Nude Woman

The two nudes that Pavle Beljanski included in his collection, one from the beginning and the other from the end of the cycle painted between 1927 and 1929, summarize the stylistic changes in Šumanović’s method of painting. The directness of sensations and feelings, shaped by swift brushstrokes with diluted paint on the canvas Nude Woman with a Shawl, was transformed in the Nude Woman into an inner pulsation beneath the compact, densely painted matter laid down layer by layer with a painting knife instead of a brush which the artist had used earlier. The geometric style of the composition repressed by gestural expression from 1927 was now clearly accentuated through almost sculpturally solid forms of the nude and by the cubist vestiges on the face of the brunette which bears an uncanny resemblance to the painter’s self-portrait from the Luncheon on the Grass. His cycle of 1927/29 opened up an issue which he focused on until his late Šid canvases. The characteristic material feature of the Nude Woman and most other nudes from this series, especially the Paris Model from the Šid gallery, was also underlined by Šumanović in the cycle of forty nudes which he painted in Šid between 1932 and 1934. Depicted in the interior, these brunettes were painted from Parisian models, and they were linked to the 1929 canvases by their similar tonality and technical treatment. In the so called “Šidijanke” (Women from Šid) cycle (1935/38), where Šumanović developed the sculptural quality of the female body to the fullest, except for the position of arms in the Nude Woman repeated in one nude Bather from 1935, the multiplication and the new functions acquired by the white drapery upon which the nude is seated show the breadth of Šumanović’s visual creativity regardless of the limited thematic and linguistic repertoire.