The Nude Art Form - Essay Example

The Nude Art Form Order No. 256327 No. of pages: 9 Premium 6530 Paintings of women in the nude have always been the of much debate, discussion and controversy. The proliferation of female nude paintings is only matched by the immense study material generated by them, and art historians and scholars have devoted much thought to the prevalence of the nude female art forms. The Greeks led the way with their “naturalistic representations of the male and female body” (Morris, Roderick Conway,1 2004) when they discarded the stylistic picturisation of human forms. This adoption of the nude in paintings and sculpture in the 5th century B.C. revolutionized the Western art scene, while Middle-Eastern cultures denounced it as blasphemy. With the advent of Christianity, the nude form was suppressed and it was not until the Renaissance, when artists looked to antiquity for inspiration, that the nude form came in vogue once again. The period between the 15th -17th century saw some of the most renowned works of nudes come into being. Kenneth Clark2 (1956) whose seminal work on the female nude gave way to much animated discussion on this forgotten topic, credits the Renaissance with giving an impetus to this form, saying “In the greatest age of painting, the nude inspired the greatest work”. The nude female form continues to inspire artists and art lovers to this day and many ground breaking studies reveal the various nuances of female depiction, its metamorphosis over the ages and the reaction it evokes, ranging from awe to a total denial of its worth as a subject. The words nude and naked are often interchanged for each other, but the difference in their meaning is so wide that the word nude invariably evokes the image of a person without clothes but it has an aesthetic ring to it. Naked on the other hand can mean intolerance and a subsequent discarding of clothes or even to a cult of nudists who exhort people to give up clothing. To put forth the idea more clearly, we can use Kenneth Clark’s definition of the terms, where he says “To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and…. the embarrassment…in that condition. The word nude carries …no uncomfortable overtone…it projects…a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed.” The author has delineated the female nude in conformity with religious, cultural and philosophic tenets of classical and modern Western society. Clark’s theories are the benchmark for any argument for or against the female nude, while John Berger’s study of the relation between the work of art and the person looking at it constitutes a very important element while understanding the female nude. Susan Suleiman3 though differs from all this in her “The Female Body” (1986) and represents women as the victim of “male desires, male fears and male representations”. Lynda Nead explores the female nude along with the concept of obscenity and sexuality as well as the fine line that turns a female nude from erotic art to one that is vulgar. She discusses the theories of Kenneth Clark, Mary Douglas and Jacques Derrida in her “The Female Nude: Art, obscenity, sexuality”. Kenneth Clark considers the nude model to have evolved from the time of the classical Greeks when the Greek athletes wore no clothes and roamed the towns and cities thus, and were objects of admiration and worship. In those days though the female was always demurely draped and served no greater function than the biological one. The “ideal nude has always been the nude with its rippling sinews and muscles, but the Renaissance, and later the 18th,19th and 20th century emphasized the female nude. Michelangelo4 showed an inclination for the male nude as in his masterpiece David. Drawing and sculpting the female nude was a challenge to painters and sculptors, since it pushed them to explore their technical abilities as well as their creative gifts. A nude requires minute observation, coupled with a keen sense of design and the ability to express one’s ideas aesthetically. The freedom which female nudes enjoy in the modern age was conspicuously absent in the earlier ages when they were drawn. The study of the male nude was a prerequisite for training in drawing. The male nude was representative of power, courage and virility, while the female nude has always been depicted as passive, and more often than not, has served as an object of desire. Another striking difference in male and female nudes is that the body of the woman takes on cultural overtones or else is an extension of the artist’s craft. Whereas male nudes are always of the same stylized, ideal body, and seems like “…male fantasy constantly reshapes the women’s body…” (Walters). Suzanne Hill though stresses that the female nude is a portrait of beauty, love, friendship and truth. The first female nude came from the brush of Giorgione in 1510. titled “The Sleeping Venus” where it features a nude reclining in a sumptuous landscape. This painting has none of the sensuality of succeeding pictures and is a dignified look at the female form, where the shy goddess lies down, unaware of the gaze of onlookers. All this however changed when Titian unveiled his “Venus of Urbino”. This painting brought sensuality into the projection of the female form, and the canvas is a cornucopia of objects that assault the senses. The setting is an ornate palace where Venus is lying on a couch supported by satin pillows. While Giorgione’s Venus is a demure goddess, Titian’s Venus is a well fleshed out goddess, wide awake and totally aware of the voyeuristic gaze of the admirers. Titian draws attention to the nude form of the reclining goddess by splitting the canvas into two by means of a vertically placed dark drape, which contrasts sharply with the creamy whiteness of the nude form. The drape is placed near the loins, which though not visible are highlighted by the placement of the hand. In the other hand, she holds roses, the symbol of Venus, while the background is devoted to her servants, who are preparing her clothes. This painting is often treated as an allegory for marital love, because of the presence of a dog and a pot of myrtle. The dog is a symbol of faithfulness, while myrtle signifies constancy. Titian’s Venus transcends the boundary of nakedness and instead gets tagged as a beautiful nude because of these symbols and depicts marital love, which is sanctioned by God and society. (Hill, Suzanne). Titian’s Venus opened the floodgates for the revival of the female nude in art and women artists, particularly Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1652) through her paintings showed the empowerment of women through the medium of her work. “Susanna and the Elders” by Artemisia depicts Susanna with her arms flung out and body twisted in shame and this painting expresses the sexual vulnerability of women in the dominating patriarchal society. (Victoria. H.) The female nude here is an unwitting victim of her situation. The Rokeby Venus5 by Diego Velazquez (1599-1660) is one of the most celebrated portraits of the female nude, and the only surviving one by the artist. This painting has been much studied and discussed because of the period in which it was painted. It was the time of the notorious Spanish Inquisition, when artists were actively censored, but this work may have been executed by Velazquez during his stay in Rome. In those troubled times nudes “were carefully supervised and whose dissemination was considered problematic”. (Portus, Javier). The Rokeby Venus depicts Venus lying in bed, sensually, while looking into a mirror being held by Cupid, her son and the God of physical love. Velazquez incorporated the two most favored poses of Venus-lying in bed, and looking into a mirror-which gave the nude a mode of chastity, because her body is turned away from the viewer, while the mirror helps in reading her expression. While Titian’s Venus has all the associated paraphernalia of the mythological Venus, here, the roses, myrtle, and dog are absent. The mirror also shows a blurred face, thus heightening the debate that the portrait lends itself to “an image of self-absorbed beauty” (Wallace, Natasha).The physical form of the goddess is surmised from the folds of the bed sheet, which emphasize the curves of her body. The 17th century in Spain was a period of moral prudery and even minor figures in paintings like nymphs and sibyls were demurely covered, and female portraits rarely ever showed a woman with uncovered arms. Velazquez may have overcome the problem of the nude by depicting only her backside (Cherry, Peter). Velazquez’s innovations were later copied by Ingres, Baudry and Manet and the artist showed the female nude in an intimate moment even while she is alone. The morality of the age in this case dignified the woman, by echoing her sensuality through her languid pose but concealing her modesty through a brilliant posture. The Rokeby Venus acquired iconic status in 1914, when it was attacked by Mary Richardson, a militant member of the suffragette movement. She slashed the painting with a cleaver to protest the arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst, the leader of the suffragettes ostensibly to destroy the most beautiful woman in mythology, because the government had caused suffering to Ms. Pankhust, “who is the most beautiful women in modern history” In an interview given in 1952, she let it out though, that, she hated “the way men visitors gaped at it all day long”. This startling incident was to Lynda Nead symbolic of women’s attitude to the female nude. At this juncture, it would be appropriate to describe John Berger’s exploration of the nude in relation to the voyeur, which he put forth in his “Ways of Seeing” (1972). A man’s position in society is guided by his economic, social and physical temperament and is an external quantity. The female or the woman, on the other hand has her role defined by her attitude to self, and is put under the male and female gaze simultaneously. The nude is the artist’s representation of his thoughts created for the audience of his work. This line of thought casts the nude as inferior in relation to the term naked, since it is not a representation. The nude to him is reprehensible because it is art created for the man to gaze upon. Feminists have taken this point forward and questioned the societal and political implications of the male artist creating a nude for a male patron, particularly in relation to the male gaze. The theme of Susanna and the Elders has been tackled by artists, and the differing treatment by male and female artists is particularly notable in this theme, since it was “an opportunity to display the female nude” (Garrard). Tintoretto’s version of the painting has a voluptuous Susanna bathing in the garden where her feminine charms are on full display and the viewer of this painting would be more engaged with her body than her plight, where men are lasciviously gazing at her. Artemisia’s, Susanna is a woman afraid of losing her chastity and the look of fear and revulsion in her gaze is unmistakable and she tries to gather her clothes which are going helter-skelter as described earlier. The two elders hover menacingly over her, but unlike Tintoretto’s version, all the figures are proportionate. Thus, the eye of the viewer is drawn equally to all the characters, wherein the painting becomes a vehicle to depict the story, instead of a mere portrayal of the feminine form. In Artemisia’s rendering, Susanna’s being naked is incidental to the portrayal. The employment of the female nude in art can be thus a vehicle for sensory gratification as in Tintoretto’s version or a feminist outlook, where a woman’s vulnerability in a male dominated society is so eloquently wrought. Any viewer looking at Artemisia’s work would feel sympathy for this victim of sexual harassment. The artist has set the nude figure in a stony landscape which further amplifies her distress. The story of Susanna in art has always depicted the virtue of chastity and shame, but in portraying her in the nude, the focus shifts to her body. Rembrandt’s nudes of the female form show the woman in a frightful or terror stricken pose and his rendering of the nude is a “drastic deviation” from that of the other artists of his time. These female nudes are truthful to their tribe in reality because their life-like depictions are better able to convey their emotional state. Rembrandt’s female nudes have none of the well proportioned elegance of classical nudes and his females, especially Susanna, has the quality of a returned gaze. Eric Jan Sluijter in his “Rembrandt and the Female Nude”6 makes a case for the threat to morality of a female nude which can arouse a man. Dutch painting with its tradition of painting as close to life as possible poses the danger of voyeurism because of the inherent provocation in the painting. The life-size Bathsheba furthers the theory of the viewer turning voyeur because he unwittingly becomes a stand in for King David when he gazes upon this painting. Rembrandt’s insistence of lifelike bodies make a psychological impact on the viewer of the nude, and this manifests itself as empathy or desire, dependent upon the theme of the artwork. The nude has been one of the most serious art forms and we see complexities in their treatment, as in the naturalism seen in the Age of Reason in contrast to the formal frigid forms of Revived Grecian Idealism. The Victorian era even with its prudishness though acknowledged the nude to be an integral pact of the artist’s domain. Ingres though straddled this difference by objectifying the body as a vessel. This form had linear limits within which the artist had to contain his thoughts. Ingres’ “ultra linear stylization” is a hallmark of his works. Degas and the Impressions on the other hand depicted the female nude as fleeting forms (Groden. R.) By the beginning of the 20th century, the female nude acquired a new characteristic in the hands of painters and artists and became a representation of inner thoughts which could be virtuous or wicked. Picasso, with his Cubism7 gave a whole new dimension to the female nude where she represented freedom, embellishment or even arbitrariness. The new age art form of Cubism fragmented the nude into pieces, which were then placed irregularly and arbitrarily, leading to the creation of the figurative and abstract representation model of the nude. When debating the female nude and its aesthetic quality from the point of nature vs. culture and reason vs. passion a separate delineation of the female takes place. Descartes is emphatic that reason is male, but it needs its female counterpart, exemplified as nature and passion. In a study or appreciation of the female nude, the aesthetic distance gives the viewer the opportunity to see the nude as an object that is merely unclothed. It is also unchained from the fetters of common behavior because of its apolitical and asexual nature. This is especially true when we try to understand the nudes who model for artists. Inspite of being bereft of clothes they do not feel humiliation or discomfort because the nude is de-objectified in this environment. An anecdote recounting the experience of a model will throw further light on the dichotomy of this situation. In a class on computer graphics, students were set the task of drawing a naked female model. The model who was placed among the bank of computer terminals complained of people staring at her which puzzled the instructor, since her job entailed being looked at by the students. What the master had failed to understand was that she was complaining about the outsiders who were staring at her naked body, while the brief given to her was that she was going to be technically observed by a bunch of art students. This incident clears all doubts about the difference between a voyeuristic gaze and an artful one. Nude paintings are an exception rather than the rule, and of the thousands of masterpieces which attract our admiration, they number just a few hundred, yet the response evoked by them is so vociferous that much debate and hyperbole gets attached to it. To summarize all the rhetoric being floated around the female nude as a means of empowerment, control and marginalization the theory of Lynda Nead8 in her masterly study “The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality,”would suffice to see the female nudes in the right perspective. She proffesses that, "This is the symbolic importance of the female nude.” It is the internal structural link that holds art and obscenity and an entire system of meaning together. . . . And while the female nude can behave well, it involves a risk and threatens to destabilize the very foundations of our sense of order."(7) References Art and the body: Information from Answers.com http://www.answers.com/topic/art-and-the-body Clark, Kenneth. The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form. Bollingen Series 35.2. New York: Pantheon Books, 1956. Female empowerment in Renaissance art: The work of Artemisia ...http://www.helium.com/items/169696-female-empowerment-in-renaissance-art-the-work-of-artemisia-gentilischi?page=2 Michelangelo Buonarroti www.michelangelo.com/buon/bio-index2.html nudism: Definition from Answers.com http://www.answers.com/topic/nudism OH WHAT A DIFFERENCE A DIFFERENCE MAKES: GENDER IN THE VISUAL ARTS http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/forum/gender3.html Picasso and Cubism www.picassoandcubism.com Reflection on Lynda Nead’s Essays on the Female Nude « Emily May http://emilymay.wordpress.com/2007/10/23/reflection-on-lynda-neads-essays-on-the-female-nude/ Rembrandt and the Female Nude. www.amazon.com/Rembrandt-Female-Nude-Eric-Sluijter/dp/9053568379 Re-viewing the nude | Art Journal | Find Articles at BNET http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0425/is_1_58/ai_54517183/pg_5?tag=artBody;col1 The nude, from ideal to real - International Herald Tribune http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/03/20/nude_ed3_.php?page=2 The Nude - Scholarship Of "the Nude" http://science.jrank.org/pages/10510/Nude-Scholarship-Nude.html Text 65 3&4.pmd http://repositories.tdl.org/tdl/bitstream/handle/2249.1/5522/Eric%20Sluijter.pdf?sequence=1 Titian’s "Venus of Urbino”: Understanding the Meaning Behind this ...http://arthistory.suite101.com/article.cfm/titian_s__venus_of_urbino_ Susan R. Suleiman www.fas.harvard.edu/~rll/people/faculty/suleiman.html The toilet of Venus (The Rokeby Venus) www.nationalgallery.org.uk/cgi-bin/WebObjects.dll/ Women in the Nude: http://www.usp.nus.edu.sg/writing/uwc2101h/Pema.pdf Read More