Audio Description (03:19)

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Manuel Neri’s Collage and Ink Figure Study No. 35 [Joan Brown] was made in 1963. At just under two feet by two feet, it is only half-an-inch taller than it is wide, and made on light tan paper. The main elements are sketched on paper in black, cut out, and collaged onto the base paper. These are accented by more black ink all around. Some of the ink appears brushed on in quick, energetic gestures. Some was applied with Neri’s fingers, leaving dark and pale ovals all over the page with fingerprint ridge lines that add a sense of texture. The scene is a tight view of two nude female figures in an artist’s studio posed beneath a chunky overhead light with three hanging bare bulbs. Both figures lack hair, hands, and feet. The figure on the left is seated in profile, her bent legs tucked beneath her. She faces the second figure on the right. Shown from the back, shadowing on the right side of the second figure’s head and an extension of her neck on the left suggests she has turned her head slightly and is glancing toward her right.

The paper sketches are glued flat to the base paper, and thin, dark outlines around many parts of the sketches, and small smudges of ink along edges, create a subtle sensation of three-dimensionality. The light fixture, as well as the women’s bodies, have streaks and smears over much of their surfaces, some pale and wispy, some vividly saturated. The rest of the base paper has fewer fingerprints than the collaged sketches, giving the sketches vibrancy compared to the plain tan expanse they are affixed to.

Behind the sitting woman on the left, an area of black ink was painted-on fairly thick in wide back-and-forth strokes, unevenly meeting the edge of the paper on the left and lying snugly against the S-shape of her back. The dark ink continues a short way on the floor in front of her, eventually thinning and becoming paler by the time the ink reaches the standing figure. Although straight lines at the edges of the women’s wrists indicate no intention to sketch hands on either of them, the presence of black ink on the ground seems like perhaps the standing woman’s feet are there but simply hidden within the gray puddle of ink.

The light fixture feels abstracted, as do the black shadows and ink puddles on the ground. But the women, despite having no hair, hands, or feet, feel rather realistic. The curve of the seated woman’s breast, the snaking line along the standing woman’s torso to her hip to her slightly bent left leg, the roundness of her buttocks all bring this one-color painting to life.