Painted in 1989, Gold Nude is a compelling early example of George Condo’s iconoclastic take on the female nude. Gold Nude depicts a naked woman sitting cross-legged with arms akimbo, framed by viscous, dripping gold paint, a miniature halo of short green brushstrokes circling her head. Created while Condo was a student in Paris beginning to solidify his mature pictorial vocabulary, the present work takes up this theme vis-à-vis Picasso and Matisse, synthesizing the lessons of modernist masters with his own virtuoso painterly technique.
The exaggeratedly small scale of the woman’s head anticipates Condo’s seminal Antipodes series of the late 1990s and 2000s, which feature geometric, distorted figures characterized by bulging eyes and shrunken heads, ciphers for witty commentary on the nature of alienation and disconnection in contemporary life. Similarly, the carnivalesque disposition of arms and breasts evokes Picasso’s approach to the female form. As such, Gold Nude prefigures Condo’s revolutionary approach to Cubism in his mature portraiture, in the form of the pictorial language he calls “psychological cubism”. As Condo explained “I don’t want to simply look at Picasso on the wall or read about Picasso, I want to actually paint through him… I want to paint that understanding” (George Condo, quoted in Thomas Kellein, “Interview with George Condo 2004”, George Condo: 100 Women, exh. cat., Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Salzburg, p. 34).
The thickly outlined figure and saturated gold ground also suggest a source of inspiration in Matisse’s iconic semi-abstract nudes of the early 1900s, which represented the first instances of anti-naturalistic color being used in otherwise classical iterations of the female nude. In Gold Nude, Condo shares in his predecessor’s sense of profound reverence for the figure, exemplified here by the archaic simplicity of the body and sumptuous beauty of the gilded canvas. With its skillful execution and deft referentialism, Gold Nude is a masterful example of Condo’s early entries into a time-honored theme that he continues to explore to this day.