Ferdinand Hodler
Nu Féminin en mouvement (sketch for l’Émotion)
circa 1902-03
This woman has a classical grace about her figure. She is nude with but a long drape of indistinct cloth shielding her modesty, and she poses with an air of flirtation, sensuality. The bay of skin flowing from her outstretched foot, up along her thigh and rounded hip and then to her slender bosom and neck, wholly connects the woman as not just a body of singular beauty and proportion, but also as a muse - as an ideal hidden within the everyday mundane. Her shape is attractively familiar; her gesture is natural yet poised, with one hand accentuating the unique delicacy of the female body, the other drifting down nearer her belly, perhaps to instinctually cradle the area in which life is created. Her shoulders also feign a sensualness: slightly tensed, they appear to express strain or uncertainty, with an added touch of allure in the way they relate to the position of her neck. Craned away from the viewer, her face almost entirely hidden, the neck joins body with mind, soul with character. Hodler foreshortened her face, making her strong jaw and upper neck all the more feminine by softening and thickening them together as one confident contour. Like a statue, like an ethereal figure oblivious of common plagues and worries, this nude is elevated from being just a common girl to being interchangeably that and more. She is forever faceless and flat, but she has a timeless charisma that runs deeper than a mere sheaf of paper.
