Reading/Video Discussion

The Nude

The Cultural Rhetoric of the

Body in the Art of Western Modernity

RICHARD LEPPERT

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Copyright © 2007 by Westview Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Leppert, Richard D.

The nude : the cultural rhetoric of the body in the art of Western modernity

/ Richard D. Leppert.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8133-4350-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8133-4350-X (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Nude in art. 2. Art and

society. I. Title.

N7572.L47 2007

704.9'421-dc22 2006035885

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the

American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for

Printed Library Materials Z39 .48-1984.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

The State of Being without Clothes-in Art

lT IS LOST ON NO ONE THAT A SIGNIFICANT PORTION OF OUR

conscious and unconscious understandings of ourselves and of

our immediate world is framed by the imagery of advertising,

both in the medium of print and on television. This imagery

urges what sort of bodies to have or to desire-or to build

( even the seeming natural given of our fleshly frames is terrain

for future construction)-our sense of self, our belief systems,

our individuality, and our status as social beings; what clothes

to wear, or car to drive, which political party to vote for, and

so forth.

Outlining the Territory

We understand several fundamental things about the advertis­

ing image. The information it provides is not unbiased or neu­

tral (buy this instead of that and you'll be happier, better for it,

more successful). It specifically exists to get us to do something

we might otherwise not do. It promises future happiness, but

by trying to make us dissatisfied with our past and, especially,

1

2 THE NUDE

with our present. And even when we recognize the fictions upon which advertising's pleas depend for their success, we commonly find ourselves being sucked in by the very possi­ bility of the narrative-thus the appeal to men of coolness, group identity (lots of buddies), athleticism, and inordinate sexiness to women, and the like; and the appeal to women of beauty, being loved, and, above all, of inordinate sexiness to men, and so forth. We understand-certainly once we have spent our money-that the promise remains just that. But de­ spite our resistance and growing cynicism, we remain to one degree or another caught in the light of what we see: what we are shown.

Images show us a world, but not the world. Images are not the things shown, but representations thereof: re-presentations. Indeed, what images represent may other wise not exist in real­ ity and instead be confined to the realm of imagination, wish, dream, or fantasy. And yet, of course, any image literally exists as an object within the world that it some way engages. When we look at images, whether photographs, films, videos, or paintings, what we see is the product of human consciousness, itself part and parcel of culture and history. That is, images are not mined, like ore; they are constructed for the purpose of performing some function within a given society and its culture.

This is a book about paintings (mostly) produced during the broad expanse of time that marks historical modernity, from the early Renaissance to the present. The images discussed are Western, from Europe and the Americas, the earliest dated c. 1427 and the most recent 1992, with emphasis on represen­ tational art, rather than abstract. The story narrates the body without clothes: the nude.

In particular, I am keen to understand some of the ways that paintings of naked human beings function within the conflict-

Introduction 3

ing realms of power that operate throughout any social forma­ tion, especially those surrounding differences of class, gender, and race. I am interested in the representation of the naked body as a sight-and sometimes as a spectacle-that is, as an object of display and intense interest upon which the viewer obsessively gazes. The represented bodies will be those of both sexes at all ages and from different races and social classes. Both secular and sacred subjects are included. Some bodies repre­ sented will be seen as pleasured, others as tormented. Through­ out this encounter I shall question art's relation to the abstract realms of happiness, desire, fear, and anxiety, understood less as individual, private emotions and more as responses to social and cultural conditions.

Seeing and the Social Practice of Making Sense

An underlying and fundamental theme governing this book is that all meaning-thus including the meanings of paintings­ results from social practices that are in a constant state of flux and are under challenge by people holding diverse, often con­ flicting, interests. Art-making and its consumption (viewing) are social practices. But in order to consider how paintings have functioned-the jobs they have been assigned to perform-it is crucial to understand that visual representation operates with the specificity of the medium of painting-just as literature is specifically different from television, film, and music. Each of these media is richly expressive and communicative, and each is practiced according its own set of principles. That is, the means by which visual art says something to us is in part unique to vi­ sual art, and that specificity must be both respected and investi­ gated if we have any hope of sorting out how art works on us.

4 THE NUDE

Accordingly, another of my concerns is to address the question of how representations go about representing.

Sight is the principal means through which we learn to ma­ neuver in time and space. Sight is a device for recognition, pre­ diction, and confirmation: This person is mother, and not a stranger. (Her identity is seen before her name is recognized, and long before it can be spoken.) We also understand that seeing is not a simple matter of biology and physics, not a question about light waves' action on the retina. Seeing is very much about the mind and thought processes. The moment I invoke thought, the complexity of seeing increases exponen­ tially, for I have introduced language into the equation-and not mere recognition, as with the basic identity bond between infants and parents prior to language acquisition.

Here again representation enters. The function of language, itself the manifestation of cognition, is to represent in repeat­ able, abstract signs (morphemes) and sounds (phonemes) what comes to us by means of our various senses, sight principal among them. (Without our senses language is impossible. To be sure, we can get along quite well without one or more of our senses, but not without all of them-which would end life it­ sel£) Restricting ourselves to the sense of sight, what we make of it depends in part on thought, just as thought depends on language: again, representation. We cannot escape the web of representational devices; they are what allow us to make our way in the world.1

However, it is all too easy, and utterly false, to imply that paintings are simply nonverbal substitutes for what might other­ wise be expressed or communicated in words-ironically, the vast body of writing about art confirms nothing more than that words often fail miserably to account for the communicative and expressive power of images. Paintings are products of human consciousness-thought and feeling-transformed through the

Introduction 5

physical act of painting into something visible-but silent, and usually devoid of words (relatively few paintings include texts that the viewer can read). Images are less visual translations of what might otherwise be said (in words) than they are visual transformations of a certain awareness of the world. Conscious (and unconscious) awareness of a given situation, to be sure, has ties in language, but language is only the most obvious (and not the only) means by which people attempt to make sense of their reality. Were that not so there is little cause to explain the exis­ tence of either images or, for that matter, music. Further, paint­ ings are not simply assertions about the world; they are as much interrogatives, inquiries, and explorations. Images do not so much tell us anything, as make available-by making visible in a certain way--a realm of possibilities and probabilities, some of which are difficult to state in words.

Seeing to Know/Knowing to See

It makes no sense to think about a painting as though it were "a delivery van, conveying meaning to the customer."2 Viewers do not wait for a painting's meanings to arrive prepackaged. Viewers are active participants in determining meaning. In or­ der to see (that is, to perceive), I have to know something. At the most basic level this requires that I recognize what it is I am looking at, though mere recognition takes me but a short distance. Thus the ancient Roman scholar Pliny: " The mind is the real instrument of sight and observation, the eyes act as a sort of vessel receiving and transmitting the visible portion of the consciousness."3

It is easily understood that seeing requires certain skills that are in part historically and culturally specific. W hat is there for me to see involves me: my own knowledge, beliefs, investments,

6 THE NUDE

interests, desires, and pleasures. Having acquired consciousness, I never approach an image as a tabula rasa-"the innocent eye is a myth"4-I come always already knowing, believing, want­ ing, and so forth, to whatever degree. Further, I know that the image's maker, like me, approaches the wood panel or canvas with knowledge, belief, investment, interest, and desire. Still further, artists historically most often worked directly for some­ one or something else-a patron, and later, an art market­ wherefrom other, and not likely always parallel knowledges, interests, and so on emanate.

Thus: " Every image embodies a way of seeing. "5 Or better: every image embodies historically, socially, and culturally spe­ cific, competing, and contradictory ways of seeing. Precisely on that account, the contents of images are not simple substitutes for words, because they call upon so much more than words. Pic­ tures call out not only to the mind but also to the body (consider the immediate physical impact of erotic images), to thought but also to emotion, and so forth. The French novelist Emile Zola commented that art works are "a corner of nature seen through a temperament."6 Zola's remark acknowledges that artists do not operate as mere conduits moving information from point A to point B like electrical lines. Instead, artists transform their mate­ rial. But the value of Zola's insight is limited by the fact that he tacitly reduces art to the isolated psychology of the individual artist, without acknowledging that artistic consciousness itself is formed within the boundaries of history, society, and culture. Further, it is perhaps ironic that what we label individuality­ however we may imagine and treasure it-is endlessly duplicated in any given society. To cite a mundane example, the limits to in­ dividuality are evident in newspaper personal ads; despite efforts to make each message appear unique, the net result is often a striking, perhaps depressing, sameness.

Introduction 7

Limits of Engagement

In writing about art, I seek to engage some paintings in a sort of metaphoric dialogic process in which their "speaking out" to me, their function of giving visibility to something, elicits from me a response, an engagement. In the process, I hope that my readers will become engaged in the process as well. My intent is to make visible certain possibilities of meanings relative to certain images. Recognizing that art, as representation, is by nature inherently always interested, and not objective, in what it makes available for me to see or to be shown, I respond in kind. That is, I recognize, and explicitly acknowledge, my own interests. Still, the reader must remember that these interests are not coterminous with the "everything " of art-but neither are they trivial.

It is critical to emphasize that all this will be partial, incom­ plete, impermanent, and for that matter maybe wrong, but not disinterested. What I seek to do is in fact all that can be done. ''Artworks are not like broadcasting devices perpetually sending out the same signal or set of signals: The construal of meaning is dynamically constructive for both user and maker; it is a cease­ less production galvanized by objects in historically and socially specific circumstances. "7 To talk about an image is not to decode it, and having once broken its code to be done with it, the final meaning having been established and reduced to words. To talk about an image is, in the end, an attempt to relate oneself to it and to the sight it represents. The image is a place to see what we can see, a site of exploration, a place to travel, and like all sites worthy of a visit, worth returning to because there is always more to see. Art history is "a place to see seeing ";8 no more than any other site, it is assuredly not a place to see the end of seeing. As a signifying practice, it is a beginning without end, just as my

8 THE NUDE

own activity as an author of a book about images is an incom­ plete representation-about representations.9

To summarize: My particular interest in visual art lies in equal measure with the adjective, the visual, and the noun it modifies, the art. What is essential about visual art is that it is first and foremost art (i.e., artifice) and, as it were, incidentally visual. The importance of vision to visual art is not the physiological phe­ nomenon of seeing (animals see; they do not make art) but in the perceiving, which of course is governed by the eyes in con­ junction with the brain ( conscious and unconscious thought) and indeed with the entire human organism (the body) in its perceived relation to external reality. 10 I am interested in how and why art functions as representation, in how and why people, objects, places, and events are made to appear in art; and in the means by which images attempt to call out to me.11

What's Nude?

In painting, nude or naked: what to call it? What are the stakes of the difference? A generation ago, Sir Kenneth Clark, in his monumental study of nudity and nakedness in art, suggested some principles for defining the boundary between the two cat­ egories of being without clothes. Nakedness, he said, describes a state of being without clothes; nudity by contrast is a category of artistic representation. The former, he argued, "implies some sort of embarrassment" most people feel from being deprived of clothes, the latter "carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenseless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed."12 Nudity for Clark operates as a manifestation of aesthetics, as representation, and at a remove from mundane reality. The claim to aesthetics pro-

Introduction 9

vides Clark with the source of his book's subtitle: A Study in Ideal Form. Clark developed his project along formalist lines, investigating the representation of the naked human body in art as a type of painted or sculpted composition-which to be sure it is-governed by the regularities and symmetries of geometry.

Within the confines of a broadly defined Western tradition, Clark universalized the body as an unproblematic entity, di­ vorced from history other than the history of art and art­ making. In particular, he ignored any specific investigation of the function of the nude (the why question), and also the act of spectatorship (the who's looking question). As a result, his book (insightful as regards formalist art history) oddly sepa­ rates the nude from discourses about power and, ironically, the politics governing differences of class, gender, and race. Fur­ ther, it identifies but quickly backs off from eroticism's role as a driving force to portray the nude in art from time immemorial. "It is necessary to labor the obvious," Clark says, "and say that no nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the specta­ tor some vestige of erotic feeling, even though it be only the faintest shadow-and if it does not do so, it is bad art and false morals."13 The pleasure of looking at beautiful naked bodies in art, for Clark, is principally contemplative, not physical, predi­ cated upon preserving "in educated usage" a sharp division be­ tween mind and body.

A substantial, if brief, critique of Clark's book was mounted by the art critic John Berger in 1972.14 His concern was the fe­ male nude exclusively. He argued that the nude in art responds to, and in turn reinforces, the principal power differential that in part defines the social and cultural functions of gender hierarchy. He reasoned that man's presence in the world articulates a "power which he exercises on others," whereas a woman's pres­ ence articulates "what can and cannot be done to her." (While effectively critiquing Clark, Berger perpetuated a male discourse

10 THE NUDE

concerning women's supposed lack of agency.) So far as art is concerned, Berger related gender difference to the separate acts of looking and of being looked at: A man's look is directed out­ ward toward others, a woman's inward toward herself One sur­ veys and surveils; the other is surveyed and surveils herself. Berger sums up:

Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women

watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only

most relations between men and women but also the relation

of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself

is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an

object-and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.15

Berger argued that the painted nude is, essentially, the painted nude female. Historically, however, this is the case only since the nineteenth century, before which there is a reasonably close balance between the sexes in representations of the nude. Berger further notes that the female's nakedness is not expres­ sive of her own feelings but a sign of "her submission to the [art] owner's feelings or demands. " To be naked, Berger sug­ gests, is to "be oneself"; but to be nude is to be seen by others "and yet not recognized for oneself . . . Nakedness reveals itself Nudity is placed on display. "16 F inally, Berger reiterates the character of power difference by noting that female nudity in art conventionally, though by no means always, includes men who are clothed or no men at all, leaving but one man implicit, the spectator-owner of the image who stands, clothed, outside the frame. In sum, whereas Clark defines the nude in terms of beauty, Berger defines it in terms of politics.

Berger's thesis about the painted nude and spectatorship has its counterpart in film studies in the form of a famous essay by Laura Mulvey written in 1973 (a year after Ways of Seeing ap-

Introduction 11

peared) and published in 1975.17 Employing the term scopo­ philia (pleasure in looking), she suggested that the conditions of watching movies, together with the narrative conventions of film, promote "the illusion of voyeuristic separation." That is, movie-looking manifests itself as a private act in a darkened the­ ater (a looking-in on a private world, like a Peeping Tom), with attention focused on the human form itself, upon which the spectator may project his own desires. The pleasure, and the anx­ iety, of film, she argued, derives from the gap that separates im­ age from self-image, a divide that can be bridged at least temporarily by fantasy-the same gap exploited by advertising.18

The woman in film (her body and the character it reveals) re­ ceived Mulvey's principal attention, and her understanding of the woman's visual function is summarized by the following: "Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two lev­ els: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen."19

For Mulvey and Berger, and implicitly Clark, woman is im­ age, and man is the bearer of the look on that image. The for­ mer is passive, hence it lacks agency; the other is active, hence it possesses agency.20

Who's Got the Look?

Is it sufficient to suggest, like Berger, that there exist only a rel­ ative few exceptional female nudes painted by male artists that fall outside the parameters thus far described? What happens when women look at painted female nudes-or when women artists paint nudes, whether male or female? Can women in ef­ fect look back?21 And what if it is men who are naked, and if it is still men who are looking? Or women? How does the

12 THE NUDE

Berger-Mulvey equation change? And what if the viewer, whether male or female, looking at a nude, is not the presump­ tive straight viewer, but is instead gay, lesbian, or bisexual? And what of the differences marked by ethnicity, race, class stand­ ing, and religious belief? The cultural distinctions and the belief systems established by any one of these terms necessarily call into question any single account of how men and women look at one another, and how they look at representations of them­ selves and others in art. The terms of debate have largely been defined by the academic discipline of art history, which for most of its existence has been practiced almost entirely by men who rarely saw a need to raise issues of the sort articulated by Berger, who is a critic not an academic, or Mulvey, who is an academic but not an art historian. Since their pathbreaking work, the story of art, and indeed of the nude, has broadened considerably, as I trust will be evident in what follows.

The seemingly obvious connection of the art nude to socio­ cultural questions about sexual difference was made an issue only with the advent of feminist art history in the early 1970s, together with studies of race and representation, and later with the emergence of gay and lesbian histories of art in the 1980s. The issue surfaced much as the result of the. increased presence of women in the discipline who, through their own experience as women in the society at large and through their experiences within the academy-historically not a site of empathy toward women-began to constitute a new discourse.22 Some of the most interesting new work of this sort has addressed the con­ tradictions inherent in the male gaze.

Marcia Pointon, for example, alludes to the deep-seated anxiety embedded in the male look concerning female sexual­ ity, calling upon a Freudian psychoanalytic account of the male fear of castration, first experienced in childhood, generated by the appearance of physiological sexual difference-the female's

Introduction 13

lack of a penis. In other words, her account of the male gaze tacitly acknowledges not only strength, but weakness. A diffi­ culty with this formulation, however, is the degree to which it preserves the phallus as the locus of imagining the visible. As Luce Irigaray puts it, "The male sex becomes the sex because it is very visible, the erection is spectacular," and all the more in a culture that privileges sight over the other senses23-though, as I will later suggest, the male phallus in art borders culturally on being unrepresentable.

Nonetheless, Pointon demonstrates through her own prac­ tice as an art historian-a professional looker at art-that she can see through the visual technologies that operate to objec­ tify women, thereby helping to undercut or overcome the ef­ fect. Her own gaze possesses the power to name patriarchy and to demonstrate how its rhetoric operates in representation.24

This still acknowledges that the female nude is a category of painting mostly by and for men, of which "woman as spectator is offered the dubious satisfaction of identification with the heterosexual masculine gaze, voyeuristic, penetrating and pow­ erful . . . negating women's own experience and identity."25

Pointon's most important insight is to regard the female nude as a form of rhetoric in which the subject is not fully con­ tained or controlled either by the (male) artist, as "author," or by the (male) spectator as the "reader." In essence, the female nude exceeds its characterization by men, and this excess is not sim­ ply the result of external analysis by feminist spectators but in fact inherent in the object itsel£ Put perhaps too simply, the female nude, even (perhaps especially) in its most objectified and objectionable form-usually what we call pornographic­ constitutes an acknowledgment by men of the ability of women to satisfy a desire that men cannot satisfy themselves.26 More­ over, the female nude represents an imaginary female body to which the male spectator has access to only psychically, not

14 THE NUDE

physically. In representation, she remains explicitly out of reach, except in fantasy. In other words, the desire to look, and to pos­ sess by looking, in the end only demonstrates that looking is not the same as having. Assuming for a moment that all represen ­ tations of female nudes were sexist (a blatant falsehood), we would still be required to specify that men's domination of women develops simultaneously from both strength and weak­ ness. The perceived need to dominate is the surest psychosocial indicator of the latter. This offers little comfort to those being dominated, to be sure, but neither does it provide all that it might seem to promise to those exercising coercive power.

The desire of men to look at women, and vice versa, whether clothed or naked, is after all deeply informed by sex­ ual necessity, an activity fully sanctioned by society under cul­ turally approved circumstances. Herein, of course, lies the problem: There is no single road map for looking at the body of the other. The look may define desires driven by love or hate, desires mutual and reciprocal, or selfish and self-serving. Accordingly, the rhetoric of a given image is defined by more than itself, by more than what it is made to look like. It is driven by the functions to which it is put. In the generation of my youth, boys' experiences with National Geographic, for ex­ ample, were probably not always in line with the "official" dis­ courses surrounding that magazine's exploration of the world and its myriad cultures. Yet however we account for the sexual desire produced by a woman's pictured body, whatever inten­ tions her body may be designated to serve, the very act of pic­ turing her, and not something else, marks the power her body possesses over her male counterpart, as Pointon has shown. 27

What this adds up to, in the end, is that the female nude occu­ pies a space that is inevitably open to contestation, hence one that is profoundly ambiguous . And for all the insightful talk about the male and his controlling gaze, whereby women are

Introduction 15

objectified, I would argue that the female nude also defines fundamental limits to the agency of the gaze and its ability to objectify. The dominating power of the male gaze rests on the same fragile foundation as male identity itself, and while this can neither explain away the actual psychical and physical bat­ tering many women experience at the hands of men , it can perhaps provide a less essentalist account of the complexities surrounding the problem. The trouble with much current the­ orization of the male gaze is that it is itself essentalist, too of­ ten a vast simplification alike of both female and male identity and subjectivity, as I hope to show.28

W hat I have said so far addresses only images of nude women , my purpose being to set some basic parameters for what follows. The male nude has its own story to tell, one at least as conflicted as-and certainly even more contradictory than-the story of the female nude, as I will discuss in subse­ quent chapters.

N eeding to See

The nude body in art is always about the removal of clothes; nu­ dity does not constitute Westerners' natural state. To make avail­ able the sight of nudity in art is to respond to sociocultural needs not otherwise met in lived experience.29 The question to ask is: W hat is this need, and how is it met in representation? The fact is that the need is not singular, nor are the means by which representational response ( the making and the seeing) occurs. Whatever the representation, viewers project back onto the im­ age their own sets of interests, desires, investments, phobias, and the like. We see differently from each other because our lives are never identical. Nor is any individual an unchanging cipher through which impressions flow without modification: Sexists

16 THE NUDE

and bigots are not born, but made; people who strive to liberate themselves and others are not genetically programmed for this activity-and, of course, people change.

Seeing helps make us what we are, whether we choose to con­ firm, to deny, or to mediate the reality we construct. Yet neither the misogynic nor the feminist image leads us toward any neces­ sary or specific response. Either may strengthen or weaken our beliefs, whether they are regressive or progressive. This does not mean that no moral consequence attaches to either, only that n_o moral consequence is guaranteed from looking at one image as opposed to another. Each response is located within personal and general history, embedded in experience and belief, never the same in two individuals, and established within the compli­ cated dynamics of culture, which is always a changing process, and never static.

Fooling

The sense of sight is a fundamental means by which human beings attempt both to explain and to gain control of the real­ ity in which they find themselves. Not surprising, the ability mimetically to represent that world, to match in two dimen­ sions what exists in three, is conflated in some societies with magic or some other special power. One sort of painting more than any other at once evokes and demonstrates that power: trompe l 'oeil, "to deceive the eye." This French term was pejo­ ratively used for the first time in 1803 to describe a particular type of imagery, whose earliest examples date back to the very beginning of Western history. The style is typified by an ex­ traordinary naturalism that misleads the viewer, at least ini­ tially, to perceive that the image is the actual thing that it in fact merely represents.

Introduction 1 7

Samuel van Hoogstraeten, a seventeenth-century Dutch theoris t of painting, and not incidentally an accompl ished trompe l' oeil artist, wrote that a perfect painting " is like a mir­ ror of Nature, which makes things that are not actually there seem to be there, and deceives in a permitted pleasant and commendable manner."30 Trompe l'oeil's ability and purpose to deceive the viewer, however pleasantly or commendably, brings into focus questions about the general nature of all representa­ tion, concerning which much philosopher's ink was spilled al­ ready many centuries ago.

W hat was bothersome to ancient philosophers about trompe I' oeil centered on the relation between representation and ethics; that is, the impact of images on human character lent imagery the power to shape a society and its culture. Put differ­ ently, from the dawn of Western civilization, representation was correctly understood to have an enormous potential to affect the polis; representation at its core was political. Thus, did rep­ resentation help us to comprehend the nature of reality by stimulating thought, hence producing ideas, or did it deceive us with the replication of surfaces-mere appearances-by stimu­ lating the senses, hence producing a physical response devoid of cognition? Was its appeal to the noble mind or to the ignoble body? Was representation an avenue to insight or a highway to sham and a validation of fakery?3 1

These concerns notwithstanding, and as the ancients under­ stood perfectly, we cannot live or advance as human beings without recourse to representation, notably including the vi­ sual. Further, sight-the transmitting sensory medium of and for visual representation-was commonly understood as the crucial vehicle supplying information to the brain, together with hearing (taste, touch, and smell by comparison were an­ cillary). Sight and representation, in other words, operate in tandem to produce knowledge, and knowledge, as everyone

18 THE NUDE

knows, is a requisite of power. But a difficulty remains: Repre­ sentation is dangerous; by its very nature it misleads to the ex­ tent that it never is what it represents; the essence of real reality remains outside our grasp, and all the while we may delude ourselves into thinking otherwise. Thus Plato's concern with representation derived in part from the perceived danger of believing that seeing is believing.

Deception and Erotic Desire

Raphaelle Peale's Venus Rising.from the Sea-A Deception (long known as After the Bath) (Figure 1. 1) promises to be a painting of a female nude, one obviously turned frontally toward the viewer, judging both from her arm and right foot. Indeed, so presumably frank is the nude that a cloth or curtain shields pre­ cisely what the presumed viewer most wants to see, her sexual parts, her nudity. Yet what startles the viewer is not the woman, who is barely visible, but the curtain hiding her, strikingly real, a technical triumph in its own right, but one that keeps out of view something much more desirable as a sight. All images

involve the transformation of the present. The irreducible and

untranslatable significance of images, then, is finally rooted in

the intersection and inevitable contradiction between the

world's always being present to us and its seldom being present

to us as we desire it to be. Desire far the absent constantly trans­

forms the present [emphasis added].32

The curtain feeds an appetite only so as n ot to satisfy it. It taunts, if only slightly, and not incidentally reminds the viewer­ having figured out that the image is a deception-of the privi­ leged gaze of the painter, who unlike us got to look at the

Introduction

1 . 1 Raphaelle Peale ( 1 774-1825), Venus Risingfrom the Sea-A Deception (a.k.a. After the Bath) (c. 1822), canvas, 74.3 x 6 1 . 3 cm. Kansas City, MO, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Purchase: Nelson Trust), inv. no. 34-147

19

woman he does not allow us to see. (In fact, X-rays show-no surprise-that Peale never painted any more of the body than what we see.)33 Indeed, Peale paints the curtain to look more real-more tangible-than the woman, who appears to be what she is-not real but painted . In other words , the painting at­ tempts to deceive us into seeing it as a non-painting (the cloth

20 THE NUDE

covering) incorporating a real painting that is almost entirely kept out of our sight ( obviously we could not otherwise be fooled, since the image is not life size, which would be necessary were we to take the painted woman to be as real as the curtain).34

John Haberle 's female-nude personification of Night (Fig­ ure 1.2) pulls back the curtain: We get to see-but what? The heavy velvet drape at the right is highly finished by the painter; he devoted enormous care to make it appear to be what it merely represents. The nude by contrast is disappointing, a poor competitor for our attention. She is merely a sketch, an unfulfilled promise. Again, pleasure resides in the frustrated desire produced by not being able to see what we had hoped for, ironically, when we actually get to see it. Our attention drifts toward the drape that normally hides the nude from view. Mere fabric becomes the subject of our marvel. W hat is left to imagine is this: If the painter can cause me to invest my pleasure in looking at velvet, what might he be capable of when he turns his attention to her "unfinished" body? With this, the trompe 1' oeil moves us to a still more complex terrain, that of gender. The purported sight is for men, and it is con­ trolled by a male artist. He alone determines if the viewer can see her at all, and what of her we "other men'' shall see. This involves a game of one -upmanship, where the playfulness common to trompe 1' oeil takes on an aggressive edge in the re­ lation between producer (artist) and consumer (viewer).35

The Perplexing Sight of Men

Consider three Old Testament texts:

And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not

ashamed.

Introduction

1 .2 John Haberle ( 1 856-1933), Night (c. 1 909), board, 200 . 7 X 132 cm. New Britain, CT, The New Britain Museum of American Art, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Victor Demmer, inv. no. 1966.66. Photo: E. Irving Blomstrann

And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that

they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made

themselves aprons.

And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him,

W here art thou?

21

22 THE NUDE

And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid,

because I was naked; and I hid myself [Genesis 2:25, and 3:7,

9-10, respectively] .

In the West, nakedness is culturally associated with the shame that extends historically into the first precepts of judeo­ Christian religion. Adam and Eve, having lost their innocence, covered themselves to hide their nakedness, about which they became self-conscious for the first time; and Noah's sons cov­ ered their father's nakedness, the result of drunken excess. In­ deed, even the ancient Romans were at least officially critical of the nakedness associated with Greek practice in sport, de­ spite the Romans' inherited taste for Greek statuary represent­ ing nudes. 36 For the most part, nakedness is culturally marked as demanding privacy. When made publicly visible, nakedness functions as a magnet of attraction by violating a taboo whose strength varies in time and by geography.

Whereas the state of nakedness requires a specific, culturally learned etiquette of looking, or better yet, an etiquette of not looking, the painted nude represents nakedness as a state specifi­ cally made far concentrated looking. Unlike, say, catching an acci­ dental glimpse of someone without clothes, when there may be no intention to display nakedness to others, the nude in art ex­ ists only to be seen for what it is: naked. It invites not the averted eye, but the stare. W hatever the apparent rationale for the painted body to be without clothes-for example, taking a bath-the visible fact of nudity itself takes precedence. Nudity as such, in other words, overwhelms the image. Of course, nu­ dity as an art subject is not nudity itself but nudity's sign. W hat­ ever subject is represented to provide justification, explanation, or logic for the state of nudity, the nude in art challenges the cultural proscription not of nudity itself but of voyeurism. To be effective as a painting of a nude, the image must make us want

Introduction 23

to look at the body in the manner represented. A principal means by which this is accomplished is for the image to focus its rhetorical energies so as to trigger the viewer's fantasies (the imaginary) linked to desire.

W hat we commonly take the state of nudity to mean centers on the making visible of the body's sexuality. Ultimate nudity involves genitals. Thus in the parlance of movies, references to " full frontal nudity" roughly equate with real nudity; seeing someone's backside on the screen falls a bit shy of authenticity. Sexuality functions as a principal locus for our sense of embod­ ied identity; it is us at the core of our sense of being. It is also the site of psychic and physical desire and erotic pleasure, as well as anxiety and a host of other emotions.

I would like to end this Introduction with the hint of a lead-in to the art story that follows in the succeeding chapters. My clos­ ing concerns Adam and Eve's Expulsion from Paradise ( 1425-28) (Figure 1.3) by the early-Renaissance Italian painter Masaccio. Sometime after the fresco was produced, sprigs of foliage were added to cover Adam's genitals, with a corresponding sprig added for good measure, and presumably visual balance, in the vi cinity of Eve's private parts, though she modestly already shades herself with her hand. That is, her added covering was entirely redundant. The real issue is Adam's privates. When the fresco was restored and cleaned between 1986 and 1988, the fo­ liage was removed, revealing the frankness of Adam's nudity that Masaccio originally painted-and for display on the walls of a chapel. The questions are, why do so ( Genesis, after all, calls for fig leaves), and why with such profound anatomical frankness?

The reason, briefly stated, is shame: specifically, ours. Adam's nudity is an embarrassment less to him and more to us as his putative sons and daughters. To be sure, the sorrow and misery that Eve expresses in her face and slightly slumped body is man­ ifested as well by the self-consciousness she displays regarding

24 THE NUDE

1.3 Masaccio (1401-28), Expulsion from Par­ adise ( 1 425-28), fresco detail, 208 x 88 cm. Florence, B rancacci Chapel, Santa Maria del Carmine. Photo: B ridgeman-Giraudon/ Art Resource, New York

Introduction 25

her nakedness. But it is Adam's situation that is the more dra­ matic and pitiful. Deeply embarrassed and sorrowful, he hides his face; but we quickly note that the gesture seems to hide the wrong thing in that his genitals, unlike his face, are placed so profoundly on open display.

Only after eating of the forbidden fruit does Adam become aware that he is naked. Only after sinning, having given in to one form of desire, does another form of evil, the sin of the flesh, make itself evident. God calls out to him, and he hides, he says, because he was naked. And as the Old Testament makes clear, he is naked only insofar as naked means the exposure of genitals. Despite the Genesis account, Adam's horror at his ex­ pulsion from Paradise fails to transform the shame of being naked into the visible sign of his sin.

The viewer, whether in Masaccio's time or ours, cannot easily miss the point that the painter so effectively stresses: Adam's genitals are less his shame than ours, the point driven home by the fact that there is little else in the larger fresco of the Expul­ sion to detract from this singular visual detail.37 Ironically, the subsequent painting-on of modesty foliage announces precisely as much, though lamentably only at the cost of diminishing Masaccio's powerful insight. Saint Augustine, writing in the fourth century, locates Adam and Eve's weakness in their dis­ obedient flesh, which he equates with their disobedience to God. Body fights spirit in the wake of original sin, and the body that fights spirit is driven by its wrongful desires. For Au­ gustine, our sexual organs " have become as it were the private property of lust ";38 they are, simply stated, the body's shameful parts. The penis, the one markedly visible genital organ, serves as the metaphor of the human capacity for evil, the price paid for the Fall. David Freedberg aptly lays this shame at art's doorstep:

26 THE NUDE

The provision of fig leaves . . . registers a fear of the conse­

quences that the artistic and ideal work may somehow not be

so ideal after all; it reveals to the gaze that which, were it real,

would be the most realistic proof of its sexuality. Herein lies

the true subversiveness of the beautiful: it traps the enlivening

and therefore dangerous gaze. 39

The nude in Western painting is a subject with a very long pedigree, existing in nearly countless examples drawn from a breathtaking variety of subjects. To what needs do these im­ ages respond? What might they tell us about ourselves, our so­ cieties, our cultures? W hat sorts of cultural work might they accomplish? These and related questions will be addressed in the chapters that follow.