Japan (odalisque) 1916

Zinaida Serebriakova made this painting, Japan (odalisque), without a date, probably with oil on canvas. The paint handling is really interesting here, there’s something about the way that she’s used these buttery, opaque colors to create these very soft edges. You can see how she’s built up the surface slowly, layering the pigment until she gets the tonality just right. There is a really beautiful contrast between the very fleshy, almost Rubens-like tone of the figure and the more schematic, almost cubist treatment of the space around her. Look at how she’s picked out the light as it falls across the back of the figure, especially along her spine and how this makes a kind of graphic pattern with the highlights on the cloth slung around her legs. Serebriakova's contemporary, Olga Boznańska, also had a knack for this kind of intimate subject matter, but approached painting with a more impressionistic style. Serebriakova embraces a kind of ambiguity, letting the painting exist in a state of flux and openness.