Nude No. 1 1914

Editor: Here we have Alberto Magnelli’s "Nude No. 1," painted in 1914, an oil painting that strikes me as both bold and somewhat unsettling. The landscape behind the nude figure seems fractured, almost Cubist, but then the figure itself has this Fauvist color palette. What do you see when you look at this piece? Curator: The fragmentation, as you rightly noted, is key. The painting rejects a singular perspective. Notice how the forms—the figure, the landscape—are reduced to their essential geometric components. Observe how the figure, almost totemic, is constructed of simplified planes of ochre, orange, and umber, starkly delineated. Consider also the arbitrary application of color: what does it signify to you? Editor: I suppose the colour adds to the unsettling mood I initially picked up on. It is unexpected, unnatural, divorced from any sense of realism. How would this play into a Formalist interpretation? Curator: Precisely! It forces us to confront the painting as a self-contained system of signs. The distortion of form and the discord of color challenge our preconceived notions of representation. The flatness of the picture plane becomes paramount. Magnelli, at this point, flirts with abstraction, but hasn't plunged in. What is the interplay between those abstracted geometric shapes that constitute the ground and the body? Editor: It feels as if the body is not set apart from the scenery but melded into it. Curator: Exactly. The figure becomes just another formal element within the composition, challenging traditional notions of the figure-ground relationship. The planes are all intertwined within this composition, creating interesting tension and pictorial balance. What we gain from such art are novel formal insights and a disruption of previous codes, with abstraction ready to follow. Editor: It is like a code to break with colour and form itself, so cool to look at. Thanks! Curator: Indeed. We learned today, abstraction doesn’t have to start from zero and it's possible to convey so much just through shape and form.