Reclining Nude (Barbara Brown) 1916

Robert Henri painted this ‘Reclining Nude’ using oil on canvas. The brushstrokes feel quick and gestural, capturing the fleeting effects of light and shadow. But let's consider the materiality of this painting in a broader sense. Oil paint, by the time of Henri, was an industrialized product. Pigments ground and mixed by machine, linseed oil refined at scale, canvas woven in mills. The readymade quality of these materials meant that artists could focus on the act of painting itself, rather than being mired in material preparation. Yet, this ease of production has a flipside. It distances us from the labor involved in making art. The miners who extracted pigments, the factory workers who wove canvas, the farmers who harvested flax for linseed oil - their hands are strangely absent from this image, even as they enabled its creation. Henri's quick, confident brushstrokes celebrate a very modern idea: the artist as individual genius, working free from material constraints. But it also obscures the complex web of labor and industry that made that freedom possible.