One
of the most radically abstract of Brassaï’s nudes, this image was published in
1933 in the inaugural issue of the avant-garde magazine Minotaure. With
the figure’s head and legs cut off by the picture’s edges, the twisting,
truncated torso seems to float in space like an apparition—an ambiguous,
organic form with an uncanny resemblance to a phallus. This transformation of
the female figure into a fetish object is a hallmark of Surrealism that
reflects the important influence of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory on European
art of the early 20th century.