Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Victor Dubreuil
American, French; 19th-century, 20th-century
St. Petersburg, FL: Museum of Fine Arts
68%
Barrels of Money. c1898. Oil on canvas
The interest we take in a painting like this is more "conceptual" than it is strictly visual. It's derived from the raw weirdness of Dubreuil's decision to paint money brimming in barrels, rather than from the way he actually went about doing so. We like this artist to the extent that we see him to have been practicing surrealism avant la lettre. But it would be a mistake to discount Dubreuil completely as a colorist and an arranger of shapes. Proportion works wildly here, suggesting that either the vessels are tiny or the greenbacks are huge; the barrels have somehow more dimension than they ought to while the money has less, which makes for a strange and undefinable optical effect; space is by turns crammed and, at the picture's top and bottom, eerily open, and for some reason Dubreuil has included a column in the background that just about vanishes into darkness, but also manages to mimic the comportment of the barrels to the front of it and to lock them into pictorial place. This all amounts to something that's visually distinct but somewhat less than a resolved painterly language, which is actually to Dubreuil's artistic benefit. You get the sense that he was trying to convey how dollars for him were a specious non-thing, the social fact of which muddled physical reality while also somehow heightening it. There is confusion to the way this painting fits together because Dubreuil himself was confused. If what this picture, as a picture, offers up to experience is a bit narrow, it's also not quite as reducible as it seems like it should be to straightforward ideological explanation. (TFS, 2026)