The arrival of the women’s art movement also brought with it the protest nude. Sylvia Sleigh, Paul Rosano Reclining (1974) “It’s an amazing expression of how it feels to be deeply in love, to the extent that you are fused in the moment of embrace.” “The arm on the right hand side of the figure strangely seems to detach from the torso of the woman and joins the back of the chair, which starts to read as the torso of a male figure who is embracing her.” He sees it as an illustration of how it feels to be completely consumed by someone, to the point that it becomes impossible to distinguish where one person begins and the other ends. “Within her face is the shadow of a male face, which seems to press in for a kiss from the right,” Paton argues. While the painting initially appears to be of a lone woman, Marie-Thérèse Walter, one of the artist’s many muses, a closer look makes you realise that two people inhabit this work. The power of an embrace between two lovers is also the focus of Picasso’s Nude Woman in a Red Armchair ( Femme nue dans un fauteuil rouge) from 1932 – although it might not be immediately apparent to the untrained eye. “This was seen as somehow accentuating the nudity in a way that was not completely seemly.” A simple hat, seen on many women of the time, was enough to push the painting out of the world of the ideal and into the realm of the erotic. “The reason they felt this way was not because the woman was nude, but because she was nude and wearing a hat,” Paton says. When John Rothenstein, visited Steer in 1941 and chose the painting for Tate’s collection, Steer informed him that he had chosen not to exhibit the painting during his lifetime, as his friends had felt it to be indecent. Philip Wilson Steer’s portrait from the turn of the century is a perfect example of how one small detail can make a work controversial. This discomfort with recognisable, everyday people as the subject of nude portraits was only accentuated in the 20th Century as the nude entered the domestic space, with paintings of bodies appearing in bedrooms or studio interiors. Philip Wilson Steer, Seated Nude: The Black Hat (c1900)Ĭan a nude really be too lifelike? Nudes of classical figures like Psyche and Venus can be appreciated purely as art, without having to consider the living, breathing human that sat before the artist. “It betrayed its origins, where a painter had obviously stood in front of a real, live female body, and was not concealing that fact sufficiently.” The Knight errant is an example of what scholars refer to as the ‘English nude’, which caused controversy in the late 19th Century because the subjects of these works were deemed too lifelike. We’re so used to seeing millions of images of the naked human form, yet at the same time a single nude artwork in a gallery can still prove extraordinarily controversial at times.” Only recently in Australia, an art magazine was compelled by its publisher to conceal the nipples on a female nude painting it had chosen for its cover. “Even today there is this amazing mix of prudity and permissiveness. “The debates about honesty and idealisation from the Victorian period reverberate right through to our own time, which I think resembles the Victorian period in quite striking ways, particularly when you look at the way nudity and body issues are discussed in the culture at large,” he says. In many ways, contemporary portrayals of the naked body differ vastly from Victorian works, but there are also strong similarities. When we think of the nude, many of us may carry in our minds a classical image of the heroic, sculpted bodies that dominated 19th-Century art, but as Paton points out, “the nude is actually an ever-changing and endlessly contested form”.
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