Curatorial Reflection | The Art of the Nude (John Wilson, July 2008)
- Art
can never exist without naked beauty displayed" -
William Blake
- "The body always expresses the spirit whose envelope it is. And for him who can see, the nude offers the richest meaning" - Auguste Rodin
- "I was trained as a painter. I'm very familiar with the nude body, masculine and feminine. I do, I suppose have a soapbox position, and I want to be certain that the human body is in the center of the frame." - Peter Greenaway, Film- maker
The Art of the Nude | Artists Explore the Human Form
The genre of
the nude is perhaps surprisingly well represented in the Newport Museum
and Art Gallery collections, from academic studies to modernist
departures, and provides a useful point of departure for exploring the
history of art and art education.
Curatorial concept
The life class was the mainstay of British art education. The importance of the life room at Newport college of art - from the 1920s to the 1970s - is highlighted in interviews with prominent Newport Art College staff Stanley Lewis and Anthony Stevens ( - interview transcripts are available in Art and Society in Newport: Documenting the Twentieth Century, Newport Museum and Art Gallery, 2000; see The Art and Society in Newport Series). Here are some of the Initial thoughts for this exhibition:
- We may note that Stanley Lewis received an extra twelve-month's scholarship at the Royal College of Art in the 1930s when his diploma work, a life study, was adjudicated by Augustus John. Then in 1937 Stanley stole the show when his full length figure study The Welsh Molecatcher (and study here) was awarded painting of the year at the Royal Academy Summer Show. - We may also note that Stanley Lewis acknowledged the mentorship of the Head of Pedagogy at the Royal College of Art, Frederick Charles Richards, likewise a product of the Newport College of Art.
- The controversy over the purchase and public display of Sir Gerald Festus Kelly's Nude Study in the 1940s & 50s focussed press and public attention on the Art Gallery Committee's collecting policy, and proved a cause celebre that brought 20,000 people streaming into the Newport Museum and Art Gallery.
- Thomas
Rathmell's The Picture Wall
(1977) is a freshly painted and informal study of the nude in the artist's studio; and represents the artist's reflection on the practice of life-painting ( - with a reference to the history of art in the series of figure studies hung on the wall, including a seated male nude to complement the main seated female figure). - Through
the 1960's & '70's Newport College of Art enjoyed an
enviable British reputation, wth Thomas Rathmell at the helm as Head of
the School of Painting and an academic rigour centred in the
life-room that fed a stream of students to the Royal College of Art. - A healthy plurality of practices was achieved under
the Headship of Anthony Stevens during the art college boom years of
the 1970's; and less
well known is the way in which disciplinary departures at Newport
College of Art such as sculpture, photography and performance owed
much to this academic grounding, exploring the materiality of the
body in space. - Thereafter
the life room fell out of fashion; although there are recent signs of
its revival in British art colleges.
Hence Sir Gerald Festus Kelly's D.D. V (a) (Nude Study) and Thomas Rathmell's The Picture Wall - both "artist's art" in their informal studies of the nude in the artist's studio - have provided a useful point of departure for our exploration of the genre of the nude and the history of art and art education in the permanent collections of the Newport Museum and Art Gallery.
(1) Framing the nude (2) Collecting the nude
(3) Viewing the nude (4) Framing the nude as art
(1) Framing the nude | Academy, avant garde, Internet
THE ART OF THE NUDE is the third project in the Explorations Series, which provides a frame to explore the diverse range of artists, genre and art historical periods represented in the Newport Museum and Art Gallery collections.
THE ART OF THE NUDE frames the artistic genre of the nude and provides a fascinating thread through the history of art.
The study of the nude formed the basis of the post-Renaissance academic tradition of "Western Art", whilst the departures of modernism and the avant garde likewise saw a peristence of the nude as a vital genre for the artist's exploration.
Whither the nude in today's world of CGI and the Internet?
- View a video clip on You Tube of the exhibition selection process for THE ART OF THE NUDE
- View slideshow
on flickr
(2) Collecting the Nude | Newport Museum and Art Gallery
A
review of the Newport Museum and Art Gallery collections highlights the
nude as a lively artistic genre which provides a fascinating
thread through the history of art.
Our
selection brings together a diverse body of works with a lively
conception of the subject of the nude. The large-scale exhibition of 85 works - 28 drawings, 12 prints, 39 paintings and
6 works of sculpture - includes the following prominent artists: Auguste Rodin, Henry
Gaudier-Brzeska, William Blake, Sir Edward J. Poynter, Sir Gerald
Kelly, Sir William Russell Flint R.A, Peter Blake, Allen Jones, Sir
William Goscombe John R.A. , Ceri Richards, Merlyn Evans, Thomas
Rathmell, Harry Holland, Angelica Kauffman R.A, Dame Laura
Knight R.A. , Elinor Bellingham-Smith and Gerda Roper.
We may reflect upon:
the central place of the nude in the history of art
the nude as a highly productive genre for the artist's exploration
the sometimes controversial role of the nude as a mediator of aesthetic taste and cultural mores across the generations
(3) Viewing
the Nude | Revisions in Art History and Art Education
The nude occupies a central place in the history of art and has persisted as an absorbing subject for the artist from the Classical to the Renaissance, Modernist and Post-Modernist art worlds.
In
recent decades, revisionist art historical studies have unmasked and
re-appraised the nude as a genre of art - critically, raising issues
of visual representation, gender and social power; and positively,
re-connecting with a history of artistic innovation through this
abiding genre of the art school and the artist's studio.
In recent years the nude and the life-class have experienced something of a revival in British art colleges, notwithstanding the post-60's “Crisis of British Art”, radical art politics and a rejection of the life-room. | Read more: Links - the nude in art history and culture
(4) Framing the nude as art | Sir Gerald Festus Kelly's Nude Study
THE NUDE | Case study: Sir Gerald Festus Kelly, D.D. V (a) (Nude Study) (1924)
We may note the sometimes controversial role of the nude as a mediator of aesthetic taste and cultural mores across the generations. The nude has been a constantly negotiated category of "art" and "taste" occasioning its periodic cause celebre of controversy, with a tendency for yesteryear's provocation to pass into silence as today's passée.
Sir Gerald Festus Kelly's Nude Study: Newport's cause celebre
The study of the nude provided the mainstay
of the academic practice of art, a central
preoccupation of art school training and the
professional artist's studio. Whilst the
Academy regulated the nude as a category of
"art", this was of course not
without its controversies over the years.
Newport has been no exception, for the controversy surrounding "The Newport Nude" by leading Society portraitist and Royal Academy President Sir Gerald Festus Kelly in the 1940s & 50s made it the most infamous painting ever displayed in the Newport Museum and Art Gallery. With a petition launched for its removal as an affront to public morality and a headline in the Daily Mirror newspaper, Festus Kelly's feisty nude study caused a flood of some 20,000 people to view it when it was
purchased from the Royal Academy Summer Show and exhibited at Newport Museum and
Art Gallery in 1947.
The aesthetic conception
of the artist was simply in excess of
acceptable taste for the Newport public.
The case of Festus
Kelly's nude study and its reception in Newport highlights the fact that
public reception is the critical agent in the
manufacturing of controversy.
Read more: THE NUDE | Case study: Sir Gerald Festus Kelly, D.D. V (a) (Nude Study) (1924)
Regulating the Nude: From the Academy to the Internet
As we approach today's hypermedia universe of the Internet, technology pushes the boundaries of culture and taste as ever. Traditionally regulated by the art academy as an aesthetic category of "art", the nude has been under constant pressure with the evolution of modern communications technology and media from the advent of the age of photography, of film, and now the digital communications revolution and the Internet.
The nude has an abiding presence across these modern communications media as successive generations explore and exploit the often uncertain boundaries of "art" and "commercial entertainment". Yesteryear the art academy provided a vital forum for framing the nude as "art" and negotiating its status as a signifier and arbiter of aesthetic taste. Browsing through the advertisements section of the annual Royal Academy Illustrated nowadays, one may well be surprised at the apparent cult of the nude (- during the period of the Festus Kelly Newport Nude controversy). Visual imagery of the nude is ubiquitous in today's world of commercial advertising, spectacular culture, and the new Pandoras box of the Internet in which we arrive at the nude on the screen. In this new flow of imagery we encounter a new excess of both the spectacular and the quotidian, with a blurring of the lines of amateur-professional and private-public into a new cultural imaginary of the nude.
An anthropologist might observe that the role of the world of "art" as arbiter of acceptable taste- the academy, the art critic, and the press - has now devolved in our digital world to that of content filtering software as we navigate today's screen-based information environment. Such as for example the default settings for a Google image search (eg. Moderate SafeSearch is on); whilst effective content filtering has provided a strong selling point for ISP's. | Read more on The Nude: Popular Culture, Internet, Re-Mix Culture (scroll down to section 2).
- Note: Digital literacy & safety online advice: see Google Search Preferences and SafeSearch filtering
Explore "the art of the nude" online:
- Search - Google: web: "the art of the nude" : image: "the art of the nude"
- Search - visualization tools - view the search options (screen, page, video, etc) for "the art of the nude" here (Viewzi broswer).
- Specialist art library services - Bridgeman Art Library: "nude" | Visual Arts Data Service (VADS): "nude" (online database with over 100,000 images covering the visual arts, which are free for use in education)
- Photos - search tags for "art nude" in flickr hive mind (and here)
(5) Back to the life-class | The case of Newport College of Art
The case
of Newport Collge of Art offers a vivid instance of the changing
trends in art education in the post-'45 period:
Through the 1960's & '70's Newport College of Art had earned an enviable British reputation, wth Tom Rathmell at the helm as Head of the School of Painting and an academic rigour centred in the life-room that fed a stream of students to the Royal College of Art.
Less well known is the way in which disciplinary departures at Newport College of Art such as sculpture, photography and performance owed much to this academic grounding, exploring the materiality of the body in space. A healthy plurality of practices was achieved under the Headship of Anthony Stevens during the art college boom years of the 1970's.
From the late 1970's a radical rupture occurred from the college's academic tradition and plurality of practices, the response both to institutional restructuring and the “post-modernist” departure in the art world and art education at large. The new “Roy Ascott regime” focussed upon technology and media arts, likewise assuming a wide reputation and in its turn sending a generation of graduate students to the new media arts programme at the Royal College.
I'm recently informed that the new building for the Newport School of Art, Media and Design that's earmarked for a downtown, west bank location on the River Usk will include purpose-designed provision for the life-room. “A return to the acknowledgement of technical skill in art education is something that's to be welcomed”, to paraphrase a senior member of staff, “students in graphics, fine art and animation are strongly encouraged to enrol in the life-class”. Whither the nude in today's world of CGI and the Internet? | Read more: Towards a new social and cultural geography of Newport (Postscript June 2008)
John
Wilson, Guest Curator | April | 1 July | 2008