Corps de Dame--Château d'Étoupe

Dubuffet was a significant force in postwar art, and perhaps one of the most anti-artistic in his disregard for conventional medium and imagery, especially the human body. Crucial to his art making was the separation of man and nature, and his opposition to classic, humanist culture. Many of his primitivist reference points overlap with the goals of the Abstract Expressionist painters. Dubuffet's cycle of paintings entitled Corps de Dame, produced in 1950-51, focused on the female nude – not necessarily as a thing of traditional beauty but as a dense matter, spread out across the canvas. In this work, the head, torso and limbs are flattened into the composition and set off from the background and canvas edge by a thick, dark brown ground. A variety of paint textures, brushwork, scraping and scoring, offer the only substance or presence to the altered form.