Forgive me, readers, for I have sinned.
Whenever I’ve gone by Titian’s great “Venus With a Mirror,” sitting topless in the Renaissance rooms at the National Gallery of Art, or Canova’s marble “Naiad,” lounging a floor below in the no-kini of a classical goddess, carnal thoughts have come to me.
If only I’d been keeping up with the latest scholarship, I’d have had a more up-to-date reaction: full-blown, panting lust.
After well over a century of prim coverups, literal and metaphorical, of the sexual content of the greatest nudes in art, experts have been waking up to the erotic, even pornographic, potential. “I think it’s essential we understand them as objects in the context of men wanting to look at naked women,” says Amelia Jones, a pioneer of feminist art history who teaches at the University of Manchester in England. Over the past decade or two, most of her colleagues have abandoned the genteel distinction between the chaste “nude,” and pictures of the pruriently “naked,” meant to get a rise out of viewers.
The new view: Flesh is flesh is flesh.
As usual, Marcel Duchamp had hammered all this out before others, as we can see in an important show now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It digs deep into the making of his “Etant Donnes,” the wildly explicit peep show Duchamp left to the museum when he died in 1968. Duchamp’s last work did for pornography what his urinal “Fountain” had done for men’s-room plumbing back in 1917: It made clear that there’s nothing so out of bounds in our culture that it doesn’t have artistic repercussions.
But before considering Duchamp and his final word on lusty aesthetics, we need to go back to beginnings and take a more licentious look at Titian and Canova and their times.
The men of the West, even at their most refined, have long had a Playboy culture.
During the Renaissance, seedbed of most later art, inns and taverns flaunted naughty pictures. We know this because fine-art nudes were attacked for looking like them. And they were in retail circulation: In the 1520s, some of the great cultural figures of Rome published a set of sonnets called “The Positions,” with anatomically correct illustrations. The pope was not amused. The engraver did jail time, the writer and the illustrator had to skip town, and almost all copies of the work were destroyed.
That’s the context in which a nude like Titian’s so-called “Venus With a Mirror” was being ogled.
There’s evidence that “ogled” gets the looking right. In 1544, a Roman cardinal asked a subordinate to visit Titian’s studio in Venice and report back on a painting he’d commissioned of the myth of the Greek princess Danae. A subject, wrote the subordinate, that Titian had made so sexy it would get the strictest puritan going. Compared to the new painting, the report went on, Titian’s earlier nude, the so-called “Venus of Urbino,” might as well have been a nun — though for centuries now that “Venus,” one of the Uffizi’s greatest treasures, has been considered the pinnacle of refined taste. It turns out Mark Twain may have been right about the Uffizi’s “Venus” when he ranted that “the attitude of one of her arms and hand” makes it “the obscenest picture the world possesses.”
As late as 1800, even a less “active” naked lady, depicted in Goya’s famous “Nude Maja,” seems originally to have been kept behind another picture of her, clothed.
The two pictures were among other nudes, including the great “Rokeby Venus” by Velazquez, described as “obscene paintings” in a document from 1814. The next year, the Inquisition subpoenaed Goya about them.
When Canova created his “Naiad,” at almost exactly that time, the sensualism of his nymph must have been at least as striking as any ideals she represented. Canova sent a copy of his “Naiad” to George IV of England — an infamous playboy and a collector of pornography — and asked for it to be installed on a rotating base. That would have allowed a patron to take in a foot-first view up her legs, across her naked haunch and right up to her come-on glance.
It’s not only female flesh that has been seen as getting viewers hot beneath the collar. Michelangelo’s “David” was fig-leafed when it first went on display, and one prelate described the artist’s “Last Judgment” in the Sistine Chapel, distinctly un-fig-leafed, as a bathhouse scene and tried to have it destroyed.
Our new habit of not censoring the most pungent art may be throwing cold water on it. One of the most infamous pictures of all time is the “Origin of the World,” a close-up on a naked woman’s crotch painted in 1866 by the great French realist Gustave Courbet. It was originally meant for a Turkish roue in Paris, and when he gave a peek to his most privileged visitors, they must have felt a thrill at seeing the work of a great artist married to (“mated with” might be more accurate) forbidden flesh. But ever since the picture passed into public hands, the “Origin” has felt almost tame. In a recent Courbet survey in New York, “it was just another landscape — with hair,” says David Rosand, a senior art historian at Columbia University.
Nude flesh has been made safe by art, and in the process lost its potency. Experts have set about restoring it.
The British scholar Charles Hope is famous for talking about Titian’s racier pictures as mere “pinups.” Several other art historians have raised objections — but only to Hope’s “mere.” They’ve insisted that the stunning erotic power of such masterpieces enables all the complex things they do. We don’t have to choose between seeing these works as erotic objects, even in a full-blown Web-porn mode, and seeing them as tremendously important, sophisticated art.
With Duchamp, we’re talking rumpled sheets and cigarettes.
The Philadelphia show goes into every detail of the making of “Etant Donnes,” which took place in absolute secrecy between 1946 and 1966. (“Etant Donnes” is French for “Given That,” which is short for the full title “Given That: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas.”)
The piece is far too extreme for us to illustrate.
“Etant Donnes” is a peep-show diorama in 3-D. To see it, you peer through two eyeholes pierced in a weathered barn door, mounted on the far wall of a dimly lit little gallery. What you get when you look through is a pleasant country landscape. And, in the foreground, the perfectly rendered torso and splayed legs of a naked blonde, fully “Brazilianed,” as we’d say today, thrown onto her back on a pile of branches, with one hand holding a lamp.
As many scholars have insisted, what we’re seeing, really, is a woman lighting the aftermath of her own rape, as hard-core as any image could be — so extreme that it’s almost more forensic than sexual. I wouldn’t describe this piece, as the show’s catalog does, as merely “a recumbent nude in a bucolic landscape setting” that captures the “erotic frisson” of Duchamp’s affair with his model and represents “an open and desiring body.” How many desiring women would choose to lie, naked and exposed, on a bed of sticks? Jones, the art historian and Duchamp expert from Manchester, believes “Etant Donnes” creates “a visceral reaction for women. . . . I don’t see how you can engage with that work without being uncomfortable.”
Duchamp may have been running a kind of test: If art could “cleanse” the erotic, could it whitewash evident pornography?
The answer — luckily for Duchamp and the survival of his work — seems to be yes. On its Web site, the Philadelphia museum says the piece offers “an unforgettable and untranslatable experience to those who peer through the two small holes” — true, but the most thoroughgoing euphemism I’ve come across.
The show itself, and its impressive catalog, builds a classic image of the artist as hardworking genius. What it doesn’t quite do is put a spotlight on the extreme imagery itself and what it means — maybe because, in an age where porn is only a mouse-click away, we’ve lost the ability to recognize its force.
Yet that imagery is crucial to Duchamp’s “woman with the open [legs],” as he called his nude, because it lets him be direct about how art can work.
As conceptual artist Les Levine once said, the piece has “a cultural power equal to Leonardo’s ‘Mona Lisa.’ You can’t stop looking at it. It puts questions in your mind.”
Questions such as: Do we dare sidle up to Duchamp’s peephole and confront our own invasive need to gape — at flesh, and at art?
The Washington Post
Whenever I’ve gone by Titian’s great “Venus With a Mirror,” sitting topless in the Renaissance rooms at the National Gallery of Art, or Canova’s marble “Naiad,” lounging a floor below in the no-kini of a classical goddess, carnal thoughts have come to me.
If only I’d been keeping up with the latest scholarship, I’d have had a more up-to-date reaction: full-blown, panting lust.
After well over a century of prim coverups, literal and metaphorical, of the sexual content of the greatest nudes in art, experts have been waking up to the erotic, even pornographic, potential. “I think it’s essential we understand them as objects in the context of men wanting to look at naked women,” says Amelia Jones, a pioneer of feminist art history who teaches at the University of Manchester in England. Over the past decade or two, most of her colleagues have abandoned the genteel distinction between the chaste “nude,” and pictures of the pruriently “naked,” meant to get a rise out of viewers.
The new view: Flesh is flesh is flesh.
As usual, Marcel Duchamp had hammered all this out before others, as we can see in an important show now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It digs deep into the making of his “Etant Donnes,” the wildly explicit peep show Duchamp left to the museum when he died in 1968. Duchamp’s last work did for pornography what his urinal “Fountain” had done for men’s-room plumbing back in 1917: It made clear that there’s nothing so out of bounds in our culture that it doesn’t have artistic repercussions.
But before considering Duchamp and his final word on lusty aesthetics, we need to go back to beginnings and take a more licentious look at Titian and Canova and their times.
The men of the West, even at their most refined, have long had a Playboy culture.
During the Renaissance, seedbed of most later art, inns and taverns flaunted naughty pictures. We know this because fine-art nudes were attacked for looking like them. And they were in retail circulation: In the 1520s, some of the great cultural figures of Rome published a set of sonnets called “The Positions,” with anatomically correct illustrations. The pope was not amused. The engraver did jail time, the writer and the illustrator had to skip town, and almost all copies of the work were destroyed.
That’s the context in which a nude like Titian’s so-called “Venus With a Mirror” was being ogled.
There’s evidence that “ogled” gets the looking right. In 1544, a Roman cardinal asked a subordinate to visit Titian’s studio in Venice and report back on a painting he’d commissioned of the myth of the Greek princess Danae. A subject, wrote the subordinate, that Titian had made so sexy it would get the strictest puritan going. Compared to the new painting, the report went on, Titian’s earlier nude, the so-called “Venus of Urbino,” might as well have been a nun — though for centuries now that “Venus,” one of the Uffizi’s greatest treasures, has been considered the pinnacle of refined taste. It turns out Mark Twain may have been right about the Uffizi’s “Venus” when he ranted that “the attitude of one of her arms and hand” makes it “the obscenest picture the world possesses.”
As late as 1800, even a less “active” naked lady, depicted in Goya’s famous “Nude Maja,” seems originally to have been kept behind another picture of her, clothed.
The two pictures were among other nudes, including the great “Rokeby Venus” by Velazquez, described as “obscene paintings” in a document from 1814. The next year, the Inquisition subpoenaed Goya about them.
When Canova created his “Naiad,” at almost exactly that time, the sensualism of his nymph must have been at least as striking as any ideals she represented. Canova sent a copy of his “Naiad” to George IV of England — an infamous playboy and a collector of pornography — and asked for it to be installed on a rotating base. That would have allowed a patron to take in a foot-first view up her legs, across her naked haunch and right up to her come-on glance.
It’s not only female flesh that has been seen as getting viewers hot beneath the collar. Michelangelo’s “David” was fig-leafed when it first went on display, and one prelate described the artist’s “Last Judgment” in the Sistine Chapel, distinctly un-fig-leafed, as a bathhouse scene and tried to have it destroyed.
Our new habit of not censoring the most pungent art may be throwing cold water on it. One of the most infamous pictures of all time is the “Origin of the World,” a close-up on a naked woman’s crotch painted in 1866 by the great French realist Gustave Courbet. It was originally meant for a Turkish roue in Paris, and when he gave a peek to his most privileged visitors, they must have felt a thrill at seeing the work of a great artist married to (“mated with” might be more accurate) forbidden flesh. But ever since the picture passed into public hands, the “Origin” has felt almost tame. In a recent Courbet survey in New York, “it was just another landscape — with hair,” says David Rosand, a senior art historian at Columbia University.
Nude flesh has been made safe by art, and in the process lost its potency. Experts have set about restoring it.
The British scholar Charles Hope is famous for talking about Titian’s racier pictures as mere “pinups.” Several other art historians have raised objections — but only to Hope’s “mere.” They’ve insisted that the stunning erotic power of such masterpieces enables all the complex things they do. We don’t have to choose between seeing these works as erotic objects, even in a full-blown Web-porn mode, and seeing them as tremendously important, sophisticated art.
With Duchamp, we’re talking rumpled sheets and cigarettes.
The Philadelphia show goes into every detail of the making of “Etant Donnes,” which took place in absolute secrecy between 1946 and 1966. (“Etant Donnes” is French for “Given That,” which is short for the full title “Given That: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas.”)
The piece is far too extreme for us to illustrate.
“Etant Donnes” is a peep-show diorama in 3-D. To see it, you peer through two eyeholes pierced in a weathered barn door, mounted on the far wall of a dimly lit little gallery. What you get when you look through is a pleasant country landscape. And, in the foreground, the perfectly rendered torso and splayed legs of a naked blonde, fully “Brazilianed,” as we’d say today, thrown onto her back on a pile of branches, with one hand holding a lamp.
As many scholars have insisted, what we’re seeing, really, is a woman lighting the aftermath of her own rape, as hard-core as any image could be — so extreme that it’s almost more forensic than sexual. I wouldn’t describe this piece, as the show’s catalog does, as merely “a recumbent nude in a bucolic landscape setting” that captures the “erotic frisson” of Duchamp’s affair with his model and represents “an open and desiring body.” How many desiring women would choose to lie, naked and exposed, on a bed of sticks? Jones, the art historian and Duchamp expert from Manchester, believes “Etant Donnes” creates “a visceral reaction for women. . . . I don’t see how you can engage with that work without being uncomfortable.”
Duchamp may have been running a kind of test: If art could “cleanse” the erotic, could it whitewash evident pornography?
The answer — luckily for Duchamp and the survival of his work — seems to be yes. On its Web site, the Philadelphia museum says the piece offers “an unforgettable and untranslatable experience to those who peer through the two small holes” — true, but the most thoroughgoing euphemism I’ve come across.
The show itself, and its impressive catalog, builds a classic image of the artist as hardworking genius. What it doesn’t quite do is put a spotlight on the extreme imagery itself and what it means — maybe because, in an age where porn is only a mouse-click away, we’ve lost the ability to recognize its force.
Yet that imagery is crucial to Duchamp’s “woman with the open [legs],” as he called his nude, because it lets him be direct about how art can work.
As conceptual artist Les Levine once said, the piece has “a cultural power equal to Leonardo’s ‘Mona Lisa.’ You can’t stop looking at it. It puts questions in your mind.”
Questions such as: Do we dare sidle up to Duchamp’s peephole and confront our own invasive need to gape — at flesh, and at art?
The Washington Post
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