MASP

By Luciano Migliaccio
Malhoa does not appear to have been a good student in drawing live models. Professor Lupi considered that he barely made use of the course. In the Artists’ Union (Grêmio Artístico) exhibition of 1894, he showed two pictures entitled, The Model’s Rest and Before the Session in which he returns to the theme of a nude live model in a scene inside the studio. In Rest (Caldas da Rainha, Malhoa Museum, on loan from the National Museum of Contemporary Art), the model is presented from the back, warming her hands at a brazier. Before the Session is the picture today in the Masp Collection, entitled The Artist’s Studio. The same model is shown sitting, with her back arched over a blue fabric. The body glistens in full light before the lighted stove, having a large inclined chimney. In the background shadows, the artist is seen seated, smoking a cigar while attentively examining a recently finished sheet. In both cases, the nude female theme is almost controversially devoid of any idealization. The critics of the time caught the painter’s ambiguous intent. Rangel da Lima describes the nude in Rest as “banal, careless, flacid fleshiness, and palely defective” at the same time finding it “a somewhat conventional pose of a classical priestess”. A certain conventionalism can be seen in the figure’s back in the Studio, arched in an almost manneristic manner. However, the model warming herself at the stove in the large, bare studio, where the painter, withdrawn into the shadows, reflects on his work brings the scene closer to the daily reality. Malhoa treated the nude female form in a much more conventional manner in subsequent large decorative pieces (The Island of Loves, 1907, Military Museum, Lisbon). Peccata Nostra, from 1920, still shows the influence of Fortuny and that of moralistic archeological themes from the end of the previous century. There is a beautiful nude from this same year with the same title: The Model’s Rest, in which the painter returns to the pose of the woman seen from the back, warming herself at a brazier, thus returning to the more sober realism of works in the first period. The background, formed by a wide swathe of flowers, is reminiscent of Klimt’s final works.

— Luciano Migliaccio, 1998

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