Nude in Interior
Artist
Isabel Bishop
(American, 1902 - 1988)
Date1947
MediumOil and tempera on canvas
Dimensions21 1/8 x 18 1/4 in.
ClassificationsOil Painting
Credit LineStephen B. Lawrence Fund
Terms
Object number1953.08
DescriptionBishop was thoroughly aware of the history of the female nude in Western art and the objectification of the female form in the hands of many male artists, and she refused to concede to that conception: "I have no sexual interest in females. But the tradition of the female nude, it is not only a subject but an art form." (2) For an artist passionately interested in the European figural tradition, the female nude was another part of that tradition: yes, a naked female body but simultaneously a vehicle to work on the problem of aesthetic beauty in art, "an opportunity for a design concept . . . [the] concept of the nude is linked with our most elementary notions of order and design." (3)Bishop worked on the problem of the nude from the 1920s on, and by mid-century her solution was to "try for mobility in the form . . . though it all may be described as still . . . the possibility is expressed that whatever is represented there can change its position." (4) This characterization applies perfectly to "Nude in Interior": a seated figure bending over and reaching toward the ground who is at once still yet mobile, with a potential for further movement. Embodied in Bishop's mode of depicting the figure is the potential for change or growth-an essential aspect of life itself. The nude thus becomes a statement of her profoundly humanist ideas.
The small size of the canvas creates intimacy and draws the viewer close, yet Bishop imbued the figure with a sense of monumentality and expressiveness. It seems to shift in space and merge in and out of the background layers of soft tonal variations and luminosity. To create these effects, she developed a painstaking and time-consuming method uniquely her own (she finished fewer than two hundred oil paintings during her long career). Bishop wrote specifically the creation of "Nude in Interior": "It was painted on . . . linen canvas . . . and the drawing, a grey wash in tempera. The drawing was then developed with yellow ochre and raw umber, in oil paint-using . . . varnish diluted with turpentine as a medium. And then modeling, which was thin and transparent, was scumbled half-covering tones of burnt-sienna and white. Gradually thicker oil paint was introduced, and glazes of transparent color." Writing twelve years after she sold the painting, she noted it had not been given a final varnish and asked that it be sent to her to be completed. (5)
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NOTES:
2. Quoted in Isabelle Dervaux, "Enter the Women: A Slow Transformation at the Academy from the 1930s to Today," in David Dearinger and Isabelle Dervaux, Challenging Tradition: Women of the Academy, 1826-2003 (New York: National Academy of Design, 2003), p. 24.
3. Ellen Wiley Todd, The "New Woman" Revised: Painting and Gender Politics on Fourteenth Street (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 300-310; quoted in Bruce St. John, Isabel Bishop: The Affectionate Eye (Los Angeles: Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Marymount University, 1985), p. 12.
4. Karle Lunde, Isabel Bishop (New York: Abrams, 1975), p. 60.
5. Correspondence, 1959, NBMAA archives.
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