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Feb. 15th, 2012 11:52 pmI'm reading a piece about the female nude in art by Kenneth Clark, and wow. There's just cultural elitism all over the place.
It's part of what I'm reading for homework for my art class tomorrow; two essays expressing differing opinions on the place of the female nude in European art. The professor scanned it in for us and has it up in the online resources for the class.
But at one point he says "The idea of offering the body for its own sake, as a serious subject of contemplation, simply did not occur to the Chinese or Japanese mind". As if the fact that these wholly different cultures don't have the same classical Greek and Roman aesthetic as a basis for so much of their art means that they're lacking the whole concept of the human body as a subject for investigation. Yeah. Pull the other one.
The counterposition put forth by John Berger is that while a naked person is free to be him or herself, a "nude" is a body that has become an object. "To be naked is to be without disguise. To be on display is to have the surface of one's own body...turned into a disguise which...can never be discarded."
The last question in my homework was: Which analysis (Clark or Berger) do you find most convincing and why?
Here's my response (which may not seem as relevant as it would if you had read what I'm responding to, obviously. But Clark basically says that a nude is this sort of idealized conception of perfect beauty and that while it is tied to eroticism, it also a tradition of attempts to find perfection in the human form that has taken place since classical Greece and Rome.
Berger's response points out that women are being presented as objects rather than people or even as abstracted physical perfection. That artists will paint a nude with a mirror and title it Vanity to shame this woman who is absorbed in her own reflection while the [almost exclusively male] patrons-of-arts and viewers look on and enjoy the view).
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I’m solidly in the Berger camp on this one. Even laying aside Clark’s culturally elitist argument that non-Western cultures have somehow been unable to conceive of the human body as subject for serious speculation, I think Berger’s analysis is a much more realistic one.
I agree that the nude can be looked at as this sort of idealized representation of humanity that has both eroticism and idealized strength and beauty that have strength on their own. That can be done with either a male or a female form. But I don’t think that’s the primary focus of what was going on in the European art they’re talking about. The women aren’t like the male nudes, who are powerful and confident figures like Michelangelo’s David, confident in the perfection of their physical form. They tend to be either like Botticelli’s Venus, who is shy and perhaps ashamed of her nudity, or like the painting of Charles’ mistress that Berger mentioned, who is shown off like goods on display.
I think there’s a spectrum here between paintings like those two, but neither of them show a woman with the kind of presence that is always conferred on their nude male contemporaries.
Well, it seems that I'm starting to be a little less hesitant to express strong opinion based on a self-perception of lack of knowledge. At least in cases where I feel fairly justified in my response.
And now I need to pack for my trip to Chicago tomorrow and get to bed. G'night! Wish me luck on my exam tomorrow!
It's part of what I'm reading for homework for my art class tomorrow; two essays expressing differing opinions on the place of the female nude in European art. The professor scanned it in for us and has it up in the online resources for the class.
But at one point he says "The idea of offering the body for its own sake, as a serious subject of contemplation, simply did not occur to the Chinese or Japanese mind". As if the fact that these wholly different cultures don't have the same classical Greek and Roman aesthetic as a basis for so much of their art means that they're lacking the whole concept of the human body as a subject for investigation. Yeah. Pull the other one.
The counterposition put forth by John Berger is that while a naked person is free to be him or herself, a "nude" is a body that has become an object. "To be naked is to be without disguise. To be on display is to have the surface of one's own body...turned into a disguise which...can never be discarded."
The last question in my homework was: Which analysis (Clark or Berger) do you find most convincing and why?
Here's my response (which may not seem as relevant as it would if you had read what I'm responding to, obviously. But Clark basically says that a nude is this sort of idealized conception of perfect beauty and that while it is tied to eroticism, it also a tradition of attempts to find perfection in the human form that has taken place since classical Greece and Rome.
Berger's response points out that women are being presented as objects rather than people or even as abstracted physical perfection. That artists will paint a nude with a mirror and title it Vanity to shame this woman who is absorbed in her own reflection while the [almost exclusively male] patrons-of-arts and viewers look on and enjoy the view).
==
I’m solidly in the Berger camp on this one. Even laying aside Clark’s culturally elitist argument that non-Western cultures have somehow been unable to conceive of the human body as subject for serious speculation, I think Berger’s analysis is a much more realistic one.
I agree that the nude can be looked at as this sort of idealized representation of humanity that has both eroticism and idealized strength and beauty that have strength on their own. That can be done with either a male or a female form. But I don’t think that’s the primary focus of what was going on in the European art they’re talking about. The women aren’t like the male nudes, who are powerful and confident figures like Michelangelo’s David, confident in the perfection of their physical form. They tend to be either like Botticelli’s Venus, who is shy and perhaps ashamed of her nudity, or like the painting of Charles’ mistress that Berger mentioned, who is shown off like goods on display.
I think there’s a spectrum here between paintings like those two, but neither of them show a woman with the kind of presence that is always conferred on their nude male contemporaries.
Well, it seems that I'm starting to be a little less hesitant to express strong opinion based on a self-perception of lack of knowledge. At least in cases where I feel fairly justified in my response.
And now I need to pack for my trip to Chicago tomorrow and get to bed. G'night! Wish me luck on my exam tomorrow!
