Nakedly Nude V, Where to look?: Bronzino, Tintoretto & a Nude-in-process

Yesterday we looked at a few characteristics of Mannerist painting ... the two I'd like to concentrate on merge in these next paintings: elongated or exaggerated bodies, and drama-filled small spaces. Let's begin with Agnolo Bronzino's "Allegory of Venus and Cupid" from 1545:

 

Generally, when the central figure in a painting is a nude, it is difficult for the viewer to look at anything -- or anyone -- else in the picture plane.  Here, that's a bit more difficult; the painter has offered us a fine puzzle. Venus's body is smooth, a bit long in the torso, and, if she had been posed alone, on, say, a divan or a rug, she would appear calm and elegant.  But we immediately notice the figure embracing her, who is captured in a rather uncomfortable, if not impossible, pose, and this body, too, is quite distorted, longer of trunk than would be normal. The figure to the right, and the head and shoulders above Venus, display quite a bit of emotion, more than off-setting the placid content on the faces of the two figures on the left.  Venus was Cupid's mother, so the viewer can hope that Cupid is the little guy on the right.  And everybody else -- or the disembodied others? The background seems to me a swirling collage of faces, masks, doves, twisted blue drapery (later to come of age in the "Demoiselles d'Avignon"?), then a screaming man with muscular arms, someone at the upper left ordering a coffee ... If it is Cupid embracing Venus, then that would explain the Last-Judgment imagery of the picture.  What do you think is happening here?  The uncertainty seems deliberate.

The next painting is Susannah and the Elders, by Tintoretto, from 1555-6:

We can see the elders, at each side of the hedge. They, too, seem quite uncomfortable, but they will soon be able to see ... well, pretty much everything they would hope to here.  This Susannah is substantial ... where Bronzino's Venus was nude, Susannah is naked (see my other numbered nudely/naked, nakedly/nude posts). She is not perfect; she is not anticipating a portrait to come of this quiet, reflective toilette. She is alone, she thinks, and not yet aware of her onlookers.  But she is all we see.  And her calm demeanor pulls us in -- because this moment is so fleeting.  But still we look at her.  Even more, I think, than we look at Bronzino's Venus.

Why is that? We look at the "Allegory of Venus and Cupid" because we cannot be sure what is happening; so, we look all over the canvas, and then all over the canvas, and then catch a detail or two, and then look all over again.  But when we move to Tintoretto's "Susannah," we get the male gaze. And so our tendency is to gaze, as well.  Our focus is certain here.

Thinking about the ways we process the nude and the naked body, I have been working on a new odalisque,  this one with a subdued background, a background that, I hope, might still draw attention. But it can be difficult.  Theodore Roethke wrote, in "I Knew a Woman":

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
.... What's freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways.)


So, yes, it can be difficult to pull attention away from that naked "bright container,"  whether it is male or female.  Here is a detail of the bones, so far, in my newest painting:

 

Resting, now, until we do battle again, tomorrow. 

Nakedly Nude IV

In his own way, Picasso did actually sketch a Van-Gogh-esque nude. Here is a gouache sketch sometimes called "La Belle Hollandaise" from 1905:

And here is a Van Gogh, from Paris in 1886, "Standing Female Nude Seen from The Side":

Rather close ... perhaps Picasso never drew an odalisque in the style of Van Gogh because he already had ...

Nakedly Nude, III: Ingres to Van Gogh to Picasso...

I have been looking at these nudes of mine and feel that the best ones contain elements of both naked and nude bodies (see previous posts, Nakedly Nude I and II).  Picasso once said that he wanted to draw Ingres's Grande Odalisque as if he were Van Gogh, drawing. So I have been working on Ingres's Odalisque and making her a little more like the cafe owner that Van Gogh drew in Paris. My odalisque still has about 800 vertebrae, but she knows we are here; her face is broader and more relaxed:

Then I kept looking at my Watch Hill triptych, with my fairly perfect nude. She just seemed a bit too well-balanced, like a Cirque du Soleil performer on a wire, and I want, as I said yesterday, to have a bit of Joan Mitchell's "sauvage" (which she also called truth-telling) in there. So here is a new naked body, strewn over the same beach, hearing the waves:

And now, I think, we have come closer to the truth.

Nakedly Nude, II: The Through-Line from Cézanne and Matisse to Roy Lichtenstein

Dorothy Lichtenstein told the art critic Michael Kimmelman that, in his last year, her husband Roy was working on paintings of women "derived from Cézanne's bathers ... which he was thinking of developing into a whole series of works when he fell ill" (The New York Times, January 4, 1998).  I was surprised when I ran across this remark; I hadn't seen any works by Lichtenstein that seemed influenced by anyone but Picasso. So I looked around and found two sets of drawings and paintings that I find just gorgeous.

Here is Matisse's "Blue Nude," from 1907:

This continues that conversation (the entry of October 27) about the angular, un-idealized nude, women who are really -- purely -- naked.  Now look at Lichtenstein's "Collage for Still Life with Reclining Nude" from 1997:

Lichtenstein re-creates Matisse's figure here; but he also opens up the view behind her. This open window is also Matissean, French plane trees and views out a shuttered window to the Mediterranean.  Rpy Lichtenstein is coming back full circle, to people whose work he barely mentions in interviews. Now look at Cézanne's "Large Bathers," a painting from 1899-1906:

Cézanne painted several of these studies of monumental figures posed against trees, with a tunnel out to a larger plain or river. Now here is Lichtenstein's "Landscape with Figures," this one from 1980:

And here is his "Collage for Interior with Painting of Bather" from 1997, as he was returning to the same theme:

 

This bather is more nude than naked, more stylized, like Lichtenstein's early women from comic books. The artist is still experimenting ...  but see how the model's surroundings have changed since those early enclosed squares with speech bubbles. She is reclining -- in a painting? out of an open window? -- somewhere near Aix-en-Provence, and she doesn't need to say anything.

Nudely Naked: The Through-Line from Degas to Van Gogh to Matisse

"Look out my window, look at the way things are
Just wonder how, how did things ever get this far ...
Vince Taylor used to live here, nobody's heard of him,
(Ain't that a shame), just who he was, just where he fits in."
                                     lyrics from "Goin' Down Geneva" by Van Morrison

Last Friday, October 21, The New York Times published an article by Karen Rosenberg called "An Unblushing Career of Undressing Women," about an exhibition called "Degas and The Nude" (which she says, only half joking, should have been called "Degas and the Naked") at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts (p. C25).  It got me to thinking, with Van Morrison echoing in my mind, "just where he fits in."

There's a distinction familiar to art students and their teachers, a distinction between "nude" and "naked." The nude in art history is often Venus, Diana, Susannah (and the elders), an odalisque in an inaccessible harem, mythological, fantastical, glorious, nearly air-brushed, and not anything you'd see in your own world. Here is a lovely, smooth-skinned example from Ingres, the master of the nude, called "The Bather of Valpincon" from 1808:

She is perfect. (I should add that David Hockney has traced this perfection to its -- very likely -- source. There was an article in The New Yorker, "The Looking Glass," by Lawrence Weschler on January 31, 2000, which traced the beginnings of Hockney's theory that painters including Ingres, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Hals, Chardin, and Vélazquez all must have employed lenses or some form of camera obscura to achieve their photographic images. This article was then followed in 2001 by the book Secret Knowledge. In both, Hockney tells us that he suspects that Ingres must have used lenses ... how else would he be able to have such an assured line with no preparatory drawings, why else would the drawings be so small, and, I would add, how else could he reproduce that back over and over again, here and in the "Turkish Bath"?). Ingres draws fantabulous nudes. But Degas's women are naked. (And after enough time has passed, Hockney argues, with Cezanne, the lenses are discarded for a new kind of art and, as Weschler reports, then "[deliberate] awkwardness returns to European painting, for the first time, really, since Giotto," and continues on through Cubism). And awkwardness = nakedness, no?. In her article on the Boston MFA's Degas show, Rosenberg writes that the museum unflinchingly presents "the raunchiest of his 'brothel monotypes' alongside the the more genteel voyeurism of his women at their toilette ... His working girls are plump and slovenly, with tufts of dark hair between their thighs. (Even Manet never went that far) ... [but] In Degas naturalism cancels out voyeurism."  So, to finish the explanation between "nude" and "naked," Degas's women are naked. And we can see that, exactly, here, in The Tub," from 1886:

This does look like someone, anyone, that we might know .... And I began to see something. I have been looking at Van Gogh's nudes (there are not very many, and the ones I love come from his time in Paris, in 1886 and 1887).  And I began to wonder if Van Gogh might have seen Degas's women in Paris then. And then the new biography, Van Gogh: The Life arrived (by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, New York: Random House, 2011). And yes, Van Gogh saw the Impressionists in 1886, but was not impressed with them as a group: "one is bitterly, bitterly disappointed, and thinks them slovenly, ugly, badly painted, badly drawn, bad in color, everything that's miserable" and he says, as opposed to most of the painters in the group, "I have faith in color" (519).  And yet, and yet, the biography notes that Van Gogh "commented favorably only on a suite of nude women, in pastel, by Degas (520).  Yes! he did. Here is Van Gogh's "Study for Reclining Female Nude" from 1887 in Paris; it's difficult not to see Degas in this:

There is no idealized goddess to be found here. This woman is naked, formed from rough pencil strokes. Her skin is wrinkled, her breasts are not perfectly-formed oranges, she is a bit uncomfortable and awkward. This is a body, not a dream.

So then, I wondered, because I have been doing this series of nudes with some references back to Henri Matisse, whether he refers to Degas and Van Gogh.  Degas, one feels, would have been inescapable, given Matisse's contacts and Degas's reputation. But Van Gogh was relatively unknown.  In 1899, Matisse bought a Van Gogh drawing from Vollard. Years later, in 1945, Matisse would say that "Van Gogh and Gauguin were ignored. A wall had to be knocked down in order to get through" (p. 158, Matisse on Art, edited by Jack Flam (revised edition, Berkeley: University of California, 1995).  See for yourself; is this "Seated Nude" from 1906 (she's looking pretty naked!) knocking down that wall?