Vintage View: Female nudes

What is it about a naked girl?

A few months ago, I bought a small 1980s pastel of a semi-clothed female figure sitting up on a couch, looking out a window. Delighted with it, I posted an image with my aged, trusted Facebook community. Immediately, the discomfort of outward sophisticates was laid bare. ‘Hang it in the bedroom’ they pertly advised, ‘where your daughter won’t see it.’

If someone gave one of these art appraisers a small Picasso with a triangulated breast, (deemed savage and immoral in its day), would it make the cut to sit over the cistern in the downstairs cloakroom? Frightened, primary school titters continued for days on my news feed. Finally I cloaked her sadly with a firm ‘delete’.

Now, it is true, that there are nudes and there are nudes, there’s erotica and then there’s outright pornography. My mid century miss did have a rosy nipple on show, but her eyes are averted and she strikes a classical studio attitude. Greek and Roman statues may be prickly with subsumed meanings in their mythic guises and pagan props, but there’s that far away look, a detachment that makes them curiously acceptable.

An old friend from college days in Dublin, now lecturing in Medievalism comforted me that my girl was a Renaissance beauty, completely acceptable to go anywhere someone with an open mind and a feeling for the classics could handle her. The local picture framer, complained about the composition, but thought her ‘beautiful.’

Widely revealed, realistic human flesh in art, has regularly caused a prudish kerfuffle. Michelangelo generated outrage by littering the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in writhing, muscular religious nudes between 1508 and 1541. Three centuries later in 1863 Édouard Manet, was at the centre of nationwide controversy, when the Paris Refusés, (‘Salon for Refusals’ by other galleries), hung his painting The Luncheon on the Grass, (Le déjeuner sur l’herbe).

Set amongst clothed gentlemen Manet’s central nude wasn’t just showing her basket of eggs — this professional gal was sitting upright in the grass, hand beneath her chin, laying out the stall. The reason the central figure’s nudity, (seen for thousands of years in multiple cultures across the world), was deemed a shocking tease was that she was a known prostitute. ‘Good girls’ in painting and sculpture are passive, blithely unaware of their sexuality.

In 1865, Manet went on to unveil his still notorious Olympia, now deemed acceptable by the prestigious Paris Salon, and based possibly on the beloved 1510 picture Sleeping Venus by Georgione. However, ‘la difference’ was immediately obvious.

While Georgione’s reclining goddess has her eyes serenely fastened to the floor, Manet’s meaty demi-mondaine looks proudly over your shoulder for her next client. It hangs in the Musee d’Orsay today, where, all woman, she challenges all comers.

Art deco nudes are universally acceptable in the front room. If a girl is involved with gymnastic frolics, holding up a globe in an elastic stretch or skipping out the Charleston, she can sit out on any mantle unmolested by controversy. Why? Well, again, it’s that pose. Frozen into immobility in statue form, not too much detail, straining through her clothes, but lightly draped where it matters, we don’t seem to mind a racy, firmly period bronze letting it all hang out. “Goodness,” she seems to say, “did my skirt fly up just then?”

Modernity and nudes seems to get the lips pursing. Perhaps because my reasonably old study was placed on a recognisable candlewick bedspread, it kicked the side of the hen house?

A firmly, to-camera stare seems to provoke trouble whatever its vintage. Belle Époque illustrations by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec from 1880s Paris, might just show a froth of under garment at the Moulin Rouge or the drop of a dress strap. It’s the decadent expression, unkempt hair, a drink in hand and smear of rogue, that set pulses racing.

Again, these girls were unabashed. Like the ancient, lewd sheela na gig, grotesques warning off the sins of the flesh in Irish monasteries, these French fancies were erotic and meant business.

I picked up a glass paperweight at a boot sale in Carrigtwohill last Sunday week. It’s by Jorma Vennola for Iittala of Finland, and shows three pneumatic women in a sauna. A tiny and desirable piece from a feted industrial designer c1978, it had lasted the day on the front of a mixed table of junk and cost me €2. Nudes provoke a reaction which often says more about our deep-seated feelings, fears and desires than it does about the work of art.

I’m hanging my pastel in the livingroom — and my gorgeous girls steaming their cellulite? They’re right here on my desk where they belong.