo, Place d’Italie, in the Parc de la Villette, or even in the Parc de Saint Cloud. The mayor of Saint Cloud, Jean Pierre Fourcade is categorically opposed to the project.
Finally and in agreement with the artist, “La Tour aux Figures” will be installed on the hill of the island of Saint Germain and inaugurated by the President of the Republic in 1988without alas Jean Dubuffet, who died three years earlier.
For or against contemporary art, the capital and its region always offer us the possibility of marveling, complaining and even hating. In Paris, for example during the construction of the Eiffel Tower, the detractors, Maupassant, Dumas, Garnier, described it as a suppository riddled with holes or a cyclops which ends in a factory chimney. Thanks WHO ?