Composition

Maurice Tabard

1929 · Gelatin silver print · Photographs

This photograph is informed by the artist's experiences as an advertising photographer, X-ray technician, and assistant to Man Ray. By printing through a sandwich of several negatives, Tabard fabricated a nude that inhabits no definable space or time. She is at once Pygmalion's Galatea or Botticelli's Venus while remaining a Parisian model who has just stripped off her stockings. For the Surrealists, the female form was the subject of endless, obsessive reworkings.

Artist

Maurice Tabard

Date

1929

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987