Nu se coiffant

Luce first encountered Georges Seurat’s Pointillist painting technique and Divisionist color theory in the mid-1880s and began to experiment with the same energetic, staccato brushstrokes and radical color palette. Both artists used this style to interpret modern life, depicting rural landscapes, urban street scenes, as well as bourgeois and working class figures. While Seurat’s approach to the human figure was somewhat flat and detached, Luce’s paintings of individuals, including the present work, are often charged with personality and emotion.
The model for this work has been endowed with very specific features: a pert nose, full cheeks, a slender torso, and thick black hair. However, the subject of a woman seated at her toilette has a long tradition in the history of Western painting, dating back to Renaissance depictions of Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty. French artists—including François Boucher, Edouard Manet, and Berthe Morisot—famously translated that erotic mythological subject into the mortal realm, depicting modern women in the quotidian act of dressing themselves and their hair. Here, Luce has rendered that subject in his distinctive Neo-Impressionist style, with vivid punctuations of color. Though his experimentation with color borders on abstraction, Luce has developed a clear sense of volume and perspective—and a very detailed observation of the woman’s taut muscles and soft flesh.