"The Nude: From Kenneth Clarke to Porn and Back"

The real impetus for this essay came from a very young lady who visited my studio recently.   She had been to my studio many times before but for some reason, as though for the first time, she suddenly made note of the fact that almost all of the many paintings that surrounded her featured images of people who are not wearing any clothes.   And so with directness and without judgement in a way that seems characteristic of people under the age of 12 or so, she asked why I always paint people with no clothes on.  I have been asked that question many times before by folks young and old so I was hardly caught by surprise and with nothing to say.  I wanted to tell her that I wished to be part of a long noble tradition of painters and sculptors who used "the nude" to express that which was most precious and most noble about what it was to be human.  And that like artists for thousands of years from cave man to modern man we have repeatedly rediscovered that our bodies can be the most powerful way to discover and connect with realms that will become all the more real to us once we have left our bodies.   But instead, I answered her with the what is also very true for me which is that I find the naked body to be so much more beautiful than clothed.

It isn't  that I thought she was incapable of understanding what I would have said.  Frankly, its that I wasn't sure that I understood what I was about to say.  What does it mean to say that the nude is the vehicle for expressing what is most noble and precious in the human condition?  And what strange irony could possibly be at play when I say that our bodies can help us understand what the dynamics of being disembodied might be like.  These are powerful and broad statements that suggest much but actually say very little.  Even after all these years I wasn't really sure what they meant.

And so, I returned to contemplate the art itself in hopes of gaining some clarity.   First, there are the cave paintings, which I have never seen first hand, but which even in film and reproduction are so capable of lifting one's awareness so far and above the everyday of so much of what fills my mind now.  Then there are the giant basalt gaurdians and godlike creations of the ancient Egyptians, the heroic nudes of the classical Greeks, the complex spirit embued figures of the Rennaissance, the totemic figures of Africa, the psychologically tortured nudes of the 19th century and finally the creative explosion of so many nudes in the 20th century.  

All of these arts as groups and many particular individual works are all capable even in some cases after thousands of years, of moving my mind from the mundane to the sublime and universal.  I think more broadly and more deeply after having an opportunity to be in their presence.  In short...they have the power to transform.  

It isn't that images of clothed human beings don't also have the power to transform.  Certainly they do.  Still, something is at work in the creations that feature the nude, that is not at play in all of the other works.  

I was fortunate to stumble on a book years ago by an art historian named Kenneth Clarke.  His seminal work is called The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form.   This essay is hardly the place to correctly summerize this fantastic book, but for the purpose of developing my thoughts here I will say that one of the basic premisis of the book is that he distinguished "the nude" from "naked."  He does that by outlining 6 basic ways in which Euoropean artists have used the unclothed human being to express six basic precepts of being fully alive.  They are "Apollo"  "Venus 1" and "Venus" 2  "Energy"  "Pathos" and "Ecstasy".  He also lumps some interesting ideas into his final chapters which he calls "the alternative convention" and "the nude as an end in itself."  

I don't agree with all of Mr. Clarke's observations but what made a lasting impact on me was an understanding that the nude could very effectively be used to communicate ideas and in this case ideals...ideal ways of being.  

For example, Clarke explains how the Greeks came to think of themselves as the embodiment of the gods.  And that man was made in the image of the gods.  Moreover, having discovered mathematics including pythagorean geometry they were well aware of proportional harmonies.  They applied these ideas to the shaping of human figures both rigourously and intuititely.  What they discovered was that the application of these mathmatical ideas to their artistic expressions of what they felt was the most godlike image on earth...the human figure...they could indeed create human forms that were more pleasing in their proportional harmonies than many individual living human beings.  In fact, they felt that the works of their stone carvers where the highest expression of these ideas since it combined the application of the mathmatical principals in a way that could be enjoyed.  The greeks considered aethetic pleasure to also be a god like activity...even more so than pure thinking.   Moreover, they believed that if the proportions were right that the god would actually inhabit the statue.   In fact, it is perhaps fair to say that they believed the god was the proportions and that the stone held those proportions in a way that made it possible for mortals to perceive and experience.  Put another way....the statue of Venus that was place in the garden was not placed there merely because it looked nice, but because if it was a proper venus (meaning the proportions were right) Venus herself would be in there, in the stature and by extension....in the garden.

Having the "proportions" right were not the pervue of a select elite group of efite intellectuals and connesuers.   No, from what I know of Greek history...I believe it was more akin to the enjoyment men and women the world over experience today when they see a well proportioned man or woman walk by.  We don't need to understand pythagorean geomitry to feel the precense of the goddess venus when a gorgeous woman walks into the room.  However, the degree to which that woman understands the art of embodiement, the more powerful the precense of the goddess.  There is humility, sublimation and enhancement in all the right ways.  That is her art.  And if done well it can be very powerful.  With the art of fashion and make up and movement she can create the "right" proportions that will allow the goddess to show up.   The same is true for a man.  And the degree to which there is no humility, sublimation and enhancement is the degree to which the effect is diminished.  Many of us have seen a woman from 30 yards who invokes the goddess, but once she opens her mouth to speak all is lost.  Ego, arrogance and attitude in the wrong degree scatter the goddess like smoke in the wind.  

These same ideas, by the way, gave birth to the idea that each individual had the potential to embide the various gods.  Each person was essentially made in the image of the gods and it was therefore a short step for them to conclude that each man should have a voice in the governance of the tribe and eventually the city which was at that time the State.   Those ideas are called Democracy and form an important cornerstone of what makes modern life possible.  In short, the placement of the nude idealized human form at the center of their aesthetic pleasure and spiritual invocation gave birth to and supported the idea of democracy even in the face of powerful "strong man" traditions that are clearly at odds with these ideas.  

I might go a step further too, and suggest that these same ideas formed the most powerful symbol of christianity and hence provided a glue for that faith which dominated European life for the next thousand years.  The most common and powerful symbol of Christianity for all practicle purposes is a nude male figure.  The geometry is adjusted to express the anguish and strife that was so much a part of the Christian experience being that they were pursecuted for so long by the Romans.  Co-incidentally, the early Christian artists found geometric adjustments that at one and the same time expressed a profound longing (for God presumably) and great physical pain...the attenuated forms that we call Gothic.  And just like the Greeks, they applied these same geometries to their architecture with fantastic results....the great cathedrals.  Even the most hardened modern atheist is deeply moved by the proportions of these incredible structures.  Imagine how powerful they must have been for a the farmer peasant whose own home was little more than a shack and who already had a deep faith in what the builders and designers of those grand structures believed. 

However, what happened over this long stretch of time that is pegoratively reffered to as the Dark Ages, was that "strong man" ways crept into the system and it gradually created a breeding ground  for a democratic revival.  This was fueled by the invention of the printing press which made it possible for every man to read the bible for himself making the priesthood less necessary.  And a rising merchant class which began to accrue wealth from the increased trading that was developing everywhere.  Increased wealth among non nobles and clergy meant that these men had money and wanted to play with it.  They challenged the laws of usery which were church laws which basically made it a sin to loan money and charge interest on it.  They started getting creative with how to work around these laws and so a class of smart men emerged which they called "bankers."  These wealthy non clergy non noble men needed philosophical support for their goals and so they turned to the ancient greeks and their ideas of democracy and the individual as the embodiment of spirit, integral and whole even as it may be a member of a church body or a citizen of a State.  The kernal was the individual.   

As these ideas developed in the 14th century they increasingly supported artists who were able to begin making art that repossitioned the well proportioned nude at the center of art.  Some of these developments were incremental and hardly noticed and some were abrupt, cataclysmic and even shocking.  Michelangelo's David was commissioned by a group of bankers eager to both please the Church (by picking a famous Biblical hero) and announce their new ambitions and they achieved their aims in ways they could not have immagined as millions of people line up each year even 500 years later to be awestruck by their creation.   They were inventing modern banking and accounting as we know it today. They were smashing medival notions of usery and creating what would eventually become the modern corporation.   In short...David eventually became Goliath.....but that is an essay for another day.   At the time of Michelangelo's creation, Goliath was the corporate nature that the Catholic Church had become....at least in the eyes of those that wanted to accrue power through money (not land and birth right).  They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.  The stone David represented the new man, properly proportioned according to principles of restraint and abundance.  And yet now filled with a dynamic restless spirit not seen anywhere in the ancient Greeks.  This nude was not only made in the image of a god (in this case Apollo) but animated with a restless creative soul which typified the men we have admired most since that time.  

Meanwhile not far away by modern standards, tribal groups in Africa were doing what they had done for centuries uncounted.....making masks and dancing to invoke spirit.  Using ritual of one kind or another to mark and raise consciouness around important transitions in the individual and tribal life.  In fact they employed these "arts" to cultivate a sense of tribe and strengthen its bonds. They also did them as offferings to their gods to give thanks or ask for help or mercy.  They were not nude in the strict sense but they were very much of the body.  Often the activities involved body painting or tatoing and scarification.  They almost always involved masks which were intended to help the dancer become possessed if only temporarily by the god.  

As Europe developed the kind of wealth that could be used for large projects they were able to explore the world further and further from home and so eventually they would collide with these tribal traditions in Africa, the Americas and even in South Asian.  As its own spiritual traditions became further abstracted and increasingly obsessed with preserving its own power, these tribal approaches would appear increasingly powerful and "real" to a growing number of Europeans eventually becoming a powerful source of inspiration to artists and thinkers of all kinds trying to inject something authentic and visceral back into traditions that had become stale and over intellecutallized.  

Of course I am glossing over centuries of incredible individual artists and countless movements and countermovements.   This is just a blog essay!   

I am attempting, though, to select and highlight historical trends and "moments" that develop an idea which has relevance to understanding our own times and even, with a little luck, to help provide some direction about how to focus our energies in going forward.   

As the industrial revolution really kicked in by the mid 1800's the ideas of banking, accounting, the importance of the individual and so on had now become absolutely necessary for these developments to exist and grow.  In the United States, then only 100 years old, a civil war broke out over what was on the surface a war over slavery.  It was, to my mind, more about a war over the future, represented by the North vs. the past represented by the South.  The Industrial revolution would make slavery not only obsolete but more importantly....inferior in terms of production to wage earning.  It is cheaper and more productive to simply pay people to work at machines (provided for by accumulated capital) than it is to house and care for people (and keep them uneducated) under the system of slavery.  And of course the North won because it is true...it is more powerful and cheaper to do things this way.   And eventually the rest of the world figured that out and one by one gave up its antiquated ways of Kingdoms and of slavery.  It took awhile.  Some countries found graceful ways of transitioning....like England, which still has its monarchy but which gets the business of running the country done by an elected leadership that is not chosen by birthright but rather by democratic vote.  And its banking is done by modern capitalist systems....invented mostly in Italy during the Rennaisance.    

Around this time there was a unique hic-up in European Art.  It is the art of Rodin.   As you may know Rodin was a French artist living and working in Paris at the time of the Civil War in the United States.  What makes him a "hic-up" in my mind is how "out of no where" his art comes.  During his youth the sculpture of Europe in general and no less in Paris had become very accademic.  The subjects and the manner in which it was judged and in which commissions were paid was based on a system of rules and prescripts so thorough and so rigourously controlled that nearly all the  life had been squeezed out it.  All that could be said positively from our persepective of sitting in the early 21st century where "craft" is now just above a dirty word, is that there was indeed a highly developed  tradition of craft.  Oh, how wonderfully carved and how perfect each piece was at that time.  So perfect was each piece appeared to be carved from pure cane sugar.  And in keeping with another growing trend of the supression of sexual energy and desire....the pieces became sex less and even nearly genderless.  The more effite the males...the better.  The more masculine the females...the better.  Why this was so.....hmmm....I will pick that up later.

Then came the powerfully formed and sexually charged figures of August Rodin.  At first his work was shocking to his contemporaries.  But quickly, those that had felt that something drastic needed to happen to culture in order to revive it saw in Rodin's work a way past the stultifying traditions.  Things like this were happening in painting, the performing arts and other aspects of culture too.  The arts had in fact become a place to work out the terms of a new culture in ways not really unlike they had for the Greeks two thousand years earlier. The terms were different.  The whole thing messier...maybe.  I am not sure they were not messy back in the days of the ancient Greeks.  Things have a way of looking cleaner from a distance.

In anycase, Rodin's work stands almost alone in reviving the robust, powerfully three dimensional forms of the ancient Greeks and Rennaisance sculptors.  What is different, though, has become more interesting to me lately.

First, Rodin's sculptures were never thought of by his contemporaries or himself to be the embodiment of the gods themselves.  He didn't bother with pythagorian geometry or any other mathmetial system to determine the finished shape of his works.  Instead he deliberately and unabashedly embued them with a sexual charge that he declared in so many ways was the seed and source of his creative impetus.  It was as though he was the god...the creater....not the work of art itself.   And from that time on...artists.....more than ever, saw themselves as creative gods.   

That impulse came from a need to break out of what had become an overwhelmingly oppresive weight of rules and beliefs that were meant to stultify the individual even while the engins of industry and thought were being built increasingly on the neccessary free flow of money as wealth and the individual as a free agent.  Free to spend, free to move about in the world, free to feel the spark of god in his or her soul without a priest as intercessor.   And that same set of needs and forces made tribal art of the world especially compelling at that time. 

It is interesting to me that even in the relatively fast pace times of 20th century life it would take another almost 100 years for a true sexual revolution.  And with the invention of the birth control pill as well as all the forces I have already described.....it finally came.  And it rocked the world.

I am arguing here that the explosion of the sexual revolution created a riotus if not reckless explosion of creativity that was nearly formless and "pointless" in the ways that an explosion is.  By "pointless" I mean literally without a point or purpose.  If there was a purpose at all it was that of celebration and that is not a trivial thing.  And maybe that is where it had to start.


It has been 40 to 50 years since the sexual revolution and what is interesting to me, especially in light of all things that we just addressed is that despite that there are so many paintings and sculptures and photographs of the nude since that time, they don't seem to add up to anything even remotely impactful or relavant to our culture the way nude art of the past was to its contemporaries.  And I can hardly imagine that much of it will survive to speak even in muddled and confused tones to future generations.  There is no cannon of how nudes should look and no agenda that they appear to be hinged to.  Their strength, if there is strength,  is their weakness....their freedom from being hinged to some higher purpose.  They are simply celebrations.  A kind of collective "whoo hoo."    That they do not serve any agenda, not even a lofty and benevolent one and that...I suppose, is precisely why they don't seem to add up to anything.

But why?  And perhaps more importantly.....who cares?

I will give you my opinions about both of those questions in the second half of this essay in a few days.