Nathan Oliveira
Reclining Nude 1958

© Nathan Oliveira Estate courtesy John Berggruen Gallery. Reproduction of this image, including downloading, is prohibited.
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Reclining Nude
Reclining Nude is a 1958 abstract oil painting by Nathan Oliveira, just over six feet wide by a little more than five feet tall. The background is a range of grays: from gray-brown and light gray at the top and down the left side to a darker blue-gray on the right and much of the lower half. Just below the center of the expansive field of grays rests a set of shapes made of brighter colors. The shapes are so abstracted that knowing the painting’s title is key to interpreting them. Perhaps the perspective is from above of a black-haired white woman lying on her belly, her ankles crossed. It is equally plausible as a view of her lying on her side. Here, the paint was not only brushed onto the canvas, but also pushed and scraped into chunky peaks that reflect the light, bringing an incredible sense of depth and vibrancy to the serene body painted in white, peach, gray, yellow, and orange.
The heaped up, glossy black paint making up her hair is the thickest spot on the canvas and is about one-quarter of the way from the left edge. The figure widens into an oblong body that spans another quarter of the canvas’s width. It is mostly white and peach with a squiggle of gray coursing down her back. Emerging from gray-outlined buttocks in yellow and gray, her legs narrow to a sharp point one-quarter of the way from the right edge. A line of thick black paint borders her from her buttocks to her head. A long, wavy line of this black continues on past her head in an arc aiming toward the bottom left corner. It is accented with a short stripe of Kelly green and small sweeps of white, yellow, and red.
Both the background and the central figure are painted with overlapping strokes: up and down, diagonally, and back and forth. Several very thin white lines cut across the center of the painting, just above the figure. The canvas above the thin white lines is fairly smooth in texture compared to the darker bottom half. The right bottom area has energetic brush strokes like dark-gray ocean waves frothing and peaking. And on the left, more thin lines are cut into the paint following the black arc from her head toward the bottom.
Oliveira, who was born in Oakland, was never an abstract painter; rather, he came to his expressionistic style via portraiture while he was a student at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts, or CCA). He recalled, “I worked with certain aspects of Abstract Expressionism, chance, risk, gesture, but I had a responsibility to those traditional aspects of painting that dealt with an image.” Oliveira was a great admirer of Willem de Kooning; he also looked to European models of figurative expressionism, including the work of Max Beckmann and Edvard Munch.
In Reclining Nude (1958), Oliveira brushed, pushed, and scraped thick paint to suggest the fleshy suppleness of a recumbent figure set against an abstract background. Nude in Environment I (1962) also imagines an environment unmoored from reality: in this case, a dreamscape with heads swirling around a rigid standing figure. Oliveira applied the colors in thin washes, articulating details with pencil scribbles.
Oliveira all but gave up painting in 1963. In 1964, he moved to Palo Alto to take a teaching position at Stanford, where he stayed until his retirement in 1995. His new studio was in an abandoned theater, and it was there he began to paint again, in 1966. He set up a tableau on the stage and painted it directly. A dramatic light cuts into the dark proscenium in Stage #2 with Bed (1967). To the left of the bed, we see traces, called pentimento, of an armchair that Oliveira painted out of the composition.
Oliveira developed a close relationship with the Andersons after meeting them in the late 1960s, and offered invaluable guidance as they built a strong collection of California art. In turn, the Andersons opened their home and museum-caliber collection lo Stanford students, their way of giving back to Oliveira and the university.
-Sidney Simon, PhD ’18
The work of Nathan Oliveira is integral to the Anderson Collection for several reasons. Oliveira, born in Oakland, fuses the sensibility of abstract expressionism and European artists like Giacometti and Francis Bacon. He was a lifelong Bay Area artist and teacher, and taught as a professor of studio art at Stanford from 1964 to 1996. The Andersons befriended Professor Oliveira, who played a large role in advising and developing the scope of the collection. His works, including Reclining Nude, were some of the Andersons’ earliest acquisitions. Reclining Nude bespeaks Oliveira’s occupation with the singular human figure. His portraits are sensual, ceremonial, and meditative.