MANARA - Lot 194

MANARA MILO MANARA Original cover for the Italian magazine Corto Maltese No. 3, Year 2, March 1984, also used on the back cover of the 1993 reprint of Quatre doigts by Himalaya. India ink and graphite on paper 32.8 × 47.8 cm (12.91 × 18.82 in.) Drawing isn't that complicated. Representing the real thing - big deal! It can be done with a minimum of application. But translating feeling, musicality, sensuality, mystery... that's the magic, the secret. A grail that few, except a few geniuses, naturally attain. Manara is one of them: a look, a pout, an attitude... are captured with a stroke of astonishing sagacity, capable of arpeggiating the different varieties of pleasure, enjoyment, anguish... From this illustration for the cover of a magazine, we can deduce a whole story, voluptuous to the max! This representation of beauty, encased in a tangle of branches, but always free, always wild, always bewitching, is the very definition of what desire is: irrepressible.