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.mheu, Historical Museum of the Urban Environment

All roads lead to Rome

Sheltered by the ramparts

Belleforest's map of Paris

Pont Neuf

Paris, an open-plan city

Haussmann: Minister of Paris

Everything's connected!

Rue Passagère

In a roundabout fashion...

Lining the streets

Processions

From the League to the Fronde

Taking to the streets

Forward march!

The resilient Republic!

Let the party begin!

The Boulevard of Crime

The carnival

Industrious street life

Colporteurs

The central market

Paving the way...

It's a dirty job...

Standing firm

Let there be light!

Sleep soundly, good people!

The beat goes on...

Rue Passagère

In contrast to the growing police presence on the streets, Jean Dubuffet chooses to portray an anarchic environment, filled with people who seem unable to control their movements. The street was not only a thoroughfare; it had become a living thing moving to its own beat, with its own laws and lapses.

To a passer-by

The street about me roared with a deafening sound.
Tall, slender, in heavy mourning, majestic grief,
A woman passed, with a glittering hand
Raising, swinging the hem and flounces of her skirt;

Agile and graceful, her leg was like a statue's.
Tense as in a delirium, I drank
From her eyes, pale sky where tempests germinate,
The sweetness that enthralls and the pleasure that kills.

A lightning flash... then night! Fleeting beauty
By whose glance I was suddenly reborn,
Will I see you no more before eternity?

Elsewhere, far, far from here! too late! never perhaps!
For I know not where you fled, you know not where I go,
O you whom I would have loved, O you who knew it!

Extract from Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire, translated by William Aggeler (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

Pedestrians were in turn curious onlookers, customers and strollers. The ambiguity of the title of Rue Passagère (which could mean either "Busy Street" or "Transient Street) reflects the street's versatile role.

Rue Passagère

Rue Passagère was painted in 1961 following a four-year period (1956-1960) during which Dubuffet experimented with abstraction through works featuring a host of materials including sand, tar, straw and leaves mixed with oil paints (known as Sols, Texturologies and Matériologies). The artist went back to the roots of childhood drawings through what he called Art Brut (outsider art) in 1947, with a style featuring simplified lines, lack of perspective, deliberate slips, lively colors and a rejection of dominant cultural trends, which he saw as suffocating.

The painting also marked the start of an important period for Dubuffet, known as the "Hourloupe Cycle", which he began in 1962 and completed in 1974, during which he again turned his attention to portraying people, demonstrating a highly graphical approach—through the use of color in its simplest form—and to the crowds first seen in La Vie Passagère.

In the same year, 1961, Dubuffet began exploring the use of music with the Danish painter Asger Jorn, leading founder of the Cobra movement.

Jean Dubuffet

Jean Dubuffet was born in Le Havre in 1901, the son of a prosperous family. His father was a wine merchant. At the age of 17, he set off for Paris to study at Académie Julian, where he met Dufy, Masson, Juan Gris and Fernand Léger, whom he befriended. However, the young Dubuffet had yet to find himself. In 1924, he set off for South America. The following year, he took over his father's business in Le Havre. In 1927, he married and in 1929 he set up shop in Paris as a wine merchant.

Yet painting was in his blood. In 1933, he threw himself back into his art, gradually abandoning the wine business. He divorced, remarried and devoted himself to his art from 1942 onwards, enjoying quick success, with an exhibition at the Galérie Drouin in Paris in 1944, then in New York in 1948. In 1949, Clément Greenberg wrote an article on Dubuffet that brought him great acclaim in the United States, where he also met Pollock and Duchamp. Until his death on May 12, 1985, Dubuffet's fame never faltered: shows included a retrospective at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 1960, at the MOMA in 1962, and at the Guggenheim in 1973.

In 1971, the artist created a Foundation in Paris, which stores all archives and has a collection spanning his entire body of work.

.The street

Rue Passagère