"Blue Nude II," Henri Matisse, 1952.

Matisse (1869-1954) is regarded as one of the founding fathers of Modern Art. A printmaker and sculptor as well as a painter, he was a trailblazer for artists today.

Earlier in his career he was known as a Fauvist, a school of painting that featured bright, intense colors and bold brushstrokes. As the years went on he experimented more and more, creating work that broke with standards of Realism but was also fairly representational.

Late in his life, after surgery for abdominal cancer, he wheelchair-bound and sometimes bedridden. Unable to paint anymore, he had assistants paint sheets of paper with bright colors and then he would cut them up and assemble collages. They could be representational, like this or merely abstract patterns. Matisse came to refer to this time as his "second life," as he found working with cut-outs and collage immensely rewarding and a new direction for his art.

This is also interesting because it marks a turn from his earlier teachings, that the human body should not be broken up. But here, he's using negative space as part of the greater whole...and it works.

From the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

#Art #HenriMatisse #Modernism #Collage #Nude #Nekkid #WomenInArt

"The Fall of Man," Cornelis Corneliszoon van Haarlem, 1592.

Van Haarlem (1562-1638) was a painter of the Dutch Golden Age, a leader of the Northern Mannerist style, and an important precursor to Frans Hals in the realm of portraiture.

He started off as a painter of mythological subjects, with very Italian-inspired and fairly artificial styles, but later came to embrace a more Realist style favored in the Netherlands. He studied in France but was born in and spent his adult life in the city of Haarlem, where he became the official city painter, with a number of official commissions. He also was a noted portraitist, becoming an important influence on later painters, although his history, Biblical, and mythical scenes sometimes seem more like chances to paint naked bodies than anything else. Lots of bare limbs, buttocks thrust at the viewer, people being unclad for the sake of being unclad, to the point that the scene and its meaning get lost in all the flesh. I guess that's the Mannerist style for you...

From the RIjksmuseum, Amsterdam.

#Art #DutchGoldenAge #Mannerist #CornelisVanHaarlem #AdamAndEve #Nudity #Nekkid

nekkid
adjective
Eye dialect spelling of naked.

#word #nekkid #definition #wordnick

@SesameSquirrel

Sometimes the escapes planned with the minimum details also work.

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