Denuding the Nude

Hurling past thick lattices of pigment and the slumbering hues of a moonlit wood, the ac-celerated particles of an X-ray reveal a pallid image—a blanched female nude bound and broken. Only now, as her flesh shivers with the silver-scaled teeming of electrons rather than with the oily glow of the painting’s slim crescent moon, is her secret revealed: a grafted torso and a sutured canvas worthy of Mary Shelley’s hand.
In reaction to the financial and critical failure of The Knight Errant, John Everett Millais’s poetic rendition of a Gothic rescue scene, the painter excised the captive maiden’s head and torso. In place of the emboldened woman whose eyes once locked immodestly with the attending knight, Millais inserted her antithesis with passive eyes demurely averted. With the exacting eye of a technological voyeur, recent X-ray analysis of the revised painting reveals its captive maiden as a literal patchwork of latent gender politics lying dormant beneath re-blended oils.
The nude, in essence, is exposed.
Roused from the lull of inherited art history tenets by an alarm call of neoteric art books, readers will find a widened aperture for appreciation of nudes with several titles that lift the veils of preconception, culture, and context. A fresh palette of technological revelations, reappraised art studies, and tests of historical clichs emerges, loaded to in-spire unprecedented insights into the nebulous realm of interpretation, and poised to document the progressive nudes for which future canvases are primed.
Accompanying the inaugural exhibition of the Linbury Galleries of Tate Britain, Exposed: The Victorian Nude (Watson-Guptill; 0-8230-1633-1) debuts as a leading study of Victorian nude art once dissolved in misconception and neglect. Boasting a triad of pivotal essays that collectively sift through the popular myths of Victorian culture, the book exposes the intricacies of an era consumed with social responsibility and the active cultivation of a characteristic “English nude,” with which to frame its ideals. Alison Smith, senior curator of Tate Britain and the book’s editor, balances the academic drive of text with the opulence of the exhibition catalogue: a torrent of lush period paintings, illustrations, and sculptures.
Within these sociocultural parameters, female nudity in a modern context was ob-scene. This dictated the allegorical, religious, or literary translation of women in an ide-alized manner. Males, similarly, were idyllically depicted as awash with the virility of Hellenic wellsprings. Simeon Solomon’s Love in Autumn, masked by imagery and con-text, surges with a more latent passion. Here, Love’s androgynous, winged shoulders are draped with an uncertain melancholy, as fallen leaves spiral about his ankles. “At a time when the category ‘homosexual’ was beginning to be defined and recognised, the idea of male-male love tended to be expressed through complex allegorical codes.”
In this most proliferative era of nude art there was a movement for its privatiza-tion, including the commissioning of small-scale works, in which idealism and carnal de-sire would flirt and often merge. With refinements in photography achieved, and with the introduction of the stereoscopic viewer at the Great Exhibition in 1851, sexually explicit images were further privatized, and became increasingly common. Sex and Humor: Se-lections from the Kinsey Institute (Indiana University Press; 0-253-34044-6) an un-abashed parade of humorous, sexually explicit lithographs, photos, and postcards edited by Catherine Johnson (Kinsey Institute curator), Betsy Stirratt and John Bancroft, pro-vides a surviving example of a nineteenth-century gelatin silver stereocard. A society woman’s shock fuses in three dimensions before the operator of the stereoscope, as an upending over a country fence publicly airs her aversion to underclothing. Here, chal-lenges of artistic traditionalism were underway, fraying edges of its idyllic veils with the movement toward realism
Edouard Manet’s Olympia initially shocked critics with stark realism and a de-parture from tradition, as a prostitute haughtily displaces the traditional Venus and di-rectly engages the viewer, thus projecting a disquieting eroticism. In defense of Manet’s guileless nude, writer Emile Zola proposed, “When our artists give us a Venus, they ‘cor-rect’ nature, but Edouard Manet has asked himself, ‘Why lie, why not tell the truth?’” The Private Life of a Masterpiece (University of California Press; 0-520-23378-6,) a companion for the BBC Series of the same name, includes Manet in its informal study of how eight iconic masterpieces have each achieved and maintained a mysterious insertion into collective culture. Exhibition organizer Monica Bohm-Duchen matches a compre-hensive text with visually satiating splashes of imagery to yield a volume as enthralling as it is accessible.
Nearly fifty years later an analogous expression of the female nude is seen in Amedeo Modigliani’s Reclining Nude. In One Hundred Paintings (NDE Publishing; 1-55321-026-3) art historian Federico Zeri furthers his series of one hundred studies—each volume a vibrant focal point in the constellation of art history. Dominating the canvas with a radiant expanse of supple flesh bared against a cobalt blue cushion, Modigliani’s Nude assumes a traditional pose—similar to Manet’s Olympia. An undercurrent of real-ism swirls in shadowed underarms and the dusky geometry of pubic hair. Despite the warmth of fleshtone and luminous invitation of her breasts, a disturbingly pleasant face with voided sockets spawns a nightmarish, uneasy seduction—a foreign concept for the traditional Venus who lounges in her chastity.
Remaining chaste, in effect, from self-expression of their own nude form, women were long barred from painting life studies despite the impregnation of gallery walls with male interpretations of their womanhood. Women, Art, and Society (Thames&Hudson; 0-500-20354-7), a richly academic, momentous volume of art history, traces the arduous path that women artists continue to forge. Author and Professor Whitney Chadwick in-cludes surrealist Frida Kahlo’s The Broken Column in a discussion of modernist repre-sentation of the female form. Kahlo’s nude self-portrait reveals a shattered Grecian col-umn visible within a vertical fissure splitting her torso, which is braced and shallowly embedded with nails. Clearly broadcasting her internal and external pain as an expression of her reality, the image symbolizes her lifelong physical pain following a trolley acci-dent in youth. The inclusion of an ionic column may also serve to symbolize the visceral, internal break from the classical female form.
In a similar vein, the contemporary art of Alex Grey casts aside flesh as if it were itself a veil. Transfigurations (Inner Traditions; 0-89281-851-4) presents images which fundamentally contrast with traditional nude imagery in art (primordially identified with the perfection of flesh.) As a former medical illustrator, Grey reveals that “. . . layer upon layer, the human being is a trembling miracle of intricate systems and relationships . . . scientifically accurate depictions of the anatomical body are married with a saturating influx of subtle psychical energies.” Revealing human form in a state of transparency, as with Embracing, Grey seems to pursue spirit as the aesthetic ideal. The intangible nude is unveiled with the undressing of flesh.
Current studies of nudes reveal the human form as never before. Mirroring tech-nology and science, an urgency to define the essence of the nude form comes into view, as clearly as the physical cues that scar the radiographs of art analysis. Without these contemporary perspectives, the nude form is lost in a gauzy mantle of unseen ideals—ideals that foraging pupils cannot swallow.
“The body always expresses the spirit whose envelope it is. And for him who can see, the nude offers the richest meaning.” – Auguste Rodin