Nude with raised arms
This conversation is connected to Nude with raised arms.
A standing female nude faces the viewer frontally, arms raised and bent behind her head. The figure is painted in pale white-pink, outlined in a double border of dark maroon and teal-green, set against a dark violet shadow shape that sits on a muted olive and gray-green ground. The face is abstracted with dark eyes, a small mouth, and dark hair framing the head. Her body is heavy and columnar, the forms rounded and reduced to essential shapes. The paint surface is dry and chalky, with the canvas texture visible through thin, scraped layers. This is late Hofer — he was seventy-three and had been reinstated as director of the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts after the war. He'd been painting figures like this for decades: frontal, still, monumental, outlined in color, somewhere between Expressionism and the archaic.