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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.[1]
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."[2]
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.[3]
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.[4]
The current painting is the only of the Cows series that appeared in Dubuffet's first retrospective held at the Fondation Maeght, in 1985.[5]
The painting was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1956.[6]
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