Alfonso Michel

Following his 1945 exhibition at the Galería de Arte Mexicano, Michel began to experiment, breaking down form into more intensely planar and sculptural contours. In comparison to slightly earlier paintings like The Sybil (Blaisten Collection), here the faceting and cropping of the figure is more aggressive, diminishing the sexual charge normally invested in depictions of the female nude. Intended or not, in this painting Michel undermines the normative system of erotic exchange between the female nude and a presumably heterosexual male viewer. Michel's treatment of the female nude in this painting, as in the slightly later Nude, ca. 1950 (Blaisten Collection), harkens back to the disturbing distortions of Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon [traductor: guarda el frances] (Museum of Modern Art, New York) or even Paula Modersohn-Becker's Kneeling Mother and Child (Nationalgalerie, Berlin), both of 1907. Though driven by different motivations, both Picasso and Modersohn-Becker deployed heavily painted, almost ugly monumentality to in order to destabilize, or complicate, the erotic charge of the female body. Here, despite the seeming availability of the figure, whose opulent breasts punctuate the picture space, Michel uses thick paint and figural distortion to disrupt connotations of the nude's sexual availability. Shown from the waist up, in a three-quarter profile, the nude stares out of the picture space to her right. Michel positions the figure on a blue wooden chair and places her in a tropical environment, with a white stucco building, leafy foliage and a hammock. Though these elements code the nude as "Mexican," the acute compression to the foreground, the cropping of the figure and the faceted planar quality, not to mention the nude's inscrutable expression, frustrate any attempt to enjoy this nude as "closer to nature" or as innately Mexican. Despite her location among the accoutrements of a tropical paradise this nude reveals the artificiality of that construction.