Showing posts with label Venus of Wilendorf. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Venus of Wilendorf. Show all posts

13/03/2014

The Minefield of the Nude



In early July all my thoughts centred around Modigliani whose work was being shown in London. I got every review on the exhibition I could find in the papers or on line. I also re-read my many books on Modigliani. As you know, Modigliani had been one of my all time hero's since the age of 16. Quite apart from his dramatic debauched life - his love of poetry and philosophy - I had loved his art. I had only seen a handful of his paintings in various galleries around the world - but never a major retrospective. However, those individual paintings I had seen were scared on my memory and thrilled me with their beauty, colour, rich paint and elegance. So I was shocked by the dismissal of his art by most critics, who called his work weak, over stylized, and pornographic. His nudes - which I found truly beautiful and not at all sexual, came in for the greatest amount of criticism. Yes his nudes were smouldering erotic - yes they seem to have had a sleepy post-coital sensuality - but I didn't see them as exploitative or abusive. I felt they were poems to love in paint made by a man who loved women and who women loved. But it seemed that the greatest crime Modigliani committed in an age of modernist innovation was to retain a love for the old masters, and the figure in a century when many artists escaped into abstraction and conceptualism.


As I thought about it I was struck by how often I had read vicious reviews of artists who painted the nude - for example Picasso, Schiele, and Freud. And many of these vicious reviews did not just come from reactionary Feminists (in fact women on the whole in my experience were far more comfortable with the nude and the sexual than men and it was no coincidence that many of the greatest writers on the nude, the erotic and even the pornographic had been women.) 


The fact of the matter was - the nude in art was a minefield! I could count on one hand the number of critics who had openly acknowledged the sexiness of a nude. In fact, the nude, the erotic and the pornographic were subjects of intense disgust for most art critics. Remember in many ways the critic was more of a politician and social mover than an artist. They sought respect and power through their 'refined taste and judgment.' So much of what they wrote was political not personal. The last thing they want was to let people know their dirty little sexual peccadilloes. The artist on the other hand - if they were great artists - exposed to the world their inner soul. It might so happen that their inner soul was perverted, or cruel or misogynist - but that's the risk the artist took. It was not a risk the critic ever made. The nude and the sexual should in theory have been subjects that brought people together in celebration of the human, but in fact the opposite was the case. Quite apart from the major criticisms of the nude - misogyny, abuse of power, voyeurism, the male gaze, the objectification of the female or male body, homophobia, perversion - there were other many subtle criticisms centred around what was considered - beautiful, uplifting, or just plain normal. 


In a sense, this should not be surprising, because the human subject provoked human interpretations. Depending upon the viewer almost any reading was possible of a nude. This was what made the nude quite the most difficult of subjects. Because as humans, we know human body's far more intimately that any other subject moreover we have far more intellectual and emotional responses to the nude that we simply could not summon for a picture of a landscape or a still-life. The nude even in photography, was never just a neutral subject and the part of the artist was never just artistic. Every artist brought different feelings to bear on the subject. Often peoples disgust with a nude was not about the nude - but how it had been seen an interpreted by the artist. 


The beauty of the history of art was the sheer variety of interpretations of the nude - both male and female. Starting with the beautiful fat Venus of Wilendorf - which could be read as misogynistic and cruel, or fantastic and celebratory of women. The pencil-thin nudes of Cranch which were both voyeuristic and strangely reminiscent of all my present day anorexic celebrities. Then there were those beautiful full figures of Ruben's, which thrilled me but disgusted many in my day simply because people could not believe people ever thought this voluptuousness attractive. Italian art was filled with elegant athletic and angelic female nudes, strapping virile male warriors. And in the last century the nude was dismembered by artists like Picasso and Bacon, coldly analyzed by Freud or sexualized by Schiele and Modigliani. 


Because the nude was so explosive, divisive not to mention technically difficult a subject - it was often avoided in the art of my day. This was a great pity. Because in a world glutted with fashion, glamour, soft-core and hardcore images of the body (mostly female bodies) art should have tried to intellectually and emotionally help us to understand our responses to these images. But art fled in terror. Sex and the nude might have sold everywhere else in the media world - but it did not sell in the art world. So what we had was a sea of images, which exploited our basic instincts of lust, vanity, narcissism, self-loathing, or inadequacy but which offered us no mental escape. Like Pavlovian dogs see responded to the triggers that advertisers and pornographers knew so well how to pull. Whether it was a young woman who thought she was fat, being made to hate herself even more because of the anorexic images of the fashion industry, or the young man being made to buy more and more porn because he was hooked on the high it produced - we were all in a way enslaved. I personally didn't think art was enslaving - I thought it was liberating and one of the greatest ways to find enlightenment. Which was why it was so shocking to see most art alienate us even more with abstractions and theories rather than real human stories and emotion.