This photograph is informed by the artist's experiences as an advertising photographer, X-ray technician, and assistant to Man Ray. By printing through a sandwich of several negatives, Tabard fabricated a nude that inhabits no definable space or time. She is at once Pygmalion's Galatea or Botticelli's Venus while remaining a Parisian model who has just stripped off her stockings. For the Surrealists, the female form was the subject of endless, obsessive reworkings.

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