Three Nudes

This painting of three standing female nudes by the sculptor John Storrs display, much like his bronze of a similar date (Smart Museum collection 1994.116), characteristics of both academic realism and modernist abstraction. Painted from live models posed in the studio, his pictorial depiction simplifies each model's anatomy into abstract elements of composition. The firm and continuous contours of these painted images reveal a sculptor's approach to the human figure as a series of silhouettes in space, with an interior shading to suggest the contours of three-dimensional surface planes.