Since leaving “Top Chef,” Lakshmi has found herself in a period of professional uncertainty. What better time to try standup comedy? ByHelen Rosner ![Black and white portrait of Padma Lakshmi. Lakshmi wears dark pants and a white blouse. Her hair is down.]()
In art history,the odalisque is a female figure in repose, her body splayed out for the viewer’s eye to devour. Ingres’s “Grande Odalisque,” from 1814, bestows her with an anatomically impossible number of vertebrae to elongate the languorous curve of her back. In Matisse’s “Odalisque, Harmony in Red,” from 1926, she wears heavy jewelry around her ankles, like a pair of exquisite shackles. The odalisque is always sultry, frequently nude, and often blatantly Orientalized. Rarely is she streaked with whipped cream, or perilously close to squashing a glazed fruit tart with her knee, though that is exactly the state in which I found Padma Lakshmi one morning last June, during a photo shoot with the artist Marilyn Minter. The shoot, for a series of paintings Minter was calling “21st-Century Odalisques,” took place at Minter’s studio in SoHo. The National was blasting from a sound system. Minter, an auburn-haired septuagenarian wearing Converse sneakers, clutched her camera and leaned forward in a rolling office chair. Lakshmi, in black lingerie and a pink feather-trimmed boudoir robe, was draped over a chaise longue like an unfurled bolt of silk. The space around her was strewn with pastel macarons, tartlets, and bonbons. Between Lakshmi and Minter was a scrim of glass, which an assistant periodically fogged up using a clothing steamer and then wiped down, per Minter’s instructions, to create a streaky effect. | 
