A single model multiplied across a frieze of classical poses, staged in an invented bath-house where a poodle, a sphere, and a shrouded cube quietly unmoor the scene from antiquity altogether.
ARTIST: Mariano Andreu (Spanish, 1888–1976)
PERIOD: 1932
CATEGORY: Work on paper, figurative
MATERIALS: Grisaille gouache on paper, in a period giltwood frame
DIMENSIONS: 10 × 13½ in. (sight); 14½ × 18 × 1¼ in. (framed)
CONTEXT: Trained in Barcelona before settling in Paris around 1920, Andreu built a career in two disciplines that fed each other constantly — easel painting and stage design for Louis Jouvet's theatre and the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Both instincts are visible here. The anatomical study of a single model, repeated through a sequence of poses, recalls the academic drawing tradition running back through Michelangelo; but the setting — an ambiguous bath or resting-room, worked in ink-washed grisaille on a darkened ground — and its dreamlike furnishings pull the scene out of antiquity into something stranger. That combination of classical rigor and theatrical unreality places the sheet close to the concerns of the Paris Neo-Romantics, painters of Andreu's own moment and milieu who split their time, as he did, between the stage and the studio. His exhibition oils have since reached well into six figures at Sotheby's and Christie's; this sheet belongs to a more exploratory, private register of the same hand. Signed and dated 1932 upper left.