03 Works, The Art Of The Nude, with footnotes # 59

René Magritte, 1898 - 1967

LA MAGIE NOIRE, c. 1946

Oil on canvas

81 by 60cm. 31 7/8 by 23 5/8 in.

Private collection

La magie noire belongs to a group of works Magritte executed in the 1940s, on the subject of a female nude in an unidentified landscape. The woman is depicted in a classical manner. This traditional representation, however, is juxtaposed with the unexpected colouration of the figure, whose upper body gradually acquires the tone of the sky. In nearly all paintings from this group, the woman has one hand resting on a block of stone. As Magritte explained: ‘One idea is that stone is associated with an “attachment” to the earth. It does not rise up of its own accord; you can rely on its remaining faithful to the earth’s attraction. Woman, too, if you like. From another point of view the hard existence of stone... More on this painting

René Magritte, 1898 - 1967

LA MAGIE NOIRE, c. 1945

Oil on canvas

79 x 59; 94.9 x 74.7 x 6.2 

Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels

René François Ghislain Magritte (21 November 1898 – 15 August 1967) was a Belgian Surrealist artist. He became well known for creating a number of witty and thought-provoking images. Often depicting ordinary objects in an unusual context, his work is known for challenging observers' preconditioned perceptions of reality. His imagery has influenced Pop art, minimalist and conceptual art. More on René Magritte

René Magritte (1898-1967)

Le miroir universel, c. 1938-1939

Oil on canvas

45 5/8 x 35 in. (116 x 89 cm.)

Private collection

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02 Works, The Art Of The Nude, with footnotes # 58

Helmut Newton, Australian/German, 1920–2004

Lisa Lyon in her Studio, Venice, California, 1981

Gelatin silver print

22.38 x 14.94 in. (56.85 x 37.95 cm.)

Private collection

Lisa Lyon (born 1953) is a female bodybuilder and photo model from the United States, and is regarded as one of female bodybuilding's pioneers.

Born in Los Angeles, California in 1953. Lisa Lyon studied art at the University of California at Los Angeles. There she became accomplished in the Japanese art of fencing, kendo, but found herself lacking sufficient upper body strength so she began weight training. This eventually led her into bodybuilding.

Lyon modeled for Helmut Newton, American fine art photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (resulting in the 1983 book Lady: Lisa Lyon), and Marcus Leatherdale, who published two pictures of her in his first catalogue book at Molotov. Lyon's work with Mapplethorpe was specifically impressive due to Mapplethorpe's ability to portray her body as masculine and feminine in his photos, which shows how her body was truly one of a kind.

She was inducted into the IFBB Hall of Fame in 2000 for being a one-woman media-relations activist on behalf of the sport and Elevating bodybuilding to the level of fine art.

Lisa Lyon also had a short acting career.

In creating the Marvel Comics character Elektra, Frank Miller initially used Lyon as a basis for the character's appearance. More on Lisa Lyon 

Helmut Newton (Australian/German, 1920–2004) Title:

Lisa Lyon in Paris IV , c. 1980

Gelatin silver print

36.7 x 35.5 cm. (14.4 x 14 in.)

Private collection

Helmut Newton was born on October 31, 1920, in Berlin, Germany. He attended the American School in Berlin. From an early age, Newton developed a keen obsession with photography, purchasing his very first camera aged 12. Four years later, Newton was to turn his back on mainstream education, taking an apprenticeship with renowned German photographer, Elsle Simon, known as Yva. Her surreal, multiple exposure photographs that took in fashion, theater and the nude were to inspire Newton throughout his career.

On November 9, 1938, Newton, secured passage to China, where he stopped in Singapore until 1940 before leaving to Australia and finding work as a truck driver in the Australian Army.

In 1948, he married actress June Browne, herself a photographer under the name of Alice Springs, a name she chose from a map of Australia. High-profile contracts with Australian Vogue in the 1950’s; British Vogue in 1957-1958; French Vogue in 1961 provided Newton with the exposure that would allow him to stamp his style on fashion photography over the next 40 years.

Known as the ‘King of Kink’, Newton’s erotically charged imagery was provocative as it was masterful in its compositional and narrative direction. Creating highly charged images layered with voyeuristic, sado-masochist undertexts, Newton was drawn to empowered woman presenting a potent image of female sexuality in the 60’s and 70’s. 

Newton died, aged 83, in 2004 following a major car accident in Los Angeles. More on Helmut Newton

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01 Work, The Art Of The Nude, with footnotes # 57

Mario Schifano (1934 - 1998)

Naked woman

Photograph laid on cardboard

cm 100 x 70

Private collection

Mario Schifano (20 September 1934, Khoms, Libya – 26 January 1998, Rome, Italy) was an Italian painter and collagist of the Postmodern tradition. He also achieved some renown as a film-maker and rock musician.

He is considered to be one of the most significant and pre-eminent artists of Italian postmodernism. His work was exhibited in the famous 1962 "New Realists" show at the Sidney Janis Gallery with other young Pop art and Nouveau réalisme luminaries, including Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. He became part of the core group of artists comprising the "Scuola romana" alongside Franco Angeli and Tano Festa. Reputed as a prolific and exuberant artist, he nonetheless struggled with a lifelong drug habit that earned him the label maledetto, or "cursed".

Schifano had a relationship with Marianne Faithfull in 1969. More on Mario Schifano

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01 Work, The Art Of The Nude, with footnotes # 56

Salvatore Fiume (1915 - 1997)

Model lying

Oil on Masonite

cm 27 x 36

Private collection

Salvatore Fiume (23 October 1915 – 3 June 1997) was an Italian painter, sculptor, architect, writer and stage designer. His works are kept in some of the most important museums in the world, among which the Vatican Museums, the Hermitage of Saint Petersburg, the Museum of Modern Art of New York City, the Pushkin Museum of Moscow and the Galleria d'Arte Moderna of Milan.

Fiume was born in Comiso, Sicily, in 1915. At the age of sixteen, thanks to his enthusiasm and his passion for art, he won a scholarship to attend the Royal Institute for Book Illustration at Urbino, where he mastered printing techniques from etching to lithography. He ended his studies at the age of twenty-one and moved to Milan. In 1938, at the age of twenty-three, Fiume moved to Ivrea, where he became art director of a cultural magazine. During this time, he wrote his first successful literary work, the novel Viva Gioconda!, published in Milan in 1943.

In 1949 he held his first official exhibition, which included Isole di statue and Città di statue, at the Galleria Borromini in Milan. It aroused much interest among the critics and resulted in him coming into touch with international cultural and artistic institutions.

As a sculptor, he made his debut in 1994. His production includes works in stone, bronze, resin, wood and ceramics, some of which are sizeable. More on Salvatore Fiume

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01 Work, The Art Of The Nude, with footnotes # 55

Tamara de Lempicka, 1898 - 1980

NU ASSIS DE PROFIL, c. 1923

Oil on canvas

32 by 21 1/4 in., 81.2 by 54 cm

Private collection

Lempicka's sleek representations of the female nude are renowned as emblems of the Jazz Age. Painted around 1923 in Paris, the female figure in the present work resembles an Amazonian goddess. Her powerful limbs extend beyond the boundary of the picture and the mechanized appearance and sturdy curvature of her body call to mind the Purist figures in Léger's seminal Le Petit déjeuner. Unlike the more sterile renderings of her contemporaries in the 1920s, Lempicka's nudes channeled an unapologetic brand of female sexuality that few before her had dared to attempt. More on this painting

Tamara Łempicka (born Maria Górska; 16 May 1898 – 18 March 1980), also known as Tamara de Lempicka, was a Polish painter active in the 1920s and 1930s, who spent her working life in France and the United States. She is best-known for her polished Art-Deco portraits of aristocrats and the wealthy, and for her highly-stylized paintings of nudes.

Born in Warsaw, Lempicka moved to Saint Petersburg where she married a prominent Polish lawyer, then emigrated to Paris with her husband following the Russian Revolution. Her style was a blend of late, refined cubism and the neoclassical style, particularly inspired by the work of Jean-Dominique Ingres. She was an active participant in the artistic and social life of Paris between the Wars. In 1928 she became the mistress of wealthy art collector from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Baron Raoul Kuffner. After the death of his wife in 1933, the Baron married Lempicka in 1934, and thereafter she became known in the press as "The Baroness with a Brush."

Following the outbreak of World War II in 1939, she and her husband moved to the United States and she painted celebrity portraits, as well as still-lifes and, in the 1960s, some abstract paintings. Her work was out of fashion after World War II, but made a comeback in the late 1960s, with the rediscovery of Art Deco. She moved to Mexico in 1974, where she died in 1980. At her request, her ashes were scattered over the Popocatapetl volcano. More on Tamara Łempicka

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01 Work, The Art Of The Nude, with footnotes # 54

Lawrence Schiller (American, born 1936)

Marilyn Monroe, Something's Got To Give, May 23, 1962

C-print

20 x 24 in. (50.8 x 61 cm.)

Private collection

Marilyn Monroe, original name Norma Jeane Mortenson, later called Norma Jeane Baker, Jeane sometimes spelled Jean, (born June 1, 1926, Los Angeles, California, U.S.—died August 5, 1962, Los Angeles), American actress who became a major sex symbol, starring in a number of commercially successful motion pictures during the 1950s.

Her mother was frequently confined in an asylum, and Norma Jeane was reared by 12 successive sets of foster parents and, for a time, in an orphanage. In 1942 she married a fellow worker in an aircraft factory, but they divorced soon after World War II. She became a popular photographer’s model and in 1946 signed a short-term contract with Twentieth Century-Fox, taking as her screen name Marilyn Monroe. After a few brief appearances in movies made by the Fox and Columbia studios, she was again unemployed, and she returned to modeling for photographers. 

In 1950 Monroe played a small uncredited role in The Asphalt Jungle that reaped a mountain of fan mail. An appearance in All About Eve (1950) won her another contract from Fox and much recognition. She advanced to star billing on the strength of her studio-fostered image as a “love goddess.” In 1954 she married baseball star Joe DiMaggio.

Monroe studied with Lee Strasberg at the Actors’ Studio in New York City, and began to emerge as a talented comedian. In 1956 she married playwright Arthur Miller and briefly retired from moviemaking. She won critical acclaim for the first time as a serious actress for Some Like It Hot (1959). Her last role, in The Misfits (1961), was written by Miller, whom she had divorced the year before.

In 1962 Monroe began filming the comedy Something’s Got to Give. However, she was frequently absent from the set because of illnesses In June Monroe was fired from the film. Although she was later rehired, work never resumed. After several months as a virtual recluse, Monroe died from an overdose of sleeping pills in her Los Angeles home. Her death was ruled a “probable suicide,” though conspiracy theories persisted. More on Marilyn Monroe

Lawrence Schiller is an American producer, screenwriter, and photographer best known for his candid photos of Marilyn Monroe. For almost 35 years, Schiller collaborated with Norman Mailer to create several films together, including Executioner's Song (1982), for which Mailer received the Pulitzer Prize. “I never considered myself a good photographer. I still don't,” he has said. “I thought of myself as a hard worker. My camera was a sponge and I had an instinct that athletes have—anticipation.” Born on December 28, 1936 in Brooklyn, NY, was raised in San Diego and attended Pepperdine College in Los Angeles. After graduating, he held photojournalist positions at Time, The Sunday Times, The Saturday Evening Post, and Newsweek. The artist later broke into the world of film by directing part of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969 and Lady Sings the Blues in 1972. Over the course of his career, Schiller has captured images of several important and notorious figures in American history including Lee Harvey Oswald, Muhammad Ali, and Richard Nixon. He currently lives and works between Los Angeles, CA and New York, NY. More on Lawrence Schiller

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01 Work, The Art Of The Nude, with footnotes # 53

Frank Eugene (American, 1865–1938)

Adam and Eve , 1898–1899

Photogravure

17.8 x 12.7 cm. (7 x 5 in.)

Private collection

Adam and Eve, according to the creation myth of the Abrahamic religions, were the first man and woman and the ancestors of all humans. The story of Adam and Eve is central to the belief that YHWH created human beings to live in a paradise on earth, although they fell away from that state and formed the present world full of suffering and injustice. It provides the basis for the belief that humanity is in essence a single family, with everyone descended from a single pair of original ancestors. It also provides much of the scriptural basis for the doctrines of the fall of man and original Sin, important beliefs in Christianity, although not generally shared by Judaism or Islam. More on Adam and Eve

Born in New York, Frank Eugene spent most of his life in Germany, where he was an important figure in avant-garde photography and photographic education. He traveled to Germany for the first time in 1886 to attend the Bavarian Academy of Graphic Arts in Munich, and upon his return to New York in 1894, he studied photography and worked as a stage designer and portraitist. His strong painting background, combined with his expertise in etching and his affinity for Jugendstil, resulted in photographs with heavily manipulated surfaces and a hand-made sensibility. His Pictorialist works warranted his election to the Linked Ring Brotherhood in London in 1900 and recommended his work to Alfred Stieglitz, who in 1902 invited Eugene to be a founder-member of the Photo-Secession. Eugene devoted the majority of his time to serving as a photographic educator in Germany, first in Munich and then in Leipzig.

Frank Eugene was significant in the Pictorialist movement of the early 1900s; his pictures helped fortify the connection between painting and photography that led to the acceptance of photography as a fine art. His facility with painting, etching, and such photographic techniques as the gum bichromate and autochrome processes have distinguished him as an accomplished practitioner of early-twentieth-century photography. Lisa Hostetler

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