For the first 33 seconds of Sofia Coppola’s 2003 film, Lost in Translation, film credits scroll over the backside of Scarlet Johansson’s character, Charlotte. The opening mise-en-scène quietly introduces the recent college graduate reclining in a tousled gray shirt and sheer pink panties — to quote Britney Spears, “not a girl, not yet a woman.”
Famously, Coppola confessed that she had to don a pair of the sheer underwear herself to show a reluctant Johansson what the shot would look like. But for Coppola, the scene was set and the opening frame was clear. It was her own interpretation of a work by the little-known artist, John Kacere.
From 1969 until his death in the late nineties, Kacere focused almost exclusively on painting hyper-realistic depictions of idealized lingerie-clad midriffs — sheer panties, lace garter belts, and silky camises seductively ruffled above the stomach. “Woman is the source of all life, the source of regeneration,” Kacere has explained of his paintings recalling Gustave Courbet’s L'Origine du Monde,. “My work praises that aspect of womanhood.”
For its part in Lost in Translation, Coppola later recalled, ”There’s a painter called John Kacere who does paintings of girls in different underwear, so it’s taken from one of his paintings. When I started the movie, I had a reference book of different images that came to mind with the movie. I always collect reference pictures to make a book that I can show.”
Beyond his photorealistic handling of delicate fabrics, drapery and human flesh, Coppola was likely drawn to Kacere’s signature strategic cropping around his subjects midsection.
Kacere, who began his career as an Abstract Expressionist, turned his attention to Pop Art in 1967 when he became fascinated by a Mel Ramos painting entitled, Beaver Shot. Ramos’ painting featured a young woman fully clothed in a black and white stripped dress. The dress, however, bears a mysterious hole revealing the woman’s pristine white underwear.
Two years later, Kacere would begin his series dedicated to the female form, distilled from the bottom of the rib cage to the mid thigh and monumentally scaled. Accentuating the feminine form with meticulous attention to detail, the larger-than-life figures adorned in glossy ripped fabrics and gauzy briefs extend beyond the realm of typical nude study, lingering on the verge of still life or landscape.
