Jean Dubuffet

Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above on March 2, 1961

New York,  Pierre Matisse Gallery, Exhibition of Paintings by Jean Dubuffet, January - February 1951, cat. no. 9, illustrated with artist's sketch

"What I expect from any work of art is that it surprises me, that it violates my customary valuations of things and offers me other, unexpected ones" (Dubuffet in Valèrie Novarina, "Interview with Jean Dubuffet", in Flash Art, no. 110, January 1983, pp. 19-23)

Corps de Dame aux Cheveux de Côté is one of only thirty-six paintings of this most celebrated series by Jean Dubuffet, nine of which are in the collections of the most important museums of the world (including the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C., the Beyeler Foundation in Basel, the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, and the National Gallery in Berlin). Never exhibited to the public since its acquisition, the present work has been in the same collection since 1961, when it was purchased from the renowned Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York.

Executed between 1950 and 1951, the Corps de Dames series represents Dubuffet's first concerted attempt to depict the subject of the naked female body. In doing so, the artist does nothing less than approach one of the most classical themes in the whole history of art, often charged with the most diverse allegorical meanings, be it the Nike of Samothrace, the Virtues and Vices on Medieval cathedrals or Delacroix's Liberty Guiding the People. Since Edouard Manet first challenged the tradition of the female nude as the passive object of male desire with Olympia (1863) and the foreground figure in the Déjeuner sur l'Herbe (1863), the subject matter had been a touchstone for many male artist's dialogue with art history.

Dubuffet's Corps de Dames series represents a contribution to this dialogue with tradition, but at the same time, they abruptly break away from any classical idea of a Woman. "These pictures ironically called Corps de Dames, are surely among the most aggressively shocking works known to the history of painting. By their brutal attack on 'Woman', they violate all our sacred and dearly held concepts of mother, wife, mistress, beloved, daughter and sister, as well as the very principles of beauty derived from erotic desire in most cultures." (Peter Selz, The Work of Jean Dubuffet, New York 1962, p. 48). More than the Women with which, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Willem de Kooning was shocking his public in New Yory City, Dubuffet breaks with anything that had been produced before.

Whereas de Kooning in fact made clear, in his statements and the paintings themselves, his unwillingness to cut tradition loose in his work, and his paint was still juicy and alive like flesh, Dubuffet's "dames" take on the hardened and desiccated quality of the earth. Flattened out on the surface of the canvas, they remind one of some imagined primitive cave painting or the graffiti of the 'common man' on a city wall, rather than the progeny of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) by Picasso. Any attempt to render the third dimension has been completely abandoned, as "the objective of painting is to animate a surface which is by definition two-dimensional and without depth. One does not enrich it in seeking effects of relief or tromp l'oeil through shading... let us seek instead ingenious ways to flatten objects on the surface; and let the surface speak its own language of three-dimensional space which is not proper to it." (Jean Dubuffet, Prospectus, vol. I, Paris 1967, p. 74). The Corps de Dames resemble landscapes of blood and flesh, with which Dubuffet defines new ideas of beauty and aesthetic values.

"The idea that there are beautiful objects and ugly objects, people endowed with beauty and others who cannot claim it, has surely no other foundation than convention - old poppycock - and I declare that convention unhealthy... The beauty of an object depends on how we look at it and not at all on its proper proportions. It is my inclination in this direction that has made certain people believe the mood of my art to be bitter. These people have seen that I intend to sweep away everything we have been taught to consider - without question - as grace and beauty; but have overlooked my work to substitute another and vaster beauty, touching all objects and beings, not excluding the most despised - and, because of that, all the more exhilarating. The beauty for which I aim needs little to appear - unbelievably little. Any place - the most destitute - is good enough for it. I would like people to look at my work as an enterprise for the rehabilitation of scorned values, and, in any case, make no mistake, a work of celebration." (Jean Dubuffet in Peter Selz, The Work of Jean Dubuffet, New York 1962, pp. 63-64).

Characterized by a raw frontality, Corps de Dame aux Cheveux de Côté confronts the viewer with frank emotional impact, like a monumental "earth mother". Her hair streams out to her left side, as if blown by a gale of wind, in a gesture that retains, despite the crudeness of the image, something of female vanity.