Real & Imaginary
Donald Kuspit writes, “With her absurdly long neck, Noah Becker’s female Figure in Profile, 2023 is clearly the secular sister of Parmigianino’s Madonna With The Long Neck, 1535-1540, the post-Renaissance masterpiece that inaugurated mannerism. Becker’s many new portraits of sophisticated ladies, not to say upper class femme fatales —all strangely haughty, remote, their eyes often veiled by sunglasses, their lips lushly, not to say luridly red, temptingly kissable—are mannerist in spirit, not to say subliminally surreal. Mannerism is indeed the ancestor of surrealism, as the art historian Arnold Hauser convincingly argued.”
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