fourth french republicconcept:era modern
Corps de Dame
Oil on canvas by Jean Dubuffet (1950), from his Corps de Dame series. A female figure rendered with extreme impasto and surface texture — lumpy, earth-colored, deliberately anti-erotic. A direct assault on the refinement of the traditional Western nude. MoMA, New York.
Scholarly Significance
Dubuffet's Art Brut female nude series; radical anti-aesthetic challenge to Western nude tradition; anchor for Art Brut node.
Notes
- ·The Corps de Dame series generated outrage in Paris: critics and even Simone de Beauvoir criticized the works as misogynistic.
- ·Dubuffet responded that the figures were celebrations of cosmic materiality, not degradation — they embodied the earth itself.
- ·The technique involved mixing sand, gravel, and other materials into oil paint to build extreme surface relief.
- ·The series has continued to generate feminist critique and counter-critique in art historical literature.
- ·MoMA holds one of the key examples; the series is distributed across major international collections.