2024-01-05 21:10:44
When Gottfried Benn titles a poem “Beautiful Youth” and in the verses that follow it describes a bog corpse that only has perforated remnants of what were once organs, then that is an example of the ugliness in art, but above all for playing with the expected. An exhibition that apodictically calls itself “Nudes” – and thus abandons the semantic separation of “nude” and “nude image” in German – raises the expectation that it will tell a broad history of the genre. The curators of the LWL Museum for Art and Culture in Münster do not disappoint this expectation, on the contrary: with works from the Tate in London, most of which are being shown in Germany, they provide a theses-rich and bravura approach to the art history of nudity.
It was to be expected that a show dedicated to this topic today would not avoid the posterotic self-discovery of the subordinate, even if Jo Spence’s smearings with menstrual blood or John Coplans’ aging man’s stomach do not promote an intrinsic aesthetic of ugliness. But the end of the show is probably unexpected; it at least makes the viewer think back to Münster’s cathedral square: a video of Ana Mendieta’s performance “Untitled (Blood and Feathers #2)” from 1974, which shows the artist in a kind of vulnerable primal scene, The way she covers herself naked on a river bank with blood and rolls around in feathers rejects any explanatory meaning.
The modern nude painting began with Impressionism: Edgar Degas’ “Woman in the Washtub” from 1883: Image: Tate Gallery, London
These delimitations of the genre have a history that goes back to antiquity, even though the show begins in the nineteenth century – at a time when nude painting was part of the academic canon. The naked body was always wrapped in a biblical or historical context of ideas, always painted naturalistically, always de-individualized, as Cupid and Psyche, as Adam and Eve, as Saint Anthony. The fact that the show is organized more thetically and stylistically and not just chronologically allows the transition from the general to the intimate and erotic and later to the vulnerable to be understood synoptically.
The exhibition likes to summarize. “Nudes intimate” is the name of the cabinet, in the middle of which stands Auguste Rodin’s “The Kiss,” a key work in the show. Édouard Manet’s “Olympia” from 1863, de-spiritualized and individual, is the art historical elephant in the room. In terms of iconography, the closest thing to her is Henri Matisse’s “Femme nue drapée” from 1936, and in terms of reception history, Théodore Roussel’s “The Reading Girl” from 1887: a black-haired young woman sitting naked on a rocking chair and reading, a kimono lying casually on the back, she is finally home.
The male body as an object of showmanship: “Paul Rosano, reclining” by Sylvia Sleigh, 1974: Image: Tate Gallery, London
That was enough for Roussel’s Olympic moment, when in 1887 a British critic dismissed his painting as a “disgrace to art.” You are now naked and doing what you do. The atmospheric difference couldn’t be greater: from Adam and Eve and the forbidden apple to a naked woman stroking a black cat in the privacy of her Paris apartment in Christopher Nevinson’s 1926 “A Studio in Montparnasse.”
#Exhibition #Nudes #LWL #Museum #Münster