Orange Nude Female Essay
1
Reclining Nude (on the left side) /
Nu couchu (sur le cote gauche)
Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920), Italian
Oil on canvas, 58" x 35" (w x h), 1917
Sotheby's 2018 auction sold $157,159,000 USD
Source: Sotheby's notes, edited
In 1917 Modigliani's dealer offered him fifteen francs a day to paint a series of nudes. With this sum Modigliani created several of the most stunning paintings in the history of art, a new take on the nude for the Modern era. Modigliani's models were paid five francs to pose in an apartment just above his dealer's. This painting, Reclining Nude, is the masterpiece of that series. It's the largest painting Modigliani ever painted, and the only one of his horizontal nudes to contain the entire figure within the canvas. The sitter looks confidently back over her right shoulder, the slope of her profile echoing the negative space along the edges of her body. Of the 35 nudes painted at this time, two-thirds feature models reclining horizontally, the rest standing or sitting in a vertical format. The artist's fully nude horizontal poses are more successful than the upright figures. The upright bodies appear stiffer, and are often semi-draped, their facial demeanors less at ease. Modigliani's reputation has soared. Nine novels, a play, a documentary, and three feature films have been devoted to his life. His daughter Jeanne (1918-1984) wrote a biography of her father titled Modigliani: Man and Myth.
2
Untitled
Luchita Hurtado (1920-2020), Venezuelan/American
Oil on paper, 24" x 18" (w x h), 1971
Mohn Art Collective: Hammer, LACMA, MOCA, California
Source: The New York Review of Books, Books and Arts, Wiki, edited
Born in 1920 in Venezuela, Luchita Hurtado emigrated to the United States in 1928 and later travelled extensively in Mexico, before settling in Santa Monica, California, in 1951, where she has resided ever since. It wasn't until Luchita Hurtado was ninety-nine years old that she witnessed the opening of her first museum retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art featuring her paintings, drawings, and sketches spanning eighty years. She addressed the press, smiling, "This is one of the best moments of my life." Hurtado spent much of her life mingling with and befriending some of the twentieth century's best-known artists. She once attended a party in Frida Kahlo's hospital room. When she first met Marcel Duchamp, he gave Hurtado a foot massage. Jackson Pollock "scared the hell" out of her. But none of them knew Hurtado herself was an artist. "I always felt shy of it. I didn't feel comfortable with people looking at my work," adding that "there was a time when women really didn't show their work." She was influenced by Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism without fitting perfectly into either category, taking nature as the basis of her work, often depicting her body as an extension of these realms, as in this painting. Read more about this fascinating artist on Wiki HERE. See more of her art on her website HERE.
3
Diagonal Pose
John Sloan (1871-1951), American
Sanguine conte crayon on paper, 18" x 13" (w x h), circa 1916
Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE
Source: Wiki, edited
John French Sloan (1871-1951) was an American painter and etcher. He is considered one of the founders of the Ashcan school of American art. He was also a member of the group known as The Eight. His students included Peggy Bacon, Alexander Calder, and Reginald Marsh. In 1939, he published a book of his teachings and aphorisms, Gist of Art, which remained in print for over sixty years. He is best known for his urban genre scenes and ability to capture the essence of neighborhood life in New York City, often observed through his Chelsea studio window. Sloan has been called the premier artist of the Ashcan School, and also a realist painter. Sloan's paintings are represented in almost all major American museums.
4
Standing Nude with Orange Drapery
Egon Schiele (1890-1918), Austrian
Watercolor, opaque watercolor, and graphite on paper,
12" x 18" (w x h), 1914
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Source: Wiki, edited
Egon Schiele had among his admirers many Jewish art collectors whose collections were looted under the Nazis: in Germany from 1933, in Austria from the Anschluss of 1938, and in France from the German occupation of 1940. As a result, numerous restitution cases in the 21st century involve artworks by Schiele. The Leopold Museum, Vienna houses perhaps Schiele's most important and complete collection of work, featuring over 200 exhibits. The museum sold one of these, Houses with Colorful Laundry (Suburb II), for $40,100,000 at Sotheby's in 2011. Two lovers (Self Portrait with Wally), 1914/15, raised the world auction record for a work on paper by the artist to $10,700,000 USD. In 2013 Auctionata in Berlin sold a watercolor from 1916, Reclining Woman, at an online auction for $2,418,000 USD, a world record for the most expensive work of art ever sold at an online auction.
5
Nude
Clark Fay (1894-1955), American
Lithograph edition 4 of 25
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
Source: Various online, edited
Clark Fay (1894-1955) lived in Westport, Connecticut. He was an American lithographer and illustrator, a student of N.C. Wyeth and Harvey Dunn. Fay studied art in the United States but spent most of his career living and working in both France and England. As an illustrative artist he worked overseas for both the Saturday Evening Post and the Delineator. During the 1920's and 1930's, Fay exhibited his original lithographs in Paris with the Salon des Artistes Francais. The record price for his art at auction is $44,650 USD
6
Study of a Nude Female Figure
Rockwell Kent (American, 1882-1971)
Red crayon and wash on paper, 12" x 5" (w x h), circa 1926
Source: Wiki, edited
Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) was an American painter, printmaker, illustrator, writer, sailor, adventurer and voyager. Kent's early paintings of Mount Monadnock and New Hampshire were first shown at the Society of American Artists in New York in 1904. In 1905 Kent ventured to Monhegan Island, Maine, and found its rugged and primordial beauty a source of inspiration for the next five years, before moving on to the northern climes of the world. Kent found inspiration in the austerity and stark beauty of wilderness. His obituary was on the front page of the New York Times. Columbia University is the repository of Rockwell Kent's personal collection of 3,300 working drawings and sketches, most of which were unpublished. Read more about this amazing person's astonishing life on Wiki HERE.
7
Standing Nude
Georges Rouault (1871-1958), French
Oil and watercolor on cardboard, 28" x 39" (w x h), 1909
Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI
Source: Wiki, edited
Georges-Henri Rouault (1871-1958) was a French painter, draughtsman, and printmaker, his work often associated with Fauvism and Expressionism. In 1905 he exhibited his paintings at the Salon d'Automne with the other Fauvists. While Matisse represented the reflective and rationalized aspects of the group, Rouault embodied a more spontaneous and instinctive style. At the end of his life, he burned 300 of his pictures, estimated to be worth today about $81,000,000 USD. His reason for doing this was not profound. He simply felt he would not live to finish them. Rouault died in Paris in 1958 at 86-years-old.
8
Nude
Magnus Enckell (1870-1925), Finnish
Pastel, 19" x 24" (w x h), 1909
Finnish National Gallery Collection
Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki, Finland
Source: Wiki, edited
Knut Magnus Enckell (1870-1925) was a Finnish symbolist painter. At first, he painted with a subdued palette, but from 1902 onwards, he used increasingly bright colors. He was a leading member of the Finnish colorist painters' group. This art of a nude female was unusual for Enckell since his nudes were mostly of males. It's thought he was homosexual. In Finland Enckell is considered to have been a most influential symbolist artist, his funeral a national event.
