Jack B. Yeats: The Courage To Feel

After the weekend, I went with Carol to The National Gallery so we could see the new exhibition given over to Jake B Yeats. It was the fiftieth anniversary of the death of this beloved Irish painter and this show was just one of a number dedicated to him this year. Jack B Yeats was the son of John Butler Yeats a great Irish portrait painter and draughtsman and brother of William Butler Yeats - Ireland’s greatest poet. But nearly the whole Yeats family were talented painters, draughtsmen, embroiders, musician, poets and playwrights – a strong case for genetics! The Yeats family was central to Irish social history from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. You could not understand Ireland if you had not come to terms with this wonderfully creative Irish family's contribution to painting, drawing, poetry, politics, mysticism, The Irish Revival, Irish Nationalism, The Easter Rising, The Irish Republic and the gossip columns of Ireland's newspapers. Ironically this quintessential Irish family were not Catholics at all – they were Protestant Anglo-Irish – what were called ‘West-Brits’ in Irish slang. The unrequited love of William Butler Yeats and Maud Gonne was such a romantic epic in Ireland, that I can remember my mother warning me: “Don’t end up like Yeats! He threw his life away waiting for Maud Gonne to love him!” While W.B. Yeats the poet had a worldwide reputation his painter brother Jack was sadly known only in Britain.                        

As the years passed, I grew fonder and fonder of Yeats’ paintings. I had always liked them since I was a teenager – but I was never really sure whether my love for his work was critically naïve or misjudged. His later canvases were some of the hardest works for the conventional art lover to appreciate. But he only came to his last reckless style after a lifetime of drawing from life or drawing from memory. At times the late canvases could be quite awful – a mess. Yeats painted about 2,000 oil paintings so there was bound to be some dross. But at his best in his late works he set line and colour free to play across the canvas – and if you looked close – you could see that the drawing was bold and assured. The magic of these works was the way we the viewers were encouraged to read the forms and move with them. But then you need not have taken my word for it - reputable foreign painters like Oskar Kokoschka (a friend of Jack B Yeats) and Lucian Freud and the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett were fans of his work.

             

Over time, I had grown stronger in the conviction that Yeats was the greatest Irish painter – one who captured the spirit of the Irish people better than many other artists some of whom were technically more skilled painters. No he was not a world rate painter like Picasso, Beckman, or even Pollock but he was a worthy brother to artists like Georges Rouault, James Ensor, and Oscar Kokoschka. Like them, his paintings took a hard look at some of the harsher and more unjust aspects of life. Like them, his work was full of daring colours, lightening brushstrokes, impastoed paint and a judicious use of black. Like them, his work was animated and situated in moments of great spectacle - and like them, he lived his life withdrawn from the world.

            

Masquerade & Spectacle: The Circus and The Travelling Fair in The Work of Jake B Yeats, was a beautifully chosen collection of 22 paintings and watercolours from 1902-1952 about the marginalized and exotic lives of the clowns, bareback-riders and acrobats in the travelling Circus. The exhibition space was dimly lit and each painting was spot lit – giving the paintings an eerie effervescent quality. The lighting brought out his intense colours and the rich texture of his paintings. Despite the fact that most of the works were behind glass – they were all perfectly visible – such a change from awful displays I had seen in the past.

             

The theme of the Circus at the turn of the twentieth century was a favourite of many socially conscious painters like Edgar Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, George Rouault and of course Pablo Picasso. The circus people lived on the margins of society, like Gypsies but they also drew in the working and middle classes with their exotic entertainment and proletarian theatre. Many of these artists identified with the circus people because they too were poor and not in respectable employment – living for art, truth and beauty – on the margins of bourgeois, industrialised society. The clown, the bareback rider and the acrobat also provided artists with pictures full of drama and theatre – allowing them to speak to the ‘stage of life’ and the tragedy of its actors. So in some respects their paintings of clowns were in fact self-portraits in disguise.

             

Many of these paintings were from private collections and so unfamiliar even to Irish art lovers. The exhibition covered Yeats slow progression from tight linear black and white illustrations, to moody pencil drawings tinted with watercolour, into angular illustrative oil paintings, then into a wonderfully loose yet still well-drawn painterly canvases and finally into his late almost abstract–expressionist style – the paint taken straight from the tube and scrubbed in dry-brush, or glossy glazes or thick impasto sculpted and drawn with the pallet knife. Although Yeats was never technically on a par with even Irish Belle Epoch painters like William Orpen or John Lavery – he more than made up for it with canny insights into human beings, expressive courage and a little thing called soul – something sadly lacking in this Post-Modern world.

             

All his life Yeats was to benefit from his journalistic background - which sharpened his eyes to the life around him. His early work was illustrational, even occasionally comic like. He was thirty-five before he started to paint in oils. He lived a solitary life in Dublin with his wife – but he loved to sketch in the streets. His little sketchbooks, watercolours and oil paintings are full of moments of daily Irish life – caught in all their movement, rituals, and character. He loved covering sports events, figures in the city, the circus and the men of the west of Ireland.                                                                  

Repeatedly the Irish man in solitude emerges. The man about to write a letter, or alone in the streets bustling with others, sitting alone in a tram while three women gossip utterly oblivious of his existence, or as a melancholy clown, or a dwarf alone and behind the scenes. But at other times he depicted virile Irish men as fishermen, swimmers, boxers, jockeys, bareback riders or heroes of Irish myth. Women in Yeats paintings could be elegant, haughty, dainty, kindly or proud. But he never degraded them - there was hardly a nude in his whole oeuvre. He showed women as social beings - like exotic beauties in cold Dublin city streets full of crowds and incident. Women in Yeats paintings are feminine, self-assured and a vital part of Irish society.  But perhaps his greatest love was for horses. He drew them all his life and his depictions have a freshness, vigour and anatomical accuracy lacking in so many stilted equestrian pictures.

             

This was quite simply the best exhibition I had seen since the Lucian Freud and it was a delight to the senses. I would have happily owned half of these 22 paintings.

             

One of my favourite rooms in the National Gallery in those days was at the very end of the English school. Hung against a dark green wall were lovely, modest, paintings by John Singer Sargent, Alfred Munnings and Augustus John.

            

Woodrow Wilson (1917) by Sargent was a truly emptied out and pointless painting even for a Sargent fanatic like myself. It struck me as soulless, effortless and aloof - nothing better than boardroom art.

             

For sheer visual wattage and painterly fireworks Alfred Munning’s Evening At The Ford (1950) was the winner in this room. His painting of men on horses wading a ford in the dying light of summertime set my pulses racing. Munnings pallet of dark mauve's and browns for the background the figures of the men and horses – contrasted with the lime, lemon and Sapphire blue of the water made me want to paint.

             

I was less convinced by The Red Prince Mare (1921) – perhaps because the painting as a whole did not seem to fit together. This was because Munnings had sketched the horse with rider in scarlet jacket, on top in the paddock. He had painted the sky outdoors. However, he completed the painting in his studio. This meant the sketchy Impressionistic treatment of the sky and background – jostled with almost photographic treatment of the horse and foreground area.

             

Augustus John’s Carlotta c1901 was not wholly believable. The drawing seemed somewhat indecisive and odd-looking. But I liked the nod to Rembrandt and the velvety brushstrokes that harked back to Frans Hals.  Dr Kuno Meyer (1911) was a much later painting and a far more modern portrait of a powerful and impressive figure of a man. Here John had used a quite daring pallet of bold blues, modulated whites and bottle greens. I loved the bold and summery brushstrokes and the power of the design. However, it was John’s portrait of Sean O’Casey (1926) – scraped down and repainted over and over – that was my favourite. I loved the fresh, bold and intelligent - painterly attack. The readjustments were even more telling - in their searched for correctness.

                                      

The Magnificent Lucian Freud

On Tuesday 5th June 2007, I went with Carol to see the Lucian Freud exhibition in the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. IMMA was housing 50 of his paintings and twenty of his etchings and drawings through the summer. It was a beautiful sunny day – though Carol (who hated the sun) thought it too hot. To say that I was hyperactive with excitement before hand is an understatement. Although I had seen isolated paintings by Freud in group shows - I had never seen any in quantity. Of the many artists who have influenced my own art (Picasso, Basquait, van Gogh, Schiele, Gerstl, Schnabel, de Kooning, Rembrandt, Goya, Baselitz, Bacon and Salle) Freud was the last painter I had yet to see in a major retrospective. To say that my expectations were met is to put it mildly. It was the greatest exhibition I had ever seen in Ireland – with the Francis Bacon show in 2000 a close second.

            

As you know, my infatuation with Freud began in early 1992 - at a time when I was executing a couple of life paintings in NCAD during the Easter and summer holidays. As a clumsy student - struggling to deal with the difficulties of life drawing and painting - I looked in awe at Freud's work - which because of their strange realist modernity effected me so much more deeply than any other painter of the figure. I also identified with Freud's somewhat naïve and self-taught approach to life-painting.

             

Although there was no doubt that Freud's work was riddled with the mannerism and naïve mistakes of the largely self-taught (he had some art training in his teens but nothing like the systematic drilling the old masters had to endure in order to achieve mastery) - his work had genuine integrity - something distinctly lacking in the modern art world of my day. He was also one of those rare artists like Courbet, Cézanne, van Gogh, Picasso and de Kooning whose awkwardness was compelling, heart-rending and honest.

             

Artists in the West since Raphael in the 1500s until Courbet in the late nineteenth century painted not only an idealized version of the nude - they typically painted the figure only as a prop in a larger visual story. Although western art had had its fair share of sexy nudes - typically, the figure was not painted nude in order to arouse sexual desire or even to analyze character - instead the nude was used as an expressive character in a visual play.                                                                                  

The breaking point in this tradition I would date to Gustave Courbet's The Origin of The World (1866) - an immaculately painted oil of a woman's lower torso - the bushy vagina at its centre. However, it was not until the turn of the twentieth century that artists like Lovis Corinth, Richard Gerstl, Egon Schiele, Max Beckman and Otto Dix turned the body into a psychological and psychosexual revealer of subjective truth - and it is by these artists that Freud had to be judged - he was part of their unofficial Expressionist/Realist school. This should have come as no surprise - he was born and lived in Berlin until the age of eleven - this was his cultural heritage. However, what England gave him was a sense of restraint and Conservative order.                                                    

I observed that in a world of noisy attention seeking loudmouths - Freud's reclusive silence spoke volumes. It was telling that in a world were simpletons wanted to tell you everything about themselves - none of which mattered a dam - a man like Freud kept his council (some of my readers might wish I had done the same.) This was part of his aristocratic baring (many of his closest friends were from the English Gentry.) Nagging Feminist's like Linda Nochlin who sought to attack him as a misogynist took great pains to tell of his philandering, his suspected 40 illegitimate children and his cruel abandonment of ex-lovers. I would simply have asked these women this: Do you really think I or any other male painter admired Freud because of his personal life? I can answer absolutely not! I admired Freud for one reason and one bloody simple reason only - his paintings! Personally, I found sniping attacks on Freud's supposed misogyny and misanthropy childish, simplistic and ignorant. So what if he was? He spoke his version of truth and that should have been good enough. From what I could see - he was as unflattering to men as he was to women. In a world of airbrushed photographs of super models - Freud's paintings were like a kick in the face to a culture of lies about the body and humanity.

           

In 2007, pornography in the tradition of Raphael lived on in the high budget, slick, and never anything but beautiful porn of L.A. However, one only had to look at the home videos of amateur porn stars to see both the real world and the world of Freud - deathly pale or sunburned, stick thin or obsess and ugly bodies of both great humanity and repulsive imperfection. It was Freud's grandfather Sigmund Freud who changed our conception of self-hood more than any other thinker in western history - so it should have come as no surprise that Lucian Freud should have gone on to paint the human face and figure in a way almost unseen in art before.

             

Most of Freud's large paintings took up to a year to paint and he worked on a number of canvases at a time. He painted almost exclusively from life. Posing for him was a long and sometimes arduous experience. The vast majority of his models were friends, lovers or family. He had painted at least three of his daughters naked - but I will leave it to others to discern the ‘Electra Complex' implications of that!  During breaks, he treated his sitters to champagne and pheasant and his was known as a great conversationalist. Like his great friend Francis Bacon, he loved to gamble. Those who knew him spoke of his charisma, intelligence and energy.

             

Critics like Andrew-Graham Dixon and Brian Sewell had stated that Freud - although a great realist painter - was not up to the standards of old masters like Velázquez, Ruben's and Rembrandt - I disagreed. I thought that at their best - Freud's canvases were as good as anything ever painted. Technically, he might have been clumsy and wilful in a way those old masters seldom were - but in my era, he was unique. While it was true to say that his working methods and ethos was very different from the methods of the old masters - that did not mean that his work was any less compelling.

             

In my lifetime, Freud had become the standard-bearer of the realist tradition. This was in part to due to his genius and in part because the tradition was so utterly bankrupt. The trouble with 95% of the realist art produced world wide - was its triviality, crassness and historical nostalgia. I seriously thought that most of these 'traditional' painters were stunned personalities who liked to retreat into some kind of fantasy they had about a Utopian age of representational art. They were the same kind of people who built model railways and embroidered quilts - insular, timid and deluded. Freud on the other hand had no such delusions. He was a fully formed personality, intellect and practitioner. Most of these pseudo-old-masters - were terrified of the ugly, strident, or obsessive. Therefore, their work was fit for nothing but the top of a biscuit tin. Freud on the other hand embraced the ugly - and made it look beautiful - the sign of a truly great artist in my opinion.

             

I was less interested in Freud's early paintings from the 1940s to the 1960s, and I considered the high point of his art to be from the late 1970s to the turning of the millennium - as his brushes got broader and his paint thicker. However these early painting explained his late masterpieces. From the outset, he was obsessed with the eyes of his sitters – indeed had anyone ever made eyes look so hypnotic? From the outset, he was fond of using a stippling of lines to define the form. From the beginning he worked on a white canvas - allowing it to gleam through the thinly spread paint. From the outset, he had a knowing ability to give hyperactive details to certain parts of the subject - while treating other parts in a more general way. However, he always knew how to marry the parts to the whole - in a way that had always escaped me in my own work. He was a master of detail - yet never in the annoying crotchety way that other realists were. His detail was never anything less than visceral and exciting. I was less fond of Freud's drawings and etchings. However, they did give some important clues to his art. In their way, his drawings had echoes of Dürer's woodcuts. Like Dürer - Freud used very dark and strong lines to shape the volumes of flesh.                                                

Freud's technique in his late work was nothing short of magnificent. This was real painting! I was amazed by how bold and confident his brushwork was! I was thrilled by the way he went for it with every brushstroke! There was no mistaking that a man painted these paintings. They had a fierce muscularity and vigour utterly lacking in the flabby and academic work of imitators like Jenny Saville, Celia Paul (an ex-lover of Freud's), Tai-Shan and an army of art student plagiarizers.                                            

The masterpiece of the exhibition for me was his large canvas Two Plants 1977-80 - it was quite simply unbelievable! From a distance, it looked like a photograph - but up close, it was a thickly painted nest of paint. Each single leaf in this tangle of plants was recorded in all its individuality - he did not use any formula. This painting and others he had made of foliage recalled Dürer's famous watercolour of a great piece of turf.

             

Critics had carped that Freud's paintings were all browns and greys! Were these people blind? Yes from a distance they could look brown and gray - but get up close - it was a fireworks display of pinks, blues, mauve's, purples, olives, tan, cream, white, apple green, peach, plum and so on. It was a mark of his genius for colour that he could embed in his flesh tones such bright colours and yet fit them all in to a realistic whole. Another remarkable quality of his late paintings was his use of thick impasto. One of the problems of using thick paint (as I knew) was that it reduced the artist’s ability to produce subtle effects of line and texture - but Freud managed it. His impasto was precise, firm and solid. He not only painted his figures - he sculpted them out of paint! I had never seen paint dry-brushed on with the loaded brush with such finesse and accuracy.

           

 In my view, Freud's art was a total rebuke to the corrupted nature of the contemporary art world. Could anyone honestly tell me that there was more depth and power in; Barnett Newman's zips, Frank Stella's stripes, Andy Warhol's candy coloured silkscreen portraits, Robert Ryman's all white canvases, Joseph Beuys' felt and fat, Donald Judd's steel boxes, Joseph Kosuth's definitions of words, Cindy Sherman's photos, Jeff's Koons' kitsch porcelains, Damien Hirst's spot paintings, or Tracey Emin's unmade bed! Frankly to my mind all that rubbish and so much more like it was exposed in an exhibition like this to be an utter fraud perpetrated by self-deluded morons with more salesmanship and skill in 'art-bollocks' than any actual creative vision, craft, skill, discipline or intelligence.

The Yellow House

"I used to be too subjective, and I was always tempted to find my inner self in the exterior and dissipate my imagination on other people and on life."

Oskar Kokoschka

Later that month I watched with great trepidation The Yellow House on C4. I was nervous, because if any artist was more in danger of being caricatured by a film it was Vincent van Gogh. Already the premises of the book and this film based on the book irked me - why isolate just this nine weeks stay of Paul Gauguin with van Gogh probably because it’s the most sensational part of the van Gogh story - when he cut the lobe of his left ear off after a fight with Gauguin. Besides, although art critics have sometimes laughed at it, I was so familiar with the great Hollywood film Lust for Life, which covered the whole of van Gogh's creative life and had great central performances from Kirk Douglas as Vincent and Anthony Quinn as Paul. I hardly imagined that Lust For Life could be bettered by this new film and it was not. I had never bothered reading Martin Gayford book of the same name, for the simple fact of van Gogh fatigue. I mean I adored him, his art, and his writings, but enough was enough! After all, there were plenty of other artists whose stories would have made good movies.

In a sense, the nine weeks Vincent and Paul spent together were atypical in van Gogh's story. He was a profoundly lonely man who spent most of his adult life in isolation, in one run down room over a cafe, after another - 37 different places in total. He probably suffered from manic depression compounded by epilepsy, absinthe poisoning, frantic over work and malnutrition. He wandered, he painted, he drew, he read, and he wrote incessantly seeking salvation in his art.  But perhaps because of his isolation he had always dreamed of an artist’s community, where he could work together with other like minded artists on the project of late Impressionism. Vincent hoped that Gauguin would just be the first artist to join him in Arles. The trouble was that as characters they were an explosive combination. Gauguin was sinister, manipulative and domineering while van Gogh was passive-aggressive, argumentative and needy. They had met before in Paris many times, usually near the art supply shop of Pere Tanguy, where Tanguy showed artists paintings he had received in receipt of art supplies. At this time, van Gogh was still trying to find himself in a variety of sub Impressionist experimentation's. Gauguin on the other hand had slowly but surely started evolving his own very private style in Brittany. However when Gauguin walked off the train and saw Vincent's recent efforts he was walking in to a full-scale revolution in art. Seeing the huge number of canvases that Vincent had made in less than a year must have been gob smacking. However, Gauguin defended his own self-esteem by attacking Vincent’s slap dash approach to painting. Paul took on a tutor’s attitude towards Vincent, trying to get him to paint from memory, slowly and with consideration. 


As artists, they were in many ways opposites. Gauguin would in his later years in the South Seas, produce highly coloured exotic nudes that were built on a drawn foundation handed down from Ingres and Degas - they were modern and primitive and yet also strangely classical. Gauguin thought deeply about his paintings, and painted them slowly, often over years. Van Gogh on the other hand was all about capturing the moment. He painted in a frenzy, which had an inner logic of its own, and he described his best paintings pouring out in feverish bursts. But there was far more intelligence in van Gogh's manic painting than one might imagine, and despite Gauguin's classical leanings there was far more of a whiff of sulphur about his work - he was a decadent familiar with drugs, whores, drink and later underage Tahitian girls. 

Of course, the high moment came when after they had a fight, Gauguin stormed off and Vincent cut off his left ear and then handed it in a letter to a girl in the local brothel. This was just the latest in a series of what today would be called 'self-harming episodes' in Vincent's life and it would not be his last - that was when 18 months later he shot himself in the chest and died a day later. The best explanation I have heard about this episode, is that Vincent would go to the bullfights in the local arena and saw the way the matador's cut the ear of the bull off as a trophy. In cutting his ear off, Vincent was acknowledging Gauguin as the victor of their psychic battle of wills. However, it was also typical of a passive aggressive man boiling with rage, but who could not bring himself to strike out at another man so turned upon himself - the man he truly hated. However, he cut his ear lobe off - not his painting hand! He was not that beaten! 


Therefore, you would expect that with material like this, any drama could not lose. Well 'The Yellow House' bombed. Over acted, under-acted, theatrical, tedious and laughable at times - this film was rubbish. I did not believe a word of it, even when I heard them quote directly from their letters. The lowbrow nature of this film was summed up at the end when they told us that the 40 paintings they made together are now worth $1.5 Billion. So Fucking What! What in God’s name does that tell us about their work or the meaning of their lives! Just another example of the way the capitalistic, consumerist, and celebrity-driven culture of the devoured all higher meanings and shitted it out as sound bite adverts for consumption, capital and fame. The fact of the matter was that Paul and Vincent were just two among many artists, thinkers, socialists, philosophers, decadents, and writers in the late nineteenth century who imagined a better world, one driven by higher morals, shared wealth, and belief in the power of art to change the world. They may have been wrong or naïve, but they had principals. This was part of the barrier to the modern worlds understanding of them and their art. The kids on the ramparts in Paris in 1968 were the last people to understand these men. 


Neither John Simms as Vincent nor John Lynch as Gauguin, had any understanding of them. Neither of them had the volcanic and tortured personalities to live up to their parts.  If alive in 2007, Gauguin might have been in prison for paedophilia, and van Gogh would have been on lithium, unable to paint. But we still had their art and their example.

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.