The following information is excerpted from the book THE NUDE MALE: A NEW PERSPECTIVE by Margaret Walters (New York: Paddington Press Ltd., 1983):
"THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS"
Sylvia Sleighs' Philip Golub Reclining (1971) is a painting of herself painting the male nude. His graceful, sensuously relaxed back fills the foreground of the picture; he gazes at his own face in the large mirror running behind the couch, and reflected in the mirror we see the artist as well, alert and attentive, concerned not with her image but her canvas. The painting is not simply a matter of role reversal; it is a conscious and witty challenge to our expectations about artists and models, about men and women.
For a woman to paint the male nude, as against being painted nude by a man, is a break with our whole art tradition. The ban on women studying the live model-historically an insurmountable barrier to anyone with serious professional ambitions-survived almost until the end of the last century. Occasional women seem to have found ways of getting around the taboo; in the seventeenth century, for example, Artemisia Gentileschi did vigorous and overtly sensual paintings of the female nude, and the early eighteenth-century Venetian artist Giulia Lama somehow even managed to do sustained and detailed drawings of the male nude. 'The poor woman was persecuted by [other] painters,' remarked a contemporary, 'but her virtue triumphs over all.' It is not clear whether she was persecuted because she had risked her moral reputation, or because, aspiring to do large-scale altar paintings, she was regarded as professional competition by men.
But-and increasingly-any woman who tried to work professionally as an artist was exposed to ridicule, jealous denigration, and scurrilous rumors of all kinds. (Angelica Kauffman is the clearest example; as her fame grew, so did the prurient slurs on her morals.) The American sculptor Harriet Hosmer, working in Rome in the middle of the nineteenth century, advised a girl art student: 'Learn to be laughed at, and learn it as quickly as you can.' The determinedly independent Hosmer actually risked doing a large-scale marble nude, a close and skillful version of the Barberini sleeping faun. The rather dull neoclassicizing manner fashionable at the time does not disguise her attempt to convey sensual abandon and pleasure. 'This is going it rather strong,' protested one male contemporary, while others dismissed her as a mere second-rate imitator, or criticized her for her strained attempt at a 'manly energy,' her mere travesty of real creativity...
Ironically, as women artists slowly won access to life classes on equal terms with men, the male nude was losing much of its traditional importance. At the end of the nineteenth century when, at last, a woman was free to study the male model without irretrievably labeling herself fallen, she came up against a brand new version of an old myth-the equation of creativity with masculinity, with male virility. Renoir's famous remark, 'I paint with my prick,' was a retort to an intrusive journalist who asked how he managed to paint with his crippled hands. But the metaphor was increasingly common. Van Gogh praised the 'male potency' of Cezanne's work, and later Vlaminck spoke of painting 'with my heart and my loins.' Renoir's comment could have served as a battle cry for a whole generation of younger artists in France and Germany, eager to live up to the public suspicion that artists were immoral and subversive. The Expressionists often saw themselves as free spirits, getting back to nature, back to more instinctive levels of the personality. They would, by main force if necessary, break down bourgeois hypocrisy and sexual repression. And the image which proved their freedom from convention, their artistic and sexual virility, was the female nude.
No woman artist can ever 'penetrate' below the surface of things, argued George Moore. And Renoir insisted that a woman's function was to charm and please a man; she might be a dancer or a singer, but as an artist, she is merely ridiculous. Once, coming across some drawings by his model and-temporarily-his mistress, Suzanne Valadon, Renoir remarked, 'Ah, you too, and you hide this talent!' and never again referred to the matter. According to Valadon, his indifference spurred her to step out of her role merely mirroring male talent and develop her own. She used her own naked body as a basis for a number of powerful and moving paintings; and she was one of the first women to paint a frankly sensual, undisguisedly personal, male nude. The Nets celebrates her pleasure in the body of Andre Utter, twenty-one years younger than herself, who became her lover and then husband. The painting is perhaps too self-conscious to be fully successful; though Valadon delights in the three different views of his body, she carefully shields his genitals. And she is inevitably over-conscious of the way she-former model and mistress-is turning the tables on men. But her painting throws down a challenge to her contemporaries, to a centuries-old tradition-and looks forward to attempts to create new ways of seeing, nearly fifty years later.
Since the early 1960s, a number of women artists, particularly in the United States, have turned back to the traditional nude, both male and female. Starting from a premise that women have a distinctive, and hitherto largely unexpressed, sexual experience, they have begun questioning the invisible but powerful bias of most art up until now. Out of a new self-confidence, some women have turned to look freshly at their own bodies, and at men's. Some of the new nudes may prove no more than a flash in the pan, a way of shaking people out of comfortable preconceptions, but not necessarily of more than ephemeral interest. But what is exciting is the richness, the variety and the fantasy of the new women's art-its willingness to take risks, to open doors, slowly perhaps to develop new ways of seeing and feeling.
Some artists present the male nude provocatively and programmatically. In 1973, Anita Steckel formed a Fight Censorship group protesting the double standard of museum authorities, only allowing the male nude if decently fig-leafed, while the most blatantly sexual female nude is considered permissible Art. Connie Greene asked professors at Rhode Island art college, who had taught and drawn from the female nude for years, if they would be willing to pose themselves; and based a very beautiful and sympathetic series of paintings on this role reversal. Marion Pinto actually called one of her exhibitions 'Man as Sex Object'; while Sylvia Sleigh, painting her favorite young models Philip Golub and Paul Rosano over and over again is obviously turned on by their grace and almost feminine narcissism. And by their body hair; in striking contrast to the depilitated classic nude, her paintings of Paul Rosano, reclining or gazing at his reflected image, delight in the heavy patterning of dark hair on his body. Works by Pinto or Sleigh or Jillian Denby often have a dislocating effect, because we are not used to seeing the male body so relaxed, passive and sensuous. The artists ask pointed questions about the power relationships underlying traditional sexual attitudes. If there is occasionally a note of hostility toward the male, a surprising number of these nudes are gentle and genial in tone. (Tomar Levine's domestically naked man, grinning back as he lies with knees cramped up in his old-fashioned bathtub, is a good example.) The artists often express a kind of fellow feeling for their subjects, as they honestly expose their own fantasies.
Other artists play jokes with the sexual metaphors we take for granted. Anita Steckel, for example, has done a number of phallic city skylines, sometimes funny and sometimes surreally menacing. Her Feminist Peepshow consisted of forty photographs of dignified Victorian gentlemen, bearded and heavily clothed; below the waist, Steckel drew in bare legs and weird and comic penises. (One penis turns in a groping hand, another twines like a vine, yet another is so long and thin that it turns into a rope with a tiny naked man hanging at the end.) Marjorie Strider, who used to do rather conventional pop female nudes, has recently, done some weird blowups of nudes off Greek vases-one shows a woman about to be penetrated by two men with big erections, another shows nude warriors-that are being broken and forced apart by brightly colored plastic goo. Its formless, messy, subhuman energy, something out of science fiction, oozes all over the sacrosanct forms of high art.
The penis, often erect, is the central image in much of Eunice Golden's work. From one point of view, she is simply offering a visual answer to the endlessly emphasized and blown-up vaginas so run-of the-mill in modern erotic art. (Golden has even done a parody of Magritte's famous Le Viol, where the man's genitals are superimposed on his face.) But her more abstract phallic fantasies are imaginative and often very beautiful-as are the various "landscapes" she discovers in the male body. Some of her work is sharply satirical, but there is little of that open or suppressed disgust that male artists often betray when they paint the female genitals. In her Purple Sky, the disconcerting colors and almost abstract shapes resolve themselves into a closeup of a man lying on his back playing with his erect penis. The painting is coolly impersonal, but it is also a genuine attempt to identify with the way a man experiences his body, his erection.
Nancy Grossman's art also uses the male body as the focus of fantasy, this time somber and rather frightening. Much of her work is preoccupied with violence. But the Portrait of A. E., a nude man with a meticulously detailed gun strapped to his head, is not making any obvious equation between phallus and weapon. It implies, rather, that violence is in the head, that this man cannot speak except murderously, cannot see except through the sights of his gun. His shoulders are heavy, and his arms stiff, as if he were being constrained and invisibly fettered. The bonds are made visible in some of Grossman's disturbing figure sculptures, where a leather man struggles desperately with the buckles and zips and belts that confine him. Grossman uses the gear and imagery of sadomasochism, but there is all the difference in the world between her work, and that of someone like Allen Jones, who simply exploits pop images of punished and punishing women. Grossman's art is an attempt to understand the tragic roots of cruelty, the way it traps us. The bonds her men fight are the only thing that holds them together, the leather that encases and stifles them is their own skin.
In her painting Michelangelo's David, Audrey Flack turns back to the past, playing with the fact that this is the most famous of all male nudes, a stereotype of masculine beauty; and she sets out to reinvestigate its basic meanings and plastic virtue. As it turns out, the life in the painting emerges most strongly in the rough-textured brick background, Flack's sensual rendering of the pattern of rectangles and shadows and chipped corners. The effect is as if the nude, however stunning, is not quite in focus, as if it does not-and never can-quite serve as a symbol for a woman's sexual fantasy. In some ways more interesting, certainly more deeply moving, is Flack's my favourite Edelheit painting is her View of the Empire State Building from Sheep Meadow, one of a series of cityscapes, with four nudes, two men and two women, sitting in the vividly green grass of Central Park. It is disconcerting in its immediacy, in its unromantic and only too clear-sighted view of the naked body, and in the mordant comedy of the urban setting. None of the nudes is conventionally attractive, and if this is supposed to be paradisial picnic, traditional image of man's yearning to get back to nature, it is very much an idyll for our times. Empty Coke cans are scattered around, and none of the participants looks particularly satisfied or abandoned or even comfortable. But the painting combines dignity and laughter in a particularly attractive way.
Probably the finest of all contemporary painters of the nude is Alice Neel, a remarkable and, until recently, neglected painter. Most of her work-whether she was painting her neighbors in Spanish Harlem in the late 1930s, her own children, or fashionable personalities in the New York art world-is remarkable for its social and psychological insight. Much of her art consists of portraits, and she uses the nude only occasionally-but then with extraordinarily telling effect. Her nudes range from the somber and tragic Puerto Rican dying of T.B. in Spanish Harlem, to the equally terrifying Andy Warhol, stripped to the waist and seen against a blank background, holding himself upright on the edge of collapse. His breasts look almost female above the belly, terribly scarred and strapped together. His eyes are closed, his whole body turned in on itself; yet there is a disturbing hint in pose and expression, that he takes a masochistic pleasure in displaying his very real suffering.
One of the qualities that makes Neel's work so powerful and difficult is the combination of a deep physical empathy with her sitters, an almost animal awareness of their tensions; and a vision so unsentimental and unsparing that it verges on brutality. The Joe Gould, painted back in 1933 though not exhibited till 1971, shows him skinny, devilishly grinning, delighted to display himself without clothes. But Neel gets a surreal effect by loading his body with genitals; he has not just one, but three sets, their formalized shape mirrored again in the cut of his beard. Moreover, his sitting figure is flanked by two standing images of his belly and genitals, this time described in disconcerting detail-the foreskin is pushed back on the right but not on the left. The painting-its dazzling wit hovering on the edge of cruelty--is a biting comment on exhibitionism, arrogance and impotence.
More recently Neel painted art critic John Perreault, with a gentler and more affectionate irony. Stripped of his clothes, he remains a sophisticated urbanite. Neel is interested in the confidence and the selfpossessions that allow him to pose nude, fully aware that he and the artist are doing something experimental and rather 'liberated.' Yet somehow, for all the intelligent awareness expressed in his steady outward gaze, he is not quite able to relax. His pose is a little too casually unconcerned, and his self-consciousness emerges, for example, in the awkwardness of that propped-up leg.
There is nothing timeless or classless about any of Neel's nudes, male or female. Social differences and sexual tensions are not discarded with our clothes, they go skin-deep and deeper, are expressed in the tiniest physical details. The way we live in society is also expressed in the way we inhabit our naked bodies..."
For additional artists and works on the subject of women painting the male nude, you can track the following books through your local public or university library. If you can't find them, ask a librarian if they can be ordered for you through inter-library loan.
SONS & OTHERS: WOMEN ARTISTS SEE MEN exhibition catalogue, March 15-April 27, 1975, the Queens Museum (Flushing : The Museum, [1975])
WHAT SHE WANTS: WOMEN ARTISTS LOOK AT MEN edited by Naomi Salaman (London : Verso, c1994)
THE MALE BODY: A NEW LOOK AT MEN IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE by Susan Bordo (New York : Farrar Straus Giroux ; Maidenhead : Melia, 2001)
MALE TROUBLE: A CRISIS IN REPRESENTATION by Abigail Solomon-Godeau (London : Thames and Hudson, c1997)
WET: ON PAINTING, FEMINIST AND ART CULTURE by Mira Schor (Durham, North Carolina; London: Duke University Press. 1997)
Kathleen Adrian
Smithsonian American Art Museum
|
|
|
|
