Nude standing woman 

Jozef Hanula made this pencil drawing, Nude Standing Woman, at an unknown date. Here, the artist depicts an anonymous nude woman on a simple background. He adopts the academic tradition of life drawing but imbues it with the spirit of his own time. Hanula was a Slovak painter, who spent much of his career painting genre paintings of Slovak life. This drawing reflects the growing liberalization of artistic and social norms in Europe at the time. A nude woman is presented without classical or mythological conceits. She is not Venus, or an allegory of beauty, but an ordinary woman rendered with fidelity. The image is a product of art schools and academies, as the artist would have drawn from life. Looking at the artist's biography and related images from that time gives us a better sense of the meaning of art as tied to social and institutional context.