Dubuffet getting his rude on.

Jean was king of the Art Brut folk, combining a craftsman's insight into the human condition with a hipster's instinct for keeping it real. "Brut" referred to untrained artists, trying to get at a 'truthiness' by defrocking art of its fancy-shmancy lingo and over-educated nonsense. With Le Chiffonniere from 1978, keeping it real meant keeping it raw. Chiffonniere is French for bag lady (which, when not being rude as hell, moonlights in meaning as a worktable with several tiers of shallow drawers). As such, this statue is 19 feet of stainless steel and black epoxy describing the horrific outline of, for better or worse, a bag lady. 

A lot of people explain Dubuffet's Bag Lady as a cartoonish thing. Although, this looks less Cartoon Network and more Syfy to me. For real, the idea of this thing lumbering after you in a back alley after midnight is butt clinchingly scary. Despite Bag Lady's monster mash ready get-up, she had quite the list of suitor-cities ready to welcome her to her forever home. Dubuffet was represented by the Pace Gallery, which lent Le Chiff to Baltimore in 1978, setting up the statue in front of the city's World Trade Center. The city tried and failed to get together the money to buy the piece. They couldn't make it happen in time. The Pace Gallery repossessed the statue and eventually shipped it off to San Francisco, a city with the cash flow to back up its art needs.

This Dubuffet sculpture is of a 19-foot-tall lady who would have made Michael Jordan look like an amateur.

She would have won at least 10 NBA championships. She would’ve shattered every backboard with dunks and would have been able to blind her opponents by reflecting light into their eyes from her stainless steel body covered with black epoxy. Unfortunately, her large feet and slightly looming appearance make her a ringer for Big Foot, too, or perhaps like this rendition of the ancient god Vulcan.