Nude Descending a Staircase

Although she’s working amid the most hidebound traditions and taboos of England’s landed gentry, she’s an avatar of modernism, even transgression: At one point, she even becomes a literal nude descending a staircase.

More characteristic of the artist’s style, though, is the multipart “Descending,” which was inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2,” a 1912 canvas that’s far from naturalistic.

Most famously, Marcel Duchamp reprised his “Nude Descending a Staircase,” the Cubist-influenced portrait of a body in motion that scandalized New York at the 1913 Armory Show.

The famous photograph with Duchamp, whose 1912 painting “Nude Descending a Staircase” is a landmark of modern art, came about as a ploy of sexual comeuppance toward Ms. Babitz’s married lover at the time, curator Walter Hopps.

One of Lawson’s most arresting images shows a nude Brazilian woman reclining on a staircase, a pose that invokes the recumbent neoclassical odalisque while perhaps riffing on the cubist abstraction of Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2.”