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. 

Studies in figure/ground

First, a Picasso-esque sketch:

And a day-lily:

And a painted-over Watteau, a study in form....

Silks up against grass ... new layer

So, as I said yesterday, I thought the work was growing a bit too tight, so I have gone back over the last two "shadow" additions and softened them so they are a bit more ambiguously figure/ground:

By chance, again....figure/ground

I have applied the sunlight and shadows to the "Silks up against grass" painting, because it seemed to me unfinished, still:

Francis Bacon said "I want a very ordered image,

but I want it to come about by chance."

Sometimes, I throw paint at one canvas and splatter a photograph on the wall as well. Or, I come home from a Matisse show and paint over everything in the studio with his blue. The photograph is still on the wall, rather intensified by its new blues and reds; the Matissean blues had themselves to be painted away.

But that sunlight and shadow that I photographed two days ago? It was a lucky accident. Something was missing from that painting -- I was tending towards too much middle ground -- that came back into it when the light and shade hit, so I have painted it in. The painting had reached this point:

But now is here:

Sun and shadows ...

just showed up, on a newer version of the untitled figure/ground ... (Must remember that Manet and Braque show us what blacks and browns can do and for whites: Joan Mitchell, Cy Twombly, and Julie Mehretu) ... When I see these overlays of sunlight and shadows, it makes me wonder: the painted figure and ground, the object and its setting, are here covered over by patches of sunlight which is, in turn, covered over by the shadows of the brushes... where is figure and ground now?

 

Figure/ground seeks title....

A few lines from a Wallace Stevens poem follow up on yesterday and lead to the next version of that same untitled painting, below:

... The sky is too blue, the earth too wide.
The thought of her takes her away.
The form of her in something else
Is not enough....                   (Section IV, from "Bouquet of belle Scavoir")


The background has grown more blue, a little green, some yellows, and the form is still taking shape, and is (not yet) "enough":

Belonging ... IS ... figure/ground

We lived in France for several summers and a sabbatical of eight months in various rented houses and, lastly, for nearly 2 years in this house in Normandy:

And through it all, we had always felt ... French.  But that wasn't right, exactly, and we didn't quite fit.  We sold the house and the car and some of the furniture and came back to the U.S., this time to the West Coast, where we had family but no real history, yet.  And, while we all know it isn't any use not moving, moving, all by itself, is interesting in a peculiar sort of way and it can make you question ... everything. California? Connecticut or New York?  where, exactly, does a person belong? I have talked about the idea of belonging here, before (March 26th and 28th, for example) but I find now that I have an artistic response...

I wrote about Francis Bacon and figure/ground on May 19 ... I do think that the idea may have been to paint all the anguish into the figures on canvas ... but I do think the ground needs its fair share of that tortured linear movement. Sometimes it is the air around the figure that moves. And it came to me in a flash that, really, figure/ground, anguish and stillness, rest and flux: these are all terms about belonging.  Really ... think about it.

And so the series of paintings that I am starting is not so much about juxtaposition ... but belonging, and figure/ground. A ground sliced by a figure, or competing for attention with the figure.  I played with one of these, the picture posted June 28th, today: