The German term Rückenfigur translates as “back figure,” but it actually refers to a person who is positioned in the foreground of a painting with their back to the viewer. The term was coined by Caspar David Friedrich, a 19th-century German Romantic, yet painters and sculptors have studied the rear view of humans—and its focal point, the derrière—since antiquity. This exhibition explores the eroticism and intimacy, the fetishism and voyeurism, that is implicit in the rear view. Works by the modern painters Edgar Degas, Egon Schiele, Francis Bacon, and René Magritte are part of this naughty display, which marks the opening of the gallery’s swanky new two-floor, Beaux Arts-style townhouse. —Elena Clavarino