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A Venus Of Wild Nights: The Female Nude In Paintings By Judith Linhares, Shannon Egan

Art and Art History Faculty Publications

A nude woman sits on a pyramidal assemblage of logs in a pose reminiscent of Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker (1902) in Judith Linhares’s painting Up There (2003). With a delineated but transparent form, an absurdly large bumblebee feeds on enormous flowers at the base of the structure. The female figure oversees the fantastical scene like a queen bee atop a beehive. Linhares revisits the subject of a monumental female nude in her paintings (a traditional subject in the history of painting), and as such, these ‘‘queen bees’’ populate a whimsical but historical world. Her paintings are large, and even in …