Serg
Gallery
Fine art nude portraits can be anonymous figure images or challenging portraits in black and white or colour. The foundation for the creation of your pictures is the initial consultation. Tell me what you like, what you don’t and how you want to look. Pick some images from my sites or from magazines that are in a style that you like. We won’t slavishly copy these but can use them to inspire the creation of pictures that you will love.
Sara Friedlander—Vice-President, Head of Evening Sale at Christie’s and a grad of Sotheby’s Institute of Art—takes BAZAAR behind the virtual fig leaf and pinpoints ten of history’s most impactful nude paintings, from Matisse to Modigliani.
Goya’s Nude Maja, confident in her nakedness as she unashamedly gazes out at the viewer, is infamous for her direct confrontation. Rumored to be a portrait of Goya’s own mistress, this painting was commissioned for the private boudoir of a wealthy patron, hidden from the public eye. But when discovered, this erotically-charged masterpiece shocked audiences at the time and paved the way for the transgressive, boundary-pushing ethos of Modern Art.
Marcel Duchamp, the enigmatic father of Contemporary Art, shocked audiences with this Cubist masterwork. The painting, ostensibly depicting a nude woman walking down a flight of stairs, has been so abstracted into geometric planes that it is impossible to determine any sense of concrete time or space. With this work, Duchamp pushed Cubism farther than Picasso, paving the way for further explorations into abstraction, a main thrust of 20th century painting.
In the mid 20th century, Pop Art, as championed by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Tom Wesselmann, brought American popular culture into the realm of high art—utilizing the language of advertising and celebrity to turn a mirror on the fast, bright American world of capitalism and consumption. Wesselmann’s Great American Nude series used the style of Playboy centerfolds to update the nude to a contemporary context: one heavily focused on the objectification and commodification of sex rather than its psychological aspect. His sleek, colorful, alluring nudes offer themselves to the viewer in an explicitness not yet seen in art history.
