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Group of Four Trees

New York, United States of America

Group of Four Trees

Group of Four Trees is an abstract outdoor sculpture completed in 1972 by the French artist Jean Dubuffet. Commissioned by the American banker David Rockefeller for the public plaza of One Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza (now 28 Liberty Street) in the Financial District of Manhattan, it was Dubuffet's fi

rst outdoor sculpture installed in the United States and, at four stories, among the largest in New York City at the time. The work belongs to Dubuffet's Hourloupe cycle (1962–1974), a body of paintings, sculptures, and architectural projects characterized by flat interlocking forms outlined in heavy black, which the artist developed from ballpoint-pen doodles made during a phone call in 1962. Although Dubuffet is best known for coining the term art brut in the 1940s to describe work made outside cultural institutions, the Hourloupe sculptures of his late career—including the corporate and civic commissions in New York, Chicago, and Paris—mark a departure from that earlier project. Dubuffet himself declined to call Group of Four Trees a sculpture, describing it instead as a drawing extended into space. The work complemented Isamu Noguchi's Sunken Garden (1964), already installed in the plaza...

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