Monday, December 07, 2009

Boil 2.12

Like many people, I have trouble with Ruben's nudes, especially the female ones: all that smothering flesh, vibrantly alive but with the erotic appeal of a mud slide. (Rubens, owing to moral constraints of the time, rarely worked from nude female models, and many of his women are what they look like: male models imaginatively plumped and upholstered, fore and aft.)
P. Schjeldahl, "Rubenessence", The New Yorker, Feb 7 2005, p.88