Tête sableuse

Jean Dubuffet signed and dated this work, whose title means “sandy head,” in April 1950, adding at the upper right, with his initials, “in honor of Enid Bissett”. He had been working very steadily that month, as he wrote in several letters to his dealer Pierre Matisse, noting, “I always scrape my paintings very assiduously for a long time,” a reference to the deliberateness of his process, and the complex surfaces that were its result.