Open Letter To Artists (From An Art Critic) - Part 3
by Joan Altabe - 6/15/2006
Nudes. There are good ones and those of the second kind.
Pretty pictures with nothing to say - the second kind - look so practiced, so drilled, they come across like well-played scales: skillful, but song-less, all feeling smoothed away in technique. There are way too many of these.
I grant you that unclothed figure art is a ticklish thing to paint. But making it look like a Kodachrome slide made into a painting is too removed from visceral experience: too slick, too smooth, and too skin-deep. What’s more, because most figure paintings describe the female form, when they’re pink and posed, they tend to look like ads for feminine hygiene products.
Good nudes tell stories that are psychologically charged. Figure-painting master Raphael Soyer used skin tones, as well as gesture. The quiet, recessive shades in his work lend an intimate, introspective air.
Edouard Manet was also good at painting storytelling nudes. Consider the nude woman in “Luncheon on the Grass” picnicking with two clothed men under the oaks and chestnut trees of Paris’ Bois de Boulogne. On the face of it, the depiction is no different than all the Old Master art that intermixed clothed males with nude females. Yet Manet’s version shocked high Parisian society. Emperor Napoleon III, who was hardly a paragon of decency, even called the image "indecent.” Why?
Some point to the fact that the identity of the nude was known: Victorine Meurend, an artist's model and painter who ran off to America with her lover after Manet finished the painting. But the bigger cause for shock may lie in the sub-text of the story that the painting tells. A clue can be found in the painting that prompted Manet to paint “Luncheon on the Grass.” Four centuries earlier, Giorgione depicted two clothed males and a pair of nude women in his “Concert Champetre.” But Giorgione showed the women waiting on the men, who are talking only to each other.
Clearly, Manet’s “Luncheon on the Grass” ended the male fantasy of female passivity that played out so constantly in art history. He painted the nude female actively engaged in conversation with men, and in public, no less. And he went further. He showed Meurend boldly staring back at you, as if you were intruding. "Yes?' she seems to ask over her shoulder, her face direct and challenging and lacking the usual demure reticence of naked females in art.
Nudes that stand for states of mind are the good ones. Eugene Delacroix used a bare-breasted female in the cause of patriotism. In his “Liberty Leading the People,” which ended up on a French postage stamp, he painted the female raising the tricolor of the French flag in battle. The uncovered breast was meant as a reminder that Liberty is the mother of France.
Meaningful figure art applies to sculpture, as well. Like Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People,” Michelangelo’s unclad "David," the Biblical hero who stood up to the menacing Goliath, also stood for liberty. And he heightened the contrast between the boy and the giant by portraying the boy in the nude. In that way, he emphasized his vulnerability. At the same time, he showed the boy’s state of mind. Even though he is seen standing fast in combat, he is not without fear. The furrow that Michelangelo carved in his brow tells you that.
Nudes that don’t tell stories are merely studies. The hard part is turning a study into a statement.
— Joan Altabe | June 15, 2006
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