Spring Fling
Nicole Eisenman
American, born France. 1965
1996
An oil-on-canvas painting that stages a nude woman bound to a simple wooden frame, a basket of daisies spilling from her back to create an ambiguous mix of ritual, eroticism, and wry playfulness.
A cool, pale-blue backdrop makes the softly modeled body, wooden posts, gleaming cuffs, and falling flowers read like a staged tableau—at once classical in facture and oddly off-kilter, where tenderness and unease coexist.
Reworking the old allegory of spring, Eisenman’s painting uses humor and contradiction to unsettle the traditional nude and to push late-20th-century figurative painting toward questions of desire, agency, and representation.
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
65 × 52 1/2" (165.1 × 133.4 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Gift of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg in memory of Jack Tilton
Accession
252.2021
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
