Cycliste Nue (Nude Cyclist)
1944
Image not available — this artwork is under copyright
View on museum website →Medium
gouache on wove paper
Dimensions
overall: 32.5 x 24.8 cm (12 13/16 x 9 3/4 in.)
Classification
Drawing
Department
CG-W
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Gift of the Stephen Hahn Family Collection
Accession Number
1995.48.2
Art Historical Context
**Cycliste Nue (N Cyclist)**, created by Jean Dubuffet in 1944, captures the artist's emerging fascination with raw, unpolished human forms during a tumultuous period in World War II-era France. This gouache on wove paper, measuring 32.5 x 24.8 cm, Dubuffet's early experiments in what would become his signature Art Brut—or "raw art"—style, rejecting academic refinement for spontaneous, childlike vigor. The intimate scale and opaque, vibrant gouache medium allowed for bold textures and vivid colors, evoking a sense of playful absurdity in depicting a nude figure on a bicycle. Painted amid the ...
About the Artist
Jean Dubuffet
Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) was a French painter and sculptor born into a prosperous family of wholesale wine merchants in Le Havre. His early life revolved around this bourgeois world, with childhood friendships among writers like Raymond Queneau and Georges Limbour shaping his intellectual circle. In 1918, at age 17, he moved to Paris to study painting at the Académie Julian but departed after jus...