Nude on a Red Table

Over the past forty years, Goodman has produced a profound series of paintings that both figure and disfigure the body as a site of tradition and trauma. His work engages the history of art by referencing works from he past, while thoroughly confronting contemporary issues. Born in Philadelphia, Goodman received his art education at the Philadelphia College of Art. He has had a distinguished teaching career at institutions including the University of California-Davis, the University of Georgia-Athens, and at the Pennsylvania Academy. "Nude on a Red Table" is an unsettling work that takes up a theme Goodman has depicted since the mid-1960s, a nude woman crowded onto a small table. Here, Goodman further elicits the themes of fragmentation implicit in the earlier images, the twisted body becoming a heap of heavy limbs, conjuring images of Gericault's paintings of severed body parts. Headless, the torso ends in streaks of red paint that spill over the table. Disrupting the viewer's expectations, Goodman questions the nature of representational art, as his painting dissolves from meticulous realism to total abstraction. Through this shifting visual language, Goodman engages with issues surrounding the tradition of the nude, while demonstrating his mastery of the figure.