986 - Theo, seated female nude in yellow, red, blue and green, wet-in-wet, 1994

Theo, seated female nude in yellow, red, blue and green, wet-in-wet, 1994 Watercolour on paper, signed and dated at lower right “Theo 94”. Seated female nude in abstracted conception in three-quarter view to the left, the body laid in wet-in-wet in yellow, rose, blue and green and bleeding into the ground at the edges; head, arms and hands only suggested, the background in broad vertical bands. Good condition. Image 53.5x38 cm (HxW), framed under mount behind glass in a white moulding, frame partly bumped, overall 79x64 cm (HxW). The sheet is a watercolour nude in the wet-in-wet technique, in which paint is applied into colour that is still damp; the merging of the water-soluble colours is deliberately used as a means of design, and the light paper ground shimmers through the translucent layers of paint. Emil Nolde laid in many of his watercolours in this way. The nude, the depiction of the unclothed human body, had been the central exercise in the study of anatomy and proportion since the foundation of the art academies in the 16th century and originally denoted a study of posture and movement. Since Expressionism the nude has served to express inner moods, and this female nude of 1994, in which the colour merely plays around the figure, stands in that line.