Painting by Sterling Strauser: Dual Nudes

Two figures face each other across a band of orange.

Dual Nudes is an oil on board by Sterling Strauser (1907-1995), signed and dated 1974. Paired nudes give a painter a way to study how two bodies relate across a picture, and they are made for close looking in private rooms. The two standing women are laid down in pale, dry paint, then given their edges with a few thin dark lines: a hip, a breast, a downcast brow, red touches at the mouth. Between them runs a vertical stripe of hot orange, which softens toward the corners. The image is fourteen inches wide and eighteen high. Framed, twenty-seven and a quarter high.

Neither seems inclined to speak first.