metamorphosis

Woman with Necklace Picasso 1963

Plato opined that beauty lay in harmony and proportion, and was best discerned by the mind, not the eye.



Nude Chiam Soutine

Soutine was untraditional and uncouth. He was also maladroit . With portraits, he seems to have locked libido-wise onto certain parts of the sitter environment, and to have dismissed others. Faces and bodily postures can be uncanny, but backgrounds are often muddy messes, and hands can be almost comical. The fingers look like careless swipes or like deranged worms attempting to take off. These dualities are part of Soutine's essence. A more physically-driven painter than even Pollack, he seems to have worked in a frenzied, semi-trance, attached to his "existent" like certain American Indian initiates were attached to hooks through their chests to the "sun." When Soutine is "on," he produces paintings that are peristaltic, semi-metamorphic, absurd, brilliant, poignant, and unforgettable.


Seated Woman Modigliani


Modigliani originally saw himself as a sculptor rather than a painter.






Painting of Sue Tilly Lucien Freud 1963

Freud both highlights and undercuts the erotics of the female nude, opting out of the idealizing tendencies of much of the history of Western art.



Seated Nude Jacques Lipchitz 1915


Woman III Willem de Kooning 1953

Aggressive brushwork and strategically placed high-key colors merged with images of toothy snarls, overripe, pendulous breasts, enlarged eyes and blasted extremities to reveal a woman seemingly congruent with some of modern man's most widely held sexual fears.