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Naked Eve Figurine/Standing with Snake Bronzed Sculpture

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The nymph’s posture recalls the famous Venus of Dresden and certain models used by Titian. However, Cranach eschewed the Italian influence and created a strictly German prototype of icy sensuality, a female canon of elongated forms, broad forehead, almond-shaped eyes, narrow shoulders, small breasts, long legs and a slightly rounded belly. Together with Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg provided a link between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. In the mid-1950s, Rauschenberg started producing his combine paintings, hybrid works that mixed painting with assemblage and collage, as if they were jigsaw puzzles or visual hieroglyphs. Later on, under the influence of Andy Warhol, he adopted a new technique—silkscreen printmaking—which enabled him to insert photographic images, mixing and superimposing them like collages on which he then applied oil paint in his characteristic expressive strokes. Growing up in this lively city, Eve Sweet developed a passion for self-expression and exploring her sensuality. In Adam and Eve, Grien presents us with a magnificent study of the male and female bodies. Considered to be Dürer’s main disciple and closest collaborator, the artist developed a highly characteristic and expressive style that was far removed from his mentor’s Renaissance restraint and composure. When we compare this work with the one on the same theme by Dürer, on display at the Prado Museum, Baldung’s originality and the distance between the two artists are immediately evident. The absence of the face—where the subject’s intimacy is revealed, where the ego is disclosed—contrasts with the carnal handling of the model’s erogenous zones: the pubis, breast and lips. This type of depiction, splintered into short planes, tends to eclipse the subject, resembling a representational tradition more akin to advertising or porno movies because the explicit sexual content erases all mystery.

With her Miami roots serving as a constant source of inspiration, Eve Sweet infuses her content with the vibrant energy and sensuality that the city is known for. This route begins with one of the sculptures that was commissioned directly from the artist by August Thyssen, the grandfather of Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen, in 1905. Rodin was the last of the great Romantics; his demise coincided with the demise of an entire age. No other artist of the 19th century managed to infuse the nude with the sheer expressiveness that Rodin achieved, reinstating sculpture to the lofty status it appeared to have lost. Rodin looked to the past, to Michelangelo, although like Degas he was well aware of the lifelessness of the excessively contrived academic nude. He would walk around the models in his studio, making sketches and encouraging them to move about, to play or dance, to unconsciously adopt different postures. “I have unbounded admiration for the nude. I worship it like a god”, he declared. But his goal was not so much the nude in itself but capturing the specific weight of the bodies, how those bodies occupied space and caught the light. Rodin developed the same profound familiarity with the human body that the ancient Greeks acquired at the palaestra.In Roman law, crucifixion was the “supplicium servile”, reserved for slaves, low-class citizens, foreigners and criminals of all types, social outcasts who were stripped of their clothes to undergo capital punishment. In offering himself up for contemplation in all his vulnerability, Jesus was as naked as the criminal and slave, but precisely because of that he stood triumphant, armed with the nuda veritas, the revelation of salvation. It is to this group of paintings that Express belongs. The title and images reference movement and speed: the jumping horse, the climbers in their ascent, the choreography of the dancers—a tribute to the company of his choreographer friend Merce Cunningham—and the sequence of photographs of a moving nude woman, an explicit reference to the famous picture Nude Descending a Staircase by Marcel Duchamp, with whom Rauschenbert maintained a very productive artistic dialogue. As Saint John Chrysostom claimed, “The well-shaped body is merely a whitened sepulchre, the parts of which are full of so much uncleanliness.” Its depiction was only permitted in the sacred context, for illustrative purposes and provided that it was essential for understanding the Christian message. For example, scenes like the discovery of nudity by Adam and Eve, which marked their distance from God, the Crucifixion, the resurrection of the flesh and the suffering of saints escaped ecclesiastical reprobation. The nude in The Prints is clearly based on the woman with the zither viewed from behind in the foreground of The Turkish Bath by Ingres, which in turn is the transposition of an archetype formulated in the famous Valpinçon Bather by the same artist, currently on display at the Louvre Museum. The Pop aesthetic treated the nude as just another consumer product of contemporary society. Indeed, a genuine obsession with the female body emerged, often reduced to a mere sign or anatomical detail. As time went by, these images became increasingly erotic, finally turning women into depersonalised sex symbols.

The Romantics of the 19th century also looked to the past for inspiration, undoubtedly as a nostalgic reaction to the rapid social changes which the industrial revolution had brought about, leading to the disappearance of traditional ways of life. Medieval theology made a distinction between several types of nudity: the nuditas naturalis of the newborn, the image of purity not yet contaminated by sin, like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden before the fall; nuditas temporalis, an involuntary situation caused, for example, by poverty; nuditas criminalis, provoked by the sexual appetite that entails condemnation of the soul, as found in those of a dissolute nature; nuditas virtualis, a nudity born of the decision to lead a life of renunciation, as exemplified by John the Baptist; and finally, nuda veritas, or the nudity of Christ on the cross. In the second decade of the century, the Surrealists started delving into the corporeal, into sexuality and the psychoanalytical implications of female/male polarity, not only in iconography but also in the creation of situations of a provocative or scandalous nature, openly exploring aspects like alienation, neurosis and perversion.Eve Sweet was born and raised in the sunny city of Miami, Florida, known for its beautiful beaches and vibrant nightlife. Paul Delvaux also created a unique pictorial universe steeped in dreams and poetry. His work may be interpreted as a permanent celebration of woman, be she Eve or Venus. He called these women with their large expressive eyes and whiter- than-white skin “extras”, beings without a history who sleepwalked amidst the ruins. In an increasingly complex socio-cultural scenario, the nude was acquiring new and often contradictory implications, on a scale that ranged from a frankly raunchy eroticism to the “artistic nude”, designed—supposedly—for mere aesthetic delight. Either it was rejected as an offence against public morality, or was deemed acceptable because it belonged to the realm of fine arts and to a genre based on prestigious ancient models. These exercises gave the bodies of the Greeks that great and manly contour which the Greek masters imparted to their statues, with no vague outlines or superfluous accretions [...]. All the precepts and injunctions on the cultivation of the body from birth to adulthood, and on its preservation, nurture and embellishment by natural and artificial means, were designed to enhance the natural beauty of the ancient Greeks; they justify us in asserting, with the highest degree of probability, that the outstanding physical beauty of the Greeks far surpassed our own."

Of course, the jungle-green Versace dress that Jennifer Lopez wore to the 2000 Grammys represented another turning point in Donatella Versace's career (with the singer later wearing a reissued version on the catwalk during a Versace show in 2019). Rather than breaking the internet, Lopez's iconic fashion moment actually improved it: when the singer first wore the original dress it was so heavily searched-for online that it inspired the creation of Google Images. The tension between the aniconical rejection of images that is found in Judaism and the predominance of the visible appearance in the classical world—the theoria of the Greeks—eventually culminated in the definitive conversion of Christianity into a figurative religion. At the same time, during the centuries that unfolded between Palaeo-Christian art and humanism, the centrality that the worship of the human nude had occupied in the Greek world gave way to the concealment of the flesh. The first woman, eve, was also the first woman who appeared naked in Christian iconography. Nothing speaks to us of nature and the human condition more eloquently than a simple naked body. Thus were our first ancestors in the Garden of Eden, in a state of primeval innocence that was lost forever as a consequence of sin. From the moment Adam and Eve became aware of their nudity, a dialectic emerged between that nudity and the modesty that impregnates western culture.Her sultry content and engaging personality have attracted fans from all corners of the world, eager to get a glimpse into her exciting and seductive world.

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