The Cow with the Subtile Nose

The Cow with a Subtile Nose is an oil and enamel painting on canvas by French painter Jean Dubuffet, created in 1954. It is held in the Museum of Modern Art, in New York.

History

Since July 1954, Dubuffet often went to Durtol, a small village near Clermont-Ferrand, where his wife lived for health reason. He had set up a workshop there and started working again on the theme of the countryside, as he had done previously in 1943–1944. He took s particular interest on cows. He stated: “I took great pleasure in looking at the cows for a long time as I had done in the past and then drawing them from memory, or sometimes even, but much more exceptionally, from life."

It was at this period that he created a painting series dedicated to Cows, of which The Cow with a Subtile Nose is part.

At the same time, since July 1954, Dubuffet experimented with a new painting technique: lacquered paint. This very fluid, quick-drying industrial paint, called "four-hour enamel", when drying gives a network of cracks when used in combination with oil paint. Dubuffet then completed the painting with a small brush. He explained this as "highlighting the tiny networks of veins and ocellations caused by the presence of two enemy paintings.

The style of the painting is deliberately primitive; the large cow occupies most of the canvas, in a greenish background, which seems to represent her pasture. The cow appears unusually large, in a brownish-yellow colour. Her eyes and nose seems also very big. The title of the painting is an ironic reference to that particular feature.

The current painting is the only of the Cows series that appeared in Dubuffet's first retrospective held at the Fondation Maeght, in 1985.

Provenance

The painting was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1956.