Sold for: $9,440

PROVENANCE
Private Collection, Montreal

LITERATURE
Sandra Paikowsky, Goodridge Roberts: 1904 - 1974, The McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 1998, page 195

EXHIBITED
Galerie Walter Klinkhoff Inc., Montreal, Hommage à Goodridge Roberts (1904 - 1974), September 1983, catalogue #10

Goodridge Roberts was known equally for his landscape, still life and figurative work. Sandra Paikowsky writes, “Around 1961, he produced a series of nudes which are among his most dramatic experiments with the figure. They were also the images which drew the most positive critical attention in the press.” These works were noted for their simplicity of setting, pronounced gestural brush-stroke and rich colour. Roberts’s backgrounds were vertical sections of abstract colour fields, as in this work with its brilliant blue and deep ochre areas. This emphasizes the three-dimensional volume of the model, whose body is sensuously defined with golden tones of paint against a scarlet cloth backdrop. The model fills the picture plane in this large and impressive painting. She faces the viewer, but her gaze is cool, oblique and non-confrontational - the paint itself carries emotion with its charged colouration and the passion of the expressionist brush-stroke. Roberts always worked directly from his subject, and Nude is a superb expression of his profoundly poetic process of seeing and feeling his subject through the medium of paint.

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