The words reclining nude conjure up a vision of voluptuous femininity, a bed with crumpled sheets, and a painter, mind focused, brush alert, making his mark on the canvas. All very sexual, really. Which has always been the problem.
Fine art, as we know, is respectable. Sex is not. The reclining nude is where they meet. One of the most fascinating of fine art’s spectator sports is watching the rude removed from the nude.
A mark of the educated art lover is the ability to assess a reclining nude in artistic terms alone. From this perspective, the nude is solely a matter of subtle flesh tones, sophisticated composition, learned references to other reclining nudes, a flurry of knowing points about the goddess she is meant to represent.
Kenneth Clark, in his book The Nude, published in 1956, puts it with perfection: “To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes and the word implies some of the embarrassment which most of us feel in that condition. The word nude, on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenceless body, but of a balanced, prosperous and confident body: the body re-formed.”
The first step in ridding the nude of Clark’s “uncomfortable overtone” is to turn it into an artistic genre, alongside landscape, portraiture and still life. As a genre, it can be judged by comparison with others of its type. In that way, a knowledgable connoisseurship based on art and nothing else can be brought into play.
As a genre, it has a history: the figure that launched a thousand reclining nudes was Sleeping Venus, first seen on a canvas measuring 5ft by 3ft in the home of the Venetian intellectual Gerolamo Marcello, painted, perhaps for his marriage in 1507, by Giorgione. Its own set of conventions: historically, reclining nudes are presented in the guise of a classical goddess. Its own poses: she tends to lie with her eyes turned from the spectator, or even closed, offering no obstacle to his free-ranging glances over her body. Its own compositional devices: an impish figure may hold aside the drapery to frame the body and create a display for the viewer’s delectation. Its own set of similes: she often stretches out in a landscape whose hummocks and valleys metaphorically echo her curves. Photography carried this to extremes in the 20th century by depicting female bodies as smooth-surfaced boulders in a landscape. And its own taboos: pubic hair stays resolutely out of the picture because it signified the woman’s own demanding sexuality, which could be felt as threatening.Advertisement
Armed with this knowledge, specialist art lovers can distinguish themselves from inferior gallery-goers who judge the reclining nude on what lies before their eyes. In her novel Villette, published in 1853, Charlotte Brontë expressed the English common sense of her heroine Lucy Snowe through her reactions to a painting of Cleopatra in a Brussels gallery: “She appeared in hearty health, strong enough to do the work of two plain cooks; she could not plead a weak spine; she ought to have been standing, or at least sitting bolt upright. She had no business to lounge away the noon on a sofa. She ought likewise to have worn decent garments; a gown covering her properly, which was not the case: out of abundance of material – seven-and-twenty yards, I should say, of drapery – she managed to make inefficient raiment.”
This governessy response may tell the reader about Snowe’s superiority to the foreign response to art, but no art lover, not even the Victorians, would claim it as sophisticated. The Victorian line was expressed by John Ruskin’s response to 16th-century Venetian nudes in volume five of Modern Painters, published in 1860: “They painted it fearlessly, with all right and natural qualities; never, however, representing it as exercising any overpowering attractive influence on man; but only on the Faun or Satyr… in the greatest studies of the female body by the Venetians, the form becomes as pure as that of a Greek statue.”
The blinkered vision necessary for this relentlessly high-minded way of seeing means that sometimes the obvious is left unsaid. As a student, I endured a leg-aching half-hour in front of Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery, discussing the angle of the mirror (was it accurately placed to reflect her face?), the clue that told us she was Venus (the cupid holding the mirror), the 17th-century Spanish colour scheme of pinks and greys, the dashing brushwork and the subtle tones of sheets and flesh.
We were told that the woman was probably the mistress of the painting’s first owner, the Marques del Carpio, uplifted to the status of goddess in order to protect him from the Spanish Inquisition’s disapproval of nude images. The complete art appreciation kit, in other words. But no reference to the sinuous curve of her back, or to the way her bottom and not her breasts was the focus of the work, or to the sheer perfection of the shape before us. Not even an acknowledgment that the painter, an employee of a powerful man, had perhaps distorted the body in the direction of perfection in order to produce an image of extreme seductiveness.
Though serious art appreciation has always tried to rise above the reclining nude’s link with the base reality of the bedroom, some works refuse to keep quiet about it. They do this in a fascinating variety of ways. When Manet exhibited Olympia in 1863 to a hiss of indrawn breath, he disrupted the convention that the reclining nude should in no way cause embarrassment to the viewer. Despite brilliant brushwork and the painting’s courteous nod to Titian, Manet caused the art scandal of the Paris season by posing his model as a modern woman who stared boldly back at the spectator, discomforting madame and challenging monsieur’s freedom to stroke her body with his eyes.Advertisement
Some works are a little too insistent on the erotic. Bonnard’s paintings of his sprawling wife give the impression that he has only just left the bed he is depicting on his canvas. Sometimes, a male figure from mythology leers knowingly out of the frame and destroys the viewer’s illusion of purely aesthetic appreciation by introducing an element of voyeurism. And while the reclining Venus with hand cupped over her womanhood has an impeccable pedigree in the standing Venus sculptures of the classical world, modesty is not always the first thing to spring to the spectator’s mind when this pose is depicted. It has been suggested that the bouquet displayed by Olympia’s servant echoes the sex she hides with her hand.
The very passivity of the reclining nude can be arousing. The painters’ skill in replicating the gleaming, springy and velvety surfaces of hair, hats, jewels and tumbled fabrics adds to the nude’s seductiveness, making her one more desirable object in a cornucopia of luxury objects. Even the comparison to undulating landscape, which suggests that she is as uncomplicated and silent as the grassy glade in which she lies, underlines the centuries-old belief that women were lower down the evolutionary scale than men, creatures of feeling and instinct, but not of intellect. Animal-like, in other words, a relaxed sexual partner.
For several centuries, artists’ treatment of the reclining nude was constrained by a mesh of generally accepted rules and conventions. But the relentless succession of artistic styles in the 20th century, combined with Freud’s ideas about sexuality and the unconscious, meant that though the subject remained, the treatment did not.
After 1900, a reclining nude could be fractured by cubism, dissolved by abstraction or woven into a web of colour and pattern. Freed by Freud, painters were able to depict the previously unsayable: nipples stare at the viewer like eyes, pubic hair marks the body as proudly as hair on the head. Picasso splashed his feelings about his models all over the canvas, painting nudes that are spiky with his hostility or swell with his love. Today, Lucian Freud’s reclining nudes, painted under harsh lights, are closer to Kenneth Clark’s “naked” than descendants of Giorgione’s nude Venus lying passively in a landscape.
Does the reclining nude look any different when the painter is a woman? It may have been unconscious, but when the first generation of women to enter art school in the late 19th century turned to this subject, they often depicted her less passively than did their artist brothers. In 1907, the German Paula Modersohn-Becker painted Mother And Child Lying Nude, the two curled in towards each other, the mother’s hand protectively around her baby’s head. In France between the wars, Suzanne Valadon, a former model of Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas, produced nudes that owed nothing to the example of these masters. Hers are absorbed in an activity: one lies on her back and contemplates the hat she holds up, another watches an older woman read her fortune in the cards.Advertisement
Early in her career in the 1930s, the American Alice Neel decided that she could get to the soul of her subjects by painting them without their clothes. Pregnant Julie And Agis of 1967 shows not only a pregnant reclining nude, but one with a partner who claims her as his own with his arm over her shoulder. In 1971, Neel lay John Perreault on a bed with one knee bent up, one arm propping up his head and his genitals prominent. A reclining nude, for sure, but also a portrait whose alertness – and maleness – undercuts the reclining nude convention.
Since defencelessness is its strongest characteristic, it is rare to find a male reclining nude. In art, the admired nude male is upright and active. The horizontal male is a male at his weakest. In classical art, the male reclining nude appears in the form of a vanquished warrior and in western art as the crucified Christ held in his mother’s arms or Samson shorn of his strength by the wily Delilah.
So rarely do men inhabit the range of female poses and gestures that the exceptions strike us with great force. In late 18th-century France, a feminised man appears in certain paintings, lying around like a woman. In her book Male Trouble: A Crisis In Representation, Abigail Solomon-Godeau explains the phenomenon as a signal of a new sensibility, what she calls “a homosocial ethos”, that came to the fore during the revolutionary years. For three decades from 1790, French art displayed “a range of masculinities”, including some startling images of men reclining in a female manner, down to languid arms and fabric artfully manipulated to display the nude male body beautiful. The portrait of John Perreault shares nothing of this languor.
Around 1970, when feminism and art collided, Sylvia Sleigh, a British-born artist working in New York, set out to reverse the traditional male artist-female model set-up by painting a series of works featuring naked men. In her Self-Portrait of 1978, she shows herself painting Paul Rosano. So sinuous are his boneless curves, so flowing his dark 1970s locks, that he has all the soft glamour of the traditional female reclining nude.
And yet there is a difference. By including a portrait of his face in a mirror, she individualises him and manages to avoid the airbrushed quality of the conventional treatment of the subject. In an earlier painting, The Turkish Bath, 1973, based on Ingres’s painting of the same name, Sleigh meticulously picks out the coils and curls and patterns of her models’ body hair, a feature that appealed to her artist’s eye. Sleigh’s men are not versions of the anonymous female fantasies of Ingres’s imagination, but portraits of models and men in her circle, depicted in generous detail. In fact, the reclining nude of the group, her husband Lawrence Alloway, is older than the rest, and bald.
The variety of artistic styles of the past 100 years, the permission to depict the previously unsayable, the difference made by women artists, have served to frame the classic passive reclining nude as a moment in western art history between the early 16th and mid-19th centuries. Although the walls of the Royal Academy summer exhibition prove she is still alive, these days she has been joined by a number of frisky younger sisters, as well as a few brothers, who have much more to say for themselves.