Bill Brandt. Perspective of Nudes

In 1961 Bill Brandt published one of his most important books, Perspective of Nudes. From that point on his nudes became amongst his most famous and acclaimed works.

The Hyman Collection contains several nudes from this publication as well as others that are almost unknown to allow one to trace the evolotuon of this aspect of Brandt's work.

One starting point is provided by one of Brandt's most extraordinary early pictures, a close-up crop of his famous scene of a bedroom in Soho, which reduces the forms of an embracing man and woman into an abstraction that is transformed into a sensual masterpiece about contact and congress as the forms merge into one and the foregounded hand empahsises the tactile. The photograph anticipates the voluptous fragmentation of the body parts of Brandt's later nudes, in which the setting is also removed to concentrate attention on the human form.