The Genre of The Erotic Nude

Delacroix's "Le Lever," Czanne's "Interior with Nude," Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon,"
and the Genre of the Erotic Nude

Author(s): Joyce Brodsky
Source: Artibus et Historiae, Vol. 7, No. 13 (1986), pp. 127-151
Published by: IRSA s.c.
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JOYCE BRODSKY
Delacroix's Le
Lever,
Cezanne's Interior with
Nude,
Picasso's Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon,
and the Genre of the Erotic Nude
"In
my opinion
one does not substitute oneself for the
past,
one
just
adds a new link".
(Paul Cezanne)1
"...Baudelaire's use of
memory
as a criterion of aesthetic
judgment
in the Salon of 1846
may
be understood as
reflecting
a central...
aspect
of the
enterprise
of
representa-
tional
painting
in the West since at least the Renaissance.
That
partially
accounts for
why
art is never
only private
expression,
but is
always
a
public
form. It is also
why
the
history
of art and the
history
of
making
"useful"
things
are
related.
Although
distinctions between the two are often made
on the erroneous belief that the craftsman or inventor works
towards
already
realized
goals
while the artist is on an
open
I wish to thank Gretel
Chapman,
Nathan Knobler, Catherine
Soussloff and Bette Talvacchia for their
suggestions
about content
and for their editorial advice.
1
Richard Shiff, "Seeing Cezanne," Critical
Inquiry, 4, (Summer
1978), p.798.
2
Michael Fried, "Painting
Memories: On the Containment of the
Past in Baudelaire and Manet", Critical
Inquiry, 10, (March 1984),
p.516.
I mean the remarkable
degree
to which
products
of that
enterprise
were made from
painting,
from
prevous
painting,
often
(though by
no means
always)
with an
openness,
a
frankness in the
exploitation
of the
past,
that historians
have not
infrequently
found
disconcerting
and that we are
still far from
adequately comprehending". (Michael Fried)2
Michael Fried's reflections on artists' use of other artists'
work, may provide
us with a
good beginning
for a
theory
of
genres.
If we know
anything
from
history
about the
making
of what we call art, we know that artists look at other artists'
work almost all the time.
Copying
the works of others often
constitutes a
large part
of an artist's
training
and even in
copying
from nature, learned art conventions intercede.3
3
One of the
problems
that Svetlana
Alpers
does not address in
her
important study
of Dutch art, The Art of
Describing (Chicago
1984),
is the relation of art conventions to
making
art. While she
accounts for
ways
of
seeing
in Northern art that
may
come from
science and
technology,
she
neglects
the
impact
of one artist's
conception
on another artist's work even if both are
"copying"
from
nature.
127
ended adventure, change
in both
pursuits
is
grounded
in
models from tradition.4 This is
important
because a
theory
of
genres may
be a fruitful
approach
to
understanding
endeavors
outside of the realm of art.
The
concept
of
style
that
emerges
from
emphasis
on
continuity
and variation in a
genre departs
from the
practice
of
many
art historians who still
identify style
with radical
innovation.5 Insistence on the
primacy
of innovation discounts
the remarkable continuities that form the
patterns
of
culture,
and overlooks the
part
that social and
political
determinates
play
in the choices about what
aspects
of the
past
are to be
emulated and what
changed.6
The individual maker is a nexus
or
meeting ground
of
pattern, politics
and
biology
and his
individual contribution lies in the
particular blending
of the
mixture. The view of an artist as a radical innovator who
destroys tradition, should at least be
paralleled by
one that
views him as a conservator whose remarkable
ability
to
vary
inherited motifs
preserves
what is constitutive of a culture.
It is
my present
intention to
explore
an
example
of the
practice
of three artists that
may provide
some substance for
a
theory
of
genres
built
upon.Fried's
notion of artists' use of
their
predecessors'
work. Such a
theory
would
engender
a
model to direct
exploration
of the
patterns
of
continuity
and
variation of
types
and motifs and would be
grounded
in a
concept
of
style. However, unlike the usual taxonomic
descriptions
of forms and motifs, style
would
emerge
as
genre, i.e., the
pattern
or
sequence
of
constancy
and
change
of a motif
grounded
in the social nexus that motivates the
particular
blend of
constancy
and
change.
Central to the notion
of
genres
is the observation that once a
particular
kind of
motif has been
dropped
into the cultural
hopper,
it survives
4
George Kubler's, The
Shape
of Time, Remarks on the
History
of
Things (New
Haven
1962)
must be
acknowledged
as a
continuing
source of ideas and as a "model" that I tend to be
always varying.
In
this
essay
I
part company
with his distinction between useful and
useless
things (pp. 3, 15-16, 65) to consider
Alpers'
contention that
there is no distinction. While I believe the
problem
is too
complex
to
dismiss that
easily,
I find her ideas
provocative.
See her article, "Is
Art
History?," Daedalus, I
(Summer 1977), p.
3. For
my
"Kublerian"
ideas about the difference see
"Continuity
and
Discontinuity
in
Style:
A Problem in Art Historical
Methodology,"
The Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism, XXXIX
(Fall 1980), p.
36 fn. 16.
5
Kubler still adheres to a
"strong"
sense of innovation in his
concept
of the
"prime object".
See his "Formes du
temps reexamin6,"
Artibus et Historiae, 4, (1981), pp.
9-15.
6
Even in
periods
that subscribe to an
ideology
of radical
change,
actual
practice may
be
quite
"conservative".
7
Why
a
particular
motif becomes the basis of a
genre pattern
is
as
complex
an issue as the
problem
of what a "culture" is. As a result
of such
complexity,
it
may
not be
possible
to come to terms with
tenaciously
as a
catalyst
to
provide seemingly
endless
variations.7
The use of one artist's work
by
another runs the
gamut
from direct imitation of a whole work, through quotation
of
one or more motifs, to what
may
be
loosely
identified as
inspiration.
An artist is
usually
so
steeped
in the tradition of
images
that he
may
conflate
many
of them in
making
a
single
new work. While the unconscious
absorption
of all sorts of
images plays
a
part
we cannot account for, even on the
conscious level where we can
grasp process,
we often
underdetermine a work.8 In examination of a
sequence
of three
paintings
- Delacroix's Le Lever
[Fig. 1],
Cezanne's Interior
with Nude
[Fig. 2],
and Picasso's Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon
[Fig. 3],
direct imitation, quotation,
and loose
inspiration
all
play
a
part.9
I. Delacroix and the Tradition of the Erotic Nude
The female nude, painted,
limned and
sculpted
for the
delectation of the viewer is so
ubiquitous
a
subject
in Western
art, that it is an obvious choice
upon
which to center a
study
ultimately
concerned with
paterns
of
continuity
and
change.
The female nude
appears
in
many
works that are
essentially
mythological, allegorical
or narrative, but even in these kinds
of works, a more mundane intention
may
reside "...it is
necessary
to labor the obvious and
say
that no nude, however
abstract, should fail to arouse in the
spectator
some
vestige
of erotic
feeling,
even
though
it be
only
the faintest shadow
why
a motif
emerged
as "that kind" of motif.
8
Katia Tsiakma, "C6zanne's and Poussin's Nudes", Art Journal,
XXXVII/2 (winter 1977-78), p. 120, refers to this
problem
in discuss-
ing
Cezanne's
copies.
"He often borrowed and
interpreted
isolated
figures
from earlier
paintings, usually focusing
on
peripheral
details.
Apparently
he felt no constraint in
employing
them in new
composi-
tions. In his finished works, however, he
usually
avoided direct
quotations.
This
only
serves to
complicate
his relation to the old
masters and makes the detection of his visual sources
problematical."
See also Richard Shiff, "The
Original,
the Imitation, the
Copy,
and the
Spontaneous Classic," Yale French Studies, 66, (1984), p.
27-54 and
Cezanne and the End of
Impressionism (Chicago 1984).
9
Sara Lichtenstein in "C6zanne's
Copies
and Variants after
Delacroix", Apollo, Cl/156 (February 1975), p. 125-26, connects the
three
paintings
in a manner relevant to
my
concerns. "The woman
from Le Lever assumes a rather
provocative pose
and recurs
among
the bathers with an obsessive force. Her intentions are
betrayed
in
Cezanne's
Temptations
of St.
Anthony
and are
blatantly
advertised in
Picasso's Demoiselles
d'Avignon."
128
1) Delacroix, Le Lever)), oil on canvas, 1850. Collection Maxime Citroen, Paris. Photo: Braun and Cie from Michel
Florisoone, Eugene
Delacroix
(Paris, n.d.) fig.
52.
129
2) Cezanne, <(Interior with Nude), oil on canvas, c. 1885-90, The Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania.
Photo: The Barnes Foundation, Merion Station, Pa. 19066, U.S.A.
130
I
7
/ iI
I'
i
i
i
j
/
f
i
A..t. .'
:...
/
A
A
t.,?
_
'-
3) Picasso, Les Demoiselles dAvignon, oil on canvas, 1907. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired
3) Picasso, thLes Demoiselles d'Avignont., oil on canvas, 1907. The
Museum of Modern Art,
New York, acquired
through
the Lillie P. Bliss
Bequest.
Photo: Museum of Modern Art.
131
F? ;?r '".*?;i
<'!
, A:If .. : .
.: i
j
..
.. -:..
,
-
- and if it does not do so,
it is bad art and false morals...".10
While I do
agree
with Kenneth Clark's belief that a nude in
any
work
probably
has some erotic
aspects, my
concern in
this
study
is with works that I believe were
primarily
intended
to be about eroticism,
and I
hope
to show that such is the
case for the three
paintings
mentioned above.
Delacroix's Le Lever
[Fig. 1], painted
in 1850, is a small
oil of a nude in her boudoir who stands
facing
a mirror as
she fixes her hair.11 Her raised arms cradle her head, obscuring
her face; lush hair cascades down her
body, falling
in a
tantalizing
manner around her
genitals.
Velvet curtains frame
her
figure,
and her bed is visible in the darkness of the left
side of the
painting.
Out of the dark
ground
behind the table
on the
right side, an unidentifiable face
peers
at the nude;
otherwise she is alone in her boudoir
performing
a
private
act.
Her
body
is in full illumination
except
for some shadows that
model her form; light
also touches the bedclothes, the
filmy
cloth, the
tips
of the
bouquet
of flowers, and the
edge
of the
mirror on the table. All the traditional attributes of chiaroscuro
oil
painting
are used to
emphasize
the soft
tangibility
of her
body.
While her
activity
is
private,
the full illumination of her
figure,
her foreshortened arm and the subtle twist of the lower
part
of her
body
are directed to the viewer.
What is this
painting
about? The few discussions of it have
centered on its brushwork and its color, its link to Delacroix's
other work and its thematic source in literature. No one has
approached
it as a "boudoir"
painting
made
essentially
for the
delectation of the viewer.12
Perhaps the
painting problem
for
the artist
lay,
in
part,
in
picturing
a
voyeuristic
encounter
between him and his model. Would the full
meaning
of the
work for both maker and viewer reside in the realm of the erotic?
10
Kenneth Clark, The Nude
(Princeton 1972), p.
8.
11
Signed
and dated
"Eug.
Delacroix 1850", approximately
17
3/4 x 9 7/8 inches. It was exhibited in the Salon of 1850-51 and is
now in a
private
collection in Paris
(Maxime Citroen). Lamy
made a
lithograph
of it that was
published
in
Adolphe Moreau, E. Delacroix
et Son Oeuvre
(Paris 1873), p.
130. See Maurice
Serullay,
Memorial
Ia 'Exposition Eugene
Delacroix
(Paris 1963), pp.
310-312 for
proven-
ance, exhibition record and
bibliography.
See also Alfred Robaut,
L'Oeuvre
Complet
de
Eugene
Delacroix, (New
York
1969), p. 310, and
more
recently
Sara Lichtenstein, "C6zanne and Delacroix", Art Bulletin,
XLVII
(March 1964), p. 56, and "C6zanne's
Copies...", pp.
125-127. I
have been unable to see the
original painting
nor have I found a color
reproduction
of it. Since C6zanne worked from the black and white
lithograph
I feel
justified
in
discussing
its structure, its content, and
its
impact
on C6zanne, for I am
seeing
it as he did.
My
comments on
the
painting, however, must be taken in that
qualified light.
12 While Lichtenstein alludes to its erotic
potentialities
she sees
it as
primarily
a work with
tragic
overtones of
vanity
and death
implied
by
Satan's head behind the mirror. "Cezanne's
copies...",
p. 122. See
page
11 for
my response
to that
interpretation.
I also
disagree
with
The essence of
voyeurism
is in
seeing
while not
being
seen. If Delacroix
painted
Le Lever from a live model, he
observed her but was not in turn observed
by
her. Even if he
based his
painting
on another artist's work, he still looked
while not
being
seen. While this
may
seem trivial, one of the
purposes
of the
images
made in the
genre
of the erotic nude
is to afford
private examination, at will - to see while not
being
seen.13 Delacroix was an artist
steeped
in tradition and
therefore, in all
probability,
he mixed
looking
at the live model
with countless numbers of
images
of the nude that constituted
his visual
vocabulary.
Most of these women, like the nude in
Le Lever, did not look out at the
viewer,
but in a few cases
he
might
have seen an
example
of the "seductive" nude who
did. Prior to the nineteenth
century
as we shall see, such
seducers were
painted
as
"objects"
of desire within a
voyeuristic
context.
It is not
my
intention in this
study
to
pursue
an infinite
regress
of
nudity,
for
my particular
concern is with Le Lever
as a source for Cezanne's Interior as a source for Picasso's
Demoiselles. But it is
important
for those works as well, to
look
briefly
at a few of the
types
of
images
Delacroix could
have encountered that were also
part
of Picasso's and
Cezanne's
heritage.
Two related
genres
often conflate in the tradition: the
genre
of
fecundity
- the nude or nudes in the
landscape
- and the
genre
of the erotic nude - the nude in an interior
setting
which
is
usually
the boudoir. Both
genres
can be found in Greek art
and while
only
a few
examples
of female
nudity
exist from
the archaic
period, they
are of
particular importance,
both
because we tend to locate the
beginnings
of Western art
there, and because a few of them were available as sources
her
analysis
of Cezanne's Interior with Nude. She
suggests
that it
shows a
"grain
of
perversity" perhaps
because "Cezanne
replaced
Satan with a blackamoor, but even in this innocuous
figure
he retained
a
vague
allusion to evil"
(p. 123). There is
nothing
in Cezanne's
painting
to
support
such a
reading:
the
appearance
of the blackamoor is
part
of the
genre.
As her
interpretation
of Le Lever is
problematic,
Cezanne's
borrowing
of Delacroix's allusion to evil is also
suspect.
13 This
aspect
of the
genre
of the erotic nude is
perhaps revealing
about some
aspects
of
looking
at
pictures
in
general.
Is there also
not a
voyeuristic
element in the
private ownership
of all kinds of art
things?
One should also consider here the
relationship
between the
genre
of the erotic nude and
pornography.
While there is a thin line
between them, I believe that a crucial distinction can be made because
the sole intention of the latter is to arouse sexual
feelings
while the
former
may
be about those
feelings
as well and about their material
and structural formulations as
problems
for the artist. The
subject
of
pornography
is
very complex
as it too has a
long
tradition with
conventions that constitute a
genre.
See Susan
Sontag,
"The Porno-
graphic Imagination",
in A Susan
Sontag
Reader (New York 1982),
pp. 205-233, for a
particularly provocative approach.
132
for the artists we are
discussing.
There is an
amphora
in the Louvre
by
the Andokides
painter
that shows several nude women
swimming [Fig. 4]
and one
in Berlin that shows nude women
showering.14
In Kenneth
Clark's
study
of The
Nude, he contrasts the ideal and the
unideal in relation to these
images:
"It is from the
rapturous scrutiny
of
passion
that ideal
beauty
is born; and there is no feminine
equivalent
to the
Kritios
youth.
The rare
drawings
of naked women on
early
vases are almost
comically
unideal - for
example,
the ladies
enjoying
a shower bath on a black
figure
vase in Berlin...who
are closer to the eternal feminine of Thurber than to that
of Praxiteles".15
Clark is
certainly right
to describe these nudes as "unideal"
but are
they
comic?
Perhaps they
are
representations
of women
whose breasts and buttocks were made to arouse and not to
be
representations
of "...the
rapturous scrutiny
of
passion
from
which ideal
beauty
is born...". That
they appear
on vessels
probably
made to hold water
may signify
that
they
stand for
fecundity
or La Source, like
Ingres'
famous
standing
nude with
pitcher
in the Louvre, or the buxom nude from the back that
Courbet
painted
with her feet in a stream, in the
Metropolitan
Museum of Art. Whatever else these
paintings may
mean
they
should be
placed alongside images
of the ideal nude as
examples
of different interests the Greeks and others
may
have had in
painting
the nude, and in
particular
the nude woman.
A small wall
painting
of the Three Graces
[Fig.
5] from
Pompeii may
also have been
painted
for other than ideal
reasons
although
usual
descriptions emphasize
their
"modesty
and
virgin beauty".16
The
early
Greek
poet
Hesiod
(Theogony,
907-909)
described the
subject
in a different manner, as
erotic: "From their
eyes
as
they glanced,
flowed love that
unnerves the limbs".17 The Three Graces also
belongs
to the
genre
of the nude or nudes in the
landscape
as
symbols
of
14
Clark, op. cit., p.
73. For the Louvre
amphora
see Rene
Huyghe,
Larousse
Encyclopedia
of Prehistoric and Ancient Art
(London 1962),
fig.
549. For the Berlin
amphora,
see Clark, op. cit., fig.
54.
15
Clark, op.
cit.
pp.
73-4. A statue or
painting
of a nude does
not have to be
"literally"
nude. The
diaphanous drapery
that covers
the female
body
in statues and
paintings
from the Archaic
period
on
reveals almost as much of a woman's
body
as nude
images
do of the
male's
body.
16 Christine Mitchell Havelock, Hellenistic Art
(New
York
1979),
plate XIX, p.
268. There are
layers
of contextual
meaning
in
subjects
like the Three Graces. I am not
denying
the
complex
and erudite
programs
behind them in
antiquity
or in the tradition that
developed
from it.
Layers
of
meaning
conflate or exist in strata in
any interesting
image:
some are forever lost to us and some are added in
subsequent
periods.
It is also the case that
subjects
like Botticelli's Primavera or
his Birth of Venus, for
example,
do not
belong primarily
to either
genre
4)
Andokides Painter, ((Women
Bathing)),
Greek red
figure
amphora,
6th
century
b.c., Louvre, Paris. Photo: Documen-
tation
Photographique
de la Reunion des Musees Nation-
aux, Paris.
even if the former contains the Three Graces and some
fertility
implications
and the latter a nude Venus in a
pose
similar to
examples
in the
genre
of the erotic nude. See Charles
Dempsey's
"Mercuris Ver:
The Sources of Botticelli's Primavera", Journal of the
Warburg
and
Courtauld Institute, 31 (1968), p.
251-273. That we
experience
an
intellectual confusion in
approaching
both
paintings,
different from
those mentioned in note 18, seems to me to indicate that works like
these
belong
in a
genre
the
meaning
of which
emerges
from
Demp-
sey's description
of the Primavera. "...Indeed these sources are woven
together
with such skill and such
sensibility
that the
contemplation
of the
painting's subject
matter taken alone can induce an aesthetic
response".
Cf. Ch.
Dempsey,
"Botticelli's Three Graces", Journal of the
Warburg
and Courtauld Institute, 34 (1971), pp.
326-327. What he
refers to as "intellectual
pleasure" may
be a
key
to
defining
that
genre.
17
Havelock, op. cit., p.
268.
133
5)
((The Three Graces)), wall
painting, Pompeii.
the
beneficence, fertility
and
fecundity
of nature.'8
Raphael,
Rubens and Delacroix, among
so
many others, painted
nudes
for that reason, and so did
Cezanne, who modeled them like
sculpture
and turned them
every
which
way
as
analogues
for
experiencing
matter in all the fullness of its three-
dimensionality.
Of course this also allows for some of these
artists to
display
the
body
from all sides as an
object
of
voyeuristic perusal.
Perhaps
this was a
purpose
in the
Pompeian
house fresco.
The artist shows us their breasts and their buttocks with
"pink
blushes", a delectable feast for the
eyes.'9
What is more
revealing, however, is that the
landscape
serves as a mere
18
Perhaps Giorgione's
Concert
Champetre
is another
interesting
case
(see Clark, op. cit.,
Fig. 92). Whatever
symbolic meaning
it once
may
have had that we can no
longer decipher,
it
probably always
was also a variation on the erotic nude in a natural
setting. Paintings
like it, Manet's Dejeuner sur L'Herbe is such an
example, may
retain
"genre" meaning
when
specific
contextual
meaning
is lost to us.
19
Havelock, op. cit., p.
268. "The Grace's freshness and
youth
are
particularly
evident in the
pink
blushes of their flesh". I am, of
course, using part
of the
description ironically.
20
Edmund Burke Feldman, Varieties of Visual
Experience (New
backdrop against
which the women are
presented,
close to
the observer. It is usual in the
genre
of the nude in nature to
place
the
figure
within the
landscape
as a
symbol
of
fecundity
and abundance. C6zanne, for
example,
followed this convention
in most of his bather
paintings,
while in his Interior with Nude,
the
figure
is
up
front. When
Raphael painted
his Three Graces,
now in the Musee Conde, Chantilly,
he seems to have followed
the same convention as in the Roman
example [Fig. 6].
He
also
gave
each Grace a
tantalizing apple
to hold. Edmund
Feldman, in Varieties of Visual
Experience, juxtaposes Raphael's
painting
with Rubens' The
Judgement
of Paris of 1638-9, a
prime example
of the
genre
of
fecundity [Fig. 7].
It is
interesting
to
compare
his
captions
under both
paintings:
"With Rubens, flesh, display,
and
asymmetry govern.
The ladies
compete
with one another- one even addresses
herself to the viewer.
Raphael
uses these ladies for a
superb
demonstration of classical
equipoise: they
are balanced on
their feet, within the
pictorial space
and on the
picture
plane".20
The
simple comparison
of
"Baroque"
and "Classical" that
Feldman's
captions
serve deflects from the case that
Raphael's
nudes
may
be
just
as erotic, but of a different
variety.
While
Raphael may
seem subtle in
comparison,
there are other than
formal reasons for the curve of the buttocks of the center
nude
continuing
the
rhythm
that leads the
eye
to the
vaginal
areas of the side
figures.
In both
paintings
the nudes are
presented
from the front and the back as
objects
for
display.
Rubens even added a side view as well.2'
While Delacroix
painted
several
compositions
of nudes in
the
landscape,
like the Turkish Women
Bathing (Hartford,
Wadsworth
Atheneum),
he followed the different but related
genre
in Le Lever, the unusual
subject
for him of a
single
figure
in a boudoir
setting.
There are
early
antecedents for
this motif and in
particular
for the nude and the mirror.
Single
figures
of nudes associated with the boudoir were
engraved
on mirror backs from the Etruscan and Hellenistic
period.
In
an
example
from the Louvre of the
type
that could have
inspired Delacroix, the
figure
is
engraved
with her head tilted
and her lower extremities
subtly
turned towards the viewer
York
1967), pp.
474-75.
21
Rubens
repeated
the convention of
multiple
views in several
paintings, particularly
the Three Graces in the Prado and the Disem-
barkment of Marie de Medici in the Louvre. In the latter work, the
Naiads, elemental forces of nature, turn front, back and side:
allegory
and eroticism
perfectly merged.
See Clark, op. cit., fig. 204, and Adrian
Chappuis,
The
Drawings
of Paul C6zanne (Greenwich 1973),
I
p.
126
for a
reproduction
of the Naiads and II, figs. 369, 455, 1128 for
Cezanne's
copies
after them.
Chappuis
notes
(I, p. 126) that Delacroix
copied
the center Naiad in a
painting
in the Kunstmuseum in Basel.
134
[Fig. 8].22
Later
examples
in the
genre
such as Bellini's
Lady
at her Toilet in Vienna could also have
provided inspiration.
Seated nude on her bed, she looks in two mirrors so that she
can fix the back of her hair as does Titian's
Lady
at her Toilette,
in the Louvre -
except
that she is clothed.23 Titian's Venus of
Urbino in the Uffizi of 1
538, without clothes or mirror, although
based on
Giorgione's Sleeping
Venus in the
landscape,
in
Dresden, is
put
into the bedroom and Titian adds all the other
attributes we find in Le Lever -
flowers, bedsheets, curtains
and servant
[Fig. 9].24
The
purpose
of the
painting
seems
obvious and as Hartt has
suggested,
Venus was not intended
to be a Venus at all. He based his
argument
on the sixteenth
century correspondence
of the
patron
Guidaboldo who showed
great anxiety
to obtain this
picture
which he referred to
simply
as a nude woman.25
Titian's Venus
gazes
at the viewer but
by comparison
with
the confrontational nudes
painted by Ingres, Manet, C6zanne,
and
culminating
in Picasso's Demoiselles, she remains an
object
within a
voyeuristic
context. She is no different from
the sensual
objects surrounding
her that are included to
heighten
arousal.26 Cezanne
copied
a
prime
17th
century
example
of such an
"object"
of desire, Jacob von Loo's Le
Coucher L'italienne
[Fig. 10].
The nude's back is turned to the
viewer while she
gazes
at him over her shoulder. The velvets,
silks, disheveled bedclothes and the lace
cap
she so
demurely
wears, revolve around the
"meaning"
of the
painting:
a look
at her
sumptuous
behind.27
One of the more
enigmatic approaches
to the erotic nude
of
particular importance
to all three of the artists under
consideration is the work of
Ingres.
In La
Baigneuse
de
Valpincon
of 1808 and the La Grande
Odalisque
of 1814, both
in the Louvre, Ingres
continues the tradition of the
voyeuristic
nude and varies it in a
startling
manner. While the
Valpincon
Bather, seen from the back, should be an obvious
example
of
the "desired
object",
it is so
presentational
that the
image
22
Clark, op.
cit.,
fig.
2.
23
Clark, op. cit., fig.
88 for Bellini's
painting.
For Titian's
Lady
see
Virginia
M. Allen, "(One
Strangling
Golden Hair>>: Dante Gabriel
Rossetti's
Lady Lilith", The Art Bulletin, LXVI
(June 1984), p.
4. Allen
discusses the
Pre-Raphaelite
variations on works like Titian's
lady
combing
her hair.
24
Clark, op. cit.,
figs. 89,80. Giorgione
also
painted
a nude from
the back whose other sides were seen via reflections in a mirror, in
armor and on the surface of a
pool.
See
Giorgio Vasari, Lives of
Seventy
of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors
and Architects (New
York 1911),
III
p.
9. and the discussion in
Alpers, op. cit., p.
58. In
Giorgione's Tempest,
while the nude
nursing
her child in the
landscape
suggests
the
genre
of
fecundity (and particularly
when we know that
the
painting originally
included a nude woman
bathing
instead of the
6) Raphael,
((The Three Graces)), oil on canvas, c. 1500,
Musee Conde, Chantilly.
Photo: Giraudon.
seems to thrust itself back
upon
the
voyeur.
The
descriptive
contour of the
body
and its relation to all the
trappings
of the
boudoir, distills the eroticism into an awesome
regard
for the
craft that transforms what the artist sees into a
perfect object;
almost too
pure perhaps
to arouse the sense of touch.
Odalisque
is also surrounded
by things
that are exotic and
they
should
therefore enhance the erotic content of the
painting. They
do
man),
the "hostile"
quality
of nature seems to
prevent easy
inclusion
in the
genre.
25
Frederick, Hartt, History
of Italian Renaissance Art
(New
York
1974), p.
541.
26
In Clark's
description
of Rubens' Three Graces, he describes
the
figures
in the same manner as he does the corn and
pumpkins.
"The
golden
hair and
swelling
bosoms of his Graces... are
hymns
of
thanksgiving
for abundance, and
they
are
placed
before us with the
same unselfconscious
piety
as the sheaves of corn and
piled-up
pumpkins
that decorate a
village
church at harvest festival"
(op. cit.,
p. 140). Although
an
example
of the
genre
of
fecundity,
it is nonethe-
less clear that the nudes are
objects
like the
vegetation.
27
Chappuis, op. cit., I, fig.
47. For Cezanne's
"funny" copy
after
an
engraving
of it see II, fig.
310 bis.
135
7) Rubens, (The
Judgement
of Paris)), oil on canvas, 1638-39, the National
Gallery,
London. Photo: The National
Gallery,
London.
and
they
don't. As Odalisque turns her head to
gaze
at the
viewer, what should be a seductive "come on" freezes the
response.
This is
partially
the result of the coolness of that
look but also
emerges
from the continous contour that
sinuously joins
the turned head with the rest of the
body,
inhibiting
the
physical
movement associated with the tactile.
While Titian's Venus invites touch, Ingres Odalisque
is
truly
erotic; touch is distilled
by imagining
the alien.
Something
new is
happening
in the
genre.
In Le
Lever, Delacroix continues the tradition of the erotic
nude but he adds an element, as we would
expect
from a
romantic artist,
in a direction
very
different from
Ingres.
The
leering
face behind the table has been identified as
Mephisto
but
nothing
from Delacroix's Journal indicates that he
specifi-
cally
wanted the
figure
to be Faustian.28
Although
we know
that Delacroix was often
inspired by literary themes,
in this
case we know that his
original
intent was
allegorical.
In his
Journal
entry
for
May 3, 1847 he writes about
planning
a
painting
of a nude with death
ready
to seize her or of a nude
28
Robaut, op. cit., p.
310.
136
9) Titian, (<Venus of Urbino), Uffizi, Florence. Photo: Gab.
Fot. Firenze.
8)
Greek mirror back, <<Aphrodite
and Eros)>,
engraving,
2nd
century
b.c., Louvre, Paris. Photo: Documentation
Photographique
de la Reunion des Musees Nationaux.
combing
her hair, symbol
of death
"raping"
her.29 The
subjects
of death, violence and
passion pervade
Delacroix's work and
Le Lever in its finished form did have such undertones. It is
also
possible
that a variation on the related theme of
vanity
is
implied by
the
presence
of the mirror and is extended
by
contrasting
the
beauty
of the nude with what could be the
face of an old
ugly
servant behind it.30 As a humorous aside
to
interpretation,
Delacroix remarked in his Journal on
February
14, 1850 that a Madam P. and her sister were struck
by
the
nudity
of La femme qui se
peigne
when
they
visited the studio.
Madam P.
remarked, "What is it that
you artists, all
you men,
find so attractive in this? What makes it more
interesting
to
you
than
any
other
object
in its nude or crude state; an
apple,
29
Eugene Delacroix, Journal, I
(Paris 1893), p.
306. "Femme nue
et debout: la Mort
s'apprete
a la saisir. Femme
qui
se
peigne:
La Mort
apprete
son rateau." The "classic"
example
of the former is, of course,
Hans
Baldung
Grien's Death and the Woman in Basel.
30
Clark, op. cit.,
figs.
258 and 259 are
examples
of "vanitas"
themes
by
a follower of Memlinc and
by
Giovanni Bellini. The latter
shows an
image
in the mirror of what
may
be an old woman's face.
There is a
long
tradition of such "vanitas"
images
and as we have
for instance"31. Delacroix did not
enlighten her, at least as far
as we can tell from the
journal entry.
Even if there are such levels of
meaning
in Le Lever it
remains
primarily
a
vintage example
of the erotic nude and
was
certainly
so for C6zanne. If
anyone
would have been
susceptible
to
satanique
overtones it would have been he,
whose
early
work was rooted in
images
of sexual
passion,
violence and death. Instead it occasioned one of the most
sensuous nudes he ever
painted.
II. Cezanne's Interior with Nude
Delacroix's Le Lever was in a
private
collection in the 70's
but it was
probabily
known to C6zanne from a
lithograph
Lamy
made of it that was
published
in Moreau's E. Delacroix
et son Oeuvre in 1873. From
Chappuis' study
of the
drawings
of C6zanne and their sources, we know that like Delacroix he
was
constantly copying
other artists' work in the museum
and from
prints.
Delacroix seems to have been the artist he
seen the erotic nude was associated with the mirror in Greek art. The
"Narcissus" theme is also relevant in this context.
31
Delacroix, op. cit., p.
425. "Ce meme
jour,
Mme P... est venue
avec sa soeur, la
princesse
de B... La nudite de la Femme
impertinente,
et celle de la Femme qui se
peigne,
lui ont saut6 aux
yeux:
... Que
pouvez-vous
trouver la de si
attrayant
vous autres artistes, vous autres
hommes? Qu'est-ce
que
cela a de
plus
interessant
que
tout autre
objet
vu dans sa nudite, dans sa crudite, une pomme, par example?"
137
10) Cezanne, copy
after Jacob van Loo's <Le Coucher
L'ltalienne), pencil
on
paper,
c. 1872-75. Photo: from Ad-
rien
Chappuis,
The
Drawings
of Paul Cezanne,
(New
York
1973), II, fig.
310.
most admired and
frequently copied.32
In Sara Lichtenstein's
study
of the
copies
C6zanne made after the older artist she
has
reproduced examples
that she believes were either
copied
or
inspired by
Le Lever. Sometime in the late 70's Cezanne
made two detailed
pencil
sketches of the
upper part
of
Delacroix's nude, concentrating
in
particular
on the arms
cradling
the head
[Fig. 11].33
That
position provided
him with
a
complex problem
in
foreshortening
the arm and
contrasting
it with the head tilted into
space,
characteristic of the
"Baroque"
tension that was
always interesting
to him. It is the
only
time
he
directly copied
a motif from Le Lever.
Chappuis
dates a
pencil study
of three women bathers in
the
landscape by
Cezanne to 1874-78.34 The
standing figure
with the
long flowing
hair
may
well refer to Le Lever and if
so, C6zanne
radically
altered the
position
of the nude. He
splayed open
both arms and raised them in almost
symmetrical
32
Chappuis, op. cit., I, pp. 75, 85-5, 88, 91-3, 118, 174, 183,
230, for
examples
of Delacroix that he
copied.
See also the
important
work
by
Gertrude Berthold, C6zanne und die Alten Meister, (Stuttgart
1958),
one of the first books to
emphasize
traditional sources for
Cezanne's
painting.
33
Lichtenstein, op. cit., (1975), pp.
126-27.
Chappuis, op. cit., II,
fig.
459.
34
Chappuis, op. cit., II
fig.
365.
35
Chappuis, op. cit., I, figs. 6, 9, 54-6. He also
copies
the L'Ecorch6
(fig. 36). C6zanne owned a
plaster
cast of it. The
figure's right
arm is
sharply angled
above the head in a
"splayed
out"
position
when the
piece
is viewed from the front. Cezanne stressed that
particular angle
in
many drawings (Chappuis, II, passim).
36
See Lionello Venturi, C6zanne, Son Art
-
Son Oeuvre (Paris
11) Cezanne, copies
after Delacroix's ((Le Lever)), pencil
on
paper,
c. 1876-9, Collection H.
Burg,
London. Photo.
from Adrien
Chappuis,
The
Drawings
of Paul Cezanne,
(New
York
1973), II,
fig.
459.
angles
around the lifted head and turned the whole
figure
more to the front. What
may
well account for this
change
is
the
impact
of the works of other artists he was
copying
at
the same time: Rubens' Bellona from The
Apotheosis
of
Henry
IV,
Michelangelo's Dying Slave, G6r6me's Greek Interior and
his
Phryne
before
Areopagus, Puget's
Perseus
Rescuing
An-
dromeda, all works that contained nude
figures
with at least
one arm raised above their heads.35 He was also
composing
drawings
and
paintings
with
many
nudes in the
landscape,
male as well as female, some with arms raised.36 In most of
these he was also
turning
some of the
figures
towards the
viewer. There are two
drawings
from the late 70's that
Lichtenstein believes were studies for the small oil
painting
that Cezanne made in the late 1 880's, Interior with Nude. But
they
could also have been studies for Bathsheba.37 In both of
them the
figure
faces in the
opposite
direction from the nude
1936), passim,
for Cezanne's
many
bather
paintings
and
drawings.
One should of course mention in this context Theodore Reff's article,
"Cezanne's Bathers with Outstretched Arms", Gazette des Beaux-Arts,
(March 1962), pp.
173-190. I remain unconvinced of the sexual
implications
of the outstretched arm that Reff
proposes.
C6zanne was
always
interested in tension and balance within the
figure
and of the
figure
within an "obdurate"
space;
a
space
with substance that
pushes
against
the form, often
necessitating
an
adjustment
in the
figure's
balance. See
my
discussion of this in "C6zanne and the
Image
of
Confrontation," Gazette des Beaux-Art, (September 1978), p.
85 and
more
recently
in "A
Paradigm
Case for
Merleau-Ponty:
The
Ambiguity
of
Perception
and
Paintings
of Paul C6zanne", Artibus et Historiae, 4
(1981), pp.
125-134.
37
Lichtenstein, op. cit., (1975) p.
126 and
fig.
38.
138
:i-?,1.
1
i ,
il4si-i
q, ::?til'"
:
ici
in Cezanne's Interior and Delacroix's Le Lever
[Fig. 12].
What
is
significant, however, is that the arms are
opened
above the
head. This motif is continued in a
drawing
made some ten
years
later of a nude with a curtain behind her that
probably
was a sketch for the Interior with Nude and was
inspired by
Le Lever
[Fig. 13].38
Cezanne's Interior with Nude
[Fig. 2]
in the Barnes collection
in
Merion, Pennsylvania,
was
probably painted
in the late
80's.39 While
obviously inspired by
Delacroix it
departs
from
Le Lever in some crucial
ways
and it is
interesting
to see
Cezanne return in the late 90's to
re-study
Le Lever and to
copy
Delacroix more
faithfully
in a small water color and a
small oil
painting
than he did ten
years
earlier in the Interior.40
In the later
paintings,
the
figure
turns
sideways,
cradles her
head in her arms and stands in a
deeper space
than in the
earlier
copies.
This is not a
"regression"
to Renaissance or
Baroque space
but a use of
depth
with
bright
color to realize
a fullness of
space pulsating
about and often
merging
with
the
objects
and
figures,
that
particularly engaged
him in his
later
years.
Interior with Nude shows us his interest in a
somewhat different set of
problems
of concern to him in the
80's that revolve around confrontation and encounter.
As in the
drawings,
C6zanne
paints
the nude with her
body
turned more to the viewer than Delacroix's
figure,
while still
engaging
her reflection in the mirror. With her arms
splayed
out behind her head, she turns her
body
to confront the artist,
at once
invading
the
privacy
that surrounds Delacroix's woman
and the
voyeurism
of the viewer. Instead of the tactile
sensuousness of Le Lever, stimulated
by
the full illumination
of the
body
in contrast to rich dark shadows, Cezanne colors
his nude all over in a
light
salmon
pink
touched here and there
38
Lichtenstein, op. cit., (1975) p.
126 and
fig.
40.
39
Albert C. Barnes and Violette de Mazia, in The Art of C6zanne
(Pennsylvania 1977), p.
410 and
fig. 83, dated the
painting
c. 1880
and called it Interior with Nude. It measures
approximately
12
1/2
inches
high
x 9 1/2 inches wide. Venturi, p. 122, entry 254, called
it La Toilette and dated it c. 1878. He
gave
some
bibliographic
and
exhibition data and reviewed
provenance.
He mentioned an
anony-
mous
buyer
in Paris who
bought
the
painting
in 1899 on the 2nd of
December. The
painting
was listed as number 4, which indicates that
it was
probably
exhibited at that time. Venturi also mentioned that E.
Druet and A. Pellerin in Paris were owners.
George Riviere, Le
Maltre
Paul C6zanne
(Paris 1923), p.
203 called it Etude de Nu and dated it
1877. He described the
painting
as a "Femme debout se coiffant
devant une table; a droite une
jeune domestique presente
a sa
maitresse des
objets
de toilette sur un
plateau."
He also noted that
it was sold for 5,500 francs to Henri Rouart from an exhibition in the
Manzi-Joyant
Galleries in December of 1912
(listed
as number 95,
"Etude de Femme", 1877, (235-36).
As far as I have been able to determine it was exhibited
only
with a tint of
violet, producing
one of those
pearly greys
that
emanate from so
many
of his
paintings.
The
figure
is defined
by
a dark
purple
contour that is almost an outline and functions
to isolate the
figure
in the
space.
She is
directly
encountered
like
Ingres'
nudes but because the
painting
is built
up
of color
patches
the
eye
is deflected from
only traveling
the contour;
nothing
seems flat.
Yet
everything
in the
painting complements frontality.
While
Cezanne
preserves
and even accentuates the thrust into
space
in Delacroix's
painting by
almost
symmetrically dividing
the
floor
plane by
two
strong diagonals, they suddenly
abut the
vividly painted
back wall and that tends to tilt the floor
plane.
Cezanne then centers a metal vase filled with leaves between
the two
diagonals.41
The chair on the left and the mirror in
the center are
perspectively ambiguous;
tilted to come forward
to echo the
frontality
of the
figure.
The chair
belongs
to the
warm side of the
painting
and is colored crimson while the
large
mirror is
painted
a sensuous
grey
like the cool side of
the
painting.
On that side he also
paints
the curtain which
seems to be
blowing
from an
open window, in facets of
grey
blue and violet. On the other side, a heavier
drapery
is
painted
in a loose
array
of
purple,
salmon
pink, crimson, sienna, and
ochres. The
foreground
is
bright yellow, yellow ochre, and
green.
C6zanne
applies
the
paint loosely,
like water color, with
many
white areas left to
brighten
all the other colors.
Nothing
is dark; even the shadows are luminous and all the forms
seem to collect like a
bouquet
of flowers
presented
to the
viewer. Even that
leering
face in Delacroix's Le Lever comes
forward and becomes the
figure
of a small black servant
girl
holding
a
tray
and dressed in a
long flowing garment
of blue,
once between 1899 and 1912 in 1910-11 in the exhibition of Manet
and the Post
Impressionists
at the Grafton Galleries in London
(Venturi,
p. 122).
It is
possible
that a
photograph
of it was included in the
Salon of 1904, in a Cezanne room with 33
paintings
and
photographs
of his work. Vollard
published photographs
of that room that show
28 of the 33
paintings
but no
photographs.
See his Paul Cezanne
(Paris 1914), plates 44, 45. It could have been
through
Vollard that
Picasso had access to the
painting
or to a
photograph
of it. Lichten-
stein, op. cit., pp.
126-127 fn. 9, acknowledges
that it was John
Rewald who first
suggested
a date in the second half of the 1880's
for the
painting.
40
Lichtenstein, op. cit., (1975) figs.
41-2.
41
There is a
graphite,
watercolor and
gouache painting
The Blue
Cachepot
in a
private
collection in
Philadelphia
dated c. 1885 that
resembles in the form of the
pot
and the narrow
green
leaves the
one in Interior. The loose watercolor
handling
of the oil
painting
makes
the resemblance even more
striking
and
suggests
that a date of 1885
or later is
appropriate
for Interior. See
Joseph
J. Rishel, Cezanne in
Philadelphia Collections, (Philadelphia 1983), p.59.
139
....
: ::! : {:
'
:
'';
j! ....f
12)
Cezanne studies related to <La Toilette)), pencil
on
paper,
c. 1878-81 from sketchbook Carnet III, Kupferstich-
kabinett der oeffentlichen
Kunstsammlung,
Basel. Photo: from Adrien
Chappuis,
The
Drawings
of Paul Cezanne,
(New
York
1973), 11, fig.
467.10.
violet, grey
and
purple against
the sienna of her skin.
In his
early
work C6zanne
frequently painted orgiastic
scenes: women in brothels with a black servant either
unveiling
them to a male
guest (sometimes
C6zanne
himself)
or
serving
the lovers in bed; scenes of
rape, temptations,
and
orgiastic
banquets.
He also made a few works with
languorous
nudes
in the
landscape
like the
Judgment
of Paris and Bathsheba.
With the
exception
of two
paintings
of Leda and the Swan
and a
painting
and watercolor of a "studio" nude, Interior with
Nude (and the
drawings
and
paintings
related to Le
Lever) is,
as far as I know, unique
in Cezanne's oeuvre after the 1870's.42
42
See Venturi, figs. 92-94, 103, 112, 122-23, 240, 247, 252-56,
379-80, 550-51, 710. See also related
drawings
and watercolors.
While he continued to
paint
male and female bathers in the
landscape
with
growing frequency,
this is the
only example
of a nude in an interior
setting.
While there is an obvious
relationship
between the two, the bathers and the Interior, as
we have seen, belong
to different
genres.
It has often been noted that Cezanne's bathers are not
erotic, unlike most of the
examples
of the
subject
we discussed
in Part 1. I think this is the case because Cezanne was
primarily
interested in the structural
relationship
between the
many
figures
and the
landscape
and in an
analogous problem
which
was best understood
by Henry
Moore. Moore owned a small
painting
of Cezanne's Bathers and used it as a model from
which to
sculpt
three
figures
in
plaster.
"I now own a small
Cezanne Bathers
painting
and in
talking
to friends,
I have often
said, "look what a romantic idea Cezanne had of women" and
140
.?
.,.....
k :*
.: ..
..;;.
*1 .!
:?"'
_ .
"how
fully
he realized the three-dimensional world. I felt I
could
easily
make
sculptures
of the
figures".
And so he
did.43/
Not
only
in
addressing
the
single figure,
but in
collecting the/f
,
many poses,
Cezanne's bathers
present
us with the full
plasticity
of the three-dimensional world of bodies in nature. .
;
/
Cezanne found a
way
that was both like and unlike
they
means used
by
artists from the Renaissance on to attain mass
;'"
'
,. .
,
and volume on the
picture plane.
He still relied on
tonality
to
/'
...
provide solidity
even if the tones were
arrangements
of several . *, ;
.,'. , -s
colors and not only values of the dominant one. Like Giorgione
'
'
'
with his reflections
(mentioned
in note
24),
and
Raphael
and . ,
A'
Rubens, he turned the
figure
in
space
so that we could see
;
L
.
it from
many
sides at the same time. The different
ingredient
was color intensities that could engender the visual sense of
.,?
,
the fullness and
plentitude
of matter
alongside
the tactile.
:
Cezanne was
partially
an
"impressionist"
because he learned
to use the
warm/bright
and
cool/grey properties
of color to
':'t ." -
.
;
vivify
his
experience
of nature, but he was also a modeller
^ r-
and used the dark and
light properties
of color to make
things
, , . i
round and solid. His bathers are
paradigmatic
of the
genre
of
*?. 9
i
_
the nude in the
landscape
because the intrinsic
meaning
of
a
that
genre
is in
imaging
abundance and
plenitude.
Cezanne, in Interior with Nude, and in his
paintings
in otherF
:
genres,
shared with other nineteenth
century
artists a
growing
interest in the
problem
of
depicting
a more direct confrontation
with
reality.
But what makes Interior more "traditional" than ,
*
the "realistic" nudes of Courbet, Manet, Degas etc., is that '
,, t
some of the aura of "romanticism" and
voyeurism
still
lingers ^
If '
A
there. In
using
Delacroix's Le Lever as a model, he found
aS. tt
,i
form of
presentation
for all those
early orgiastic images
of ~'
."S'.4
sexual
fantasy
and desire
by joining
the
sensuosity
of
paint
with the eroticism of content. And in the
fragmenting
and ^
.
s'
frontalizing
of the
space,
he
presents
us with a new structure
'
'
upon
which to
ground
his thematic variation on the erotic /
4'^
nude, one that accentuates a more direct encounter and
'
confrontation with felt
experience.
This structure was
brought
.. .
'
to bear on his
expressive
interests in other
genres
as well. In
. '^& X^ ..
-
this one
example
of the erotic nude, dependent upon the-
'
tradition
encapsulated
in Delacroix's Le Lever, he
may
have
'
'
painted a paradigmatic example of the meaning of that new
,
I
.
structure.
13) Cezanne, drawing
for ((Interior with Nude)), pencil
on
43 This was
brought
to
my
attention
by
Nathan Knobler. See
paper, c. 1887-90, collection Mrs. Enid A. Haput, New
Gemma Levine, With
Henry
Moore the Artist at Work, (New
York
York. Photo: from Adrien Chappuis, The Drawings of Paul
1978), pp.
128-29. Cezanne, (New York 1973), II, fig.
968.
141
III. Picasso's Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon
Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon [Fig. 3]
reflects Picasso's interest
in C6zanne's bathers and in the Interior with Nude, but the
intrinsic
meaning
of the
painting may
lie in its
image
of
encounter with a
primal
eroticism that
belongs
to the
genre
of the erotic nude. He confronts us with the female nude from
the front, from the back, from the side; standing up, lying
and
sitting
down. His desire to have it all at one time would lead
him, as
Steinberg
has so
brilliantly understood, to
produce
a
single figure
that rotates all her
parts
before the viewer.44 The
interest in the
genre
of the erotic nude is a
primary
one in
Picasso's art
prior
to his cubist work, and is central to his art
after Cubism. C6zanne's nudes are of
particular importance
to
Picasso's
paintings
of nudes between 1906 and 1908. While
the
following quotations acknowledge
that influence
they deny
Cezanne's
specific impact
on the Demoiselles:
"...the female Bathers had a certain influence on the
Demoiselles..." But, as
Golding observes, "any
influence of
C6zanne that there
may
be in the Demoiselles as it now
appears
is of the most
general
kind".45
"Unlike the Demoiselles, it
[the
Three Woman] really
did
evolve
through
a series of
Cezannesque composition
studies of bathers".46
Most scholars
agree
that C6zanne's
paintings
were
impor-
tant to
Braque
and Picasso at the
beginning
of Cubism, but
no two of them, including
William Rubin and Leo
Steinberg
quoted above, agree
on the nature of the
inspiration.
While
Braque
is
essentially
identified with Cezanne's
landscapes,
Picasso between 1906-08, was obsessed
by
his bathers.
Steinberg's reading
of Picasso's Demoiselles makes it clear
that a
deep
content
pervades
the work that cannot be
accounted for
by thrusting
the future
development
of Cubism
back
upon
it.
Curiously
it is
just
that
thrusting
that has distorted
our
understanding
of C6zanne's works. In this instance
however, overzealous dialectical
controversy
between Stein-
44
Leo
Steinberg,
"The
Algerian
Women and Picasso at
Large",
in Other Criteria, (Oxford 1972), pp.
125-234.
45
William Rubin, "C6zannisme and the
Beginnings
of Cubism,"
in C6zanne the Late Works, (New
York 1977), p.
181.
46
Leo
Steinberg, "Resisting
C6zanne: Picasso's Three Women",
Art in America, (November-December, 1978), p.
11 6.
47
Ibid., and Leo
Steinberg,
"The
Philosophical Brothel, Part 1",
Art News, (September 1972), p.
20.
48
Steinberg, "...Brothel, Part 1", passim,
and Leo
Steinberg,
"The
Philosophical Brothel, Part 2", Art News
(October 1972), pp.
43-46.
The literature on Demoiselles is too
long
to cite. For recent discussions
of the
painting
see the October 1980 issue of Arts
Magazine
devoted
to Picasso and the 2 vols.
catalogue
"Primitivism" in the 20th
Century,
berg
and Rubin has
prevented
both of them from
giving proper
consideration to the
impact
of Cezanne's
painting
on Picasso's
Demoiselles.
In contrast to Picasso's Three Woman of
1908, Steinberg
argues,
Demoiselles of
1907, set in an
interior, was not
influenced
by
C6zanne.47 If Picasso saw the Barne's Interior
with Nude that contention is
negated.
In
ambiguously
frontaliz-
ing everything
in the
painting,
Cezanne created a
spatial
discontinuity
that denied the narrative
pictorial unity
that was
still a
part
of Delacroix's Le Lever. This
obviously appealed
to
Picasso, whose Demoiselles, as
Steinberg
has shown us, is
at least about direct confrontation and about
stylistic
and
spatial disunity.48
It is
part
of that
phenomenon
of the
"exploiting" artist, that Picasso
may
have used as a model for
the structure of one of the
major paintings
of the twentieth
century,
a small boudoir
painting
that was rather
unique
in
Cezanne's oeuvre.
Picasso was a
painter
of the human
figure,
and in
particular
of the female nude. It is no
surprise
that he would have been
interested in Cezanne's bathers as well as the nudes of
every
other artist. In the
years
between 1904 and 1907 he saw
Cezannes in the Autumn Salons in Paris and on exhibition at
Vollard's and Bernheim-Jeune's
galleries.49
Cezanne's Three
Bathers, the one owned
by
Matisse since 1899, was lent to
the Salon of 1904 and the seated
figure
in Demoiselles was
a
quotation
from it
[Fig. 14].50
In the Salon of 1904 a
photograph
of a
Tempation
of St.
Anthony
was on view, which
Reff believes
inspired
the nude in Demoiselles with one arm
lifted over her head.51 Derain had a
reproduction
of Cezanne's
Five Bathers on the wall of his studio and exhibited his own
remarkable Three
Bathers, obviously
modeled on
Cezanne,
in
the Salon des
Independents
in March 1907, before Picasso
completed
Demoiselles.52 Matisse
painted
his
Joy
of
Living
in
1905-6
using
motifs from the whole tradition of
nudity
including
C6zanne.53
Ingres'
Le Bain Turc was exhibited in the
1905 Salon, making
an
impact
on
everyone's nudes, including
those of Picasso.54
Gauguin's
erotic idols aroused
everyone
edited
by
William Rubin (New York
1984).
49
See A. Vollard and
Roger Gaucheron, Exposition
C6zanne
(Paris
1929), p.
27 for
listing
of Cezanne exhibitions from the 1870's
through
1921.
50
See Alfred H. Barr Jr., Matisse His Art and His Public, (Boston
1974), pp. 18, 38f., and Venturi, entry
381.
51
Theodore Reff, "C6zanne, Flaubert, St.
Anthony,
and the Queen
of Sheba", Art Bulletin, XLIV, (June 1962), p.
125 fn. 111. See Vollard,
op. cit., plate
47 for the
photograph.
52 Pierre Daix, Picasso the Cubist Years 1907-1916, (Boston
1979), p. 12, figs. 2, 4.
53
Barr, op. cit., p.
81f.
54
Daix, op. cit., p. 12, fig. 3, p.
14.
142
14) Cezanne, ((Three Bathers), oil on canvas, c. 1879-82, Musee du Petit Palais, Paris. Photo: Musee du Petit Palais.
143
who
quested
after a return to the
primitive,
and even Puvis
de Chavannes' ethereal women were still sources of
inspira-
tion.55
Examples
of female
nudity
were everywhere and those
mentioned above
probabily
seen
by
Picasso. As a result of
this abundance the
layers
of
image
influence on Picasso and
in
particular
on his Demoiselles will never be
fully
charted.
And to make matters more difficult he, like Delacroix and
Cezanne, was
steeped
in the tradition and looked at
everything,
past
as well as
contemporary.
But one
painting
in
particular,
Cezanne's Interior with Nude, could have
provided
him not
only
with a
figural
model but with a total structure of color
and
space
to
complement
it.
But if nudes were
everywhere,
where was Cezanne's
Interior? It was in
private
collections from 1899 on, and as
far as can be
established,
it was not
reproduced
before 1912.56
Although
I cannot
prove
that Picasso saw Cezanne's
painting,
I can show that his variation on the
genre
of the erotic nude
is
intrinsically dependent upon
it. As I have outlined above,
Cezanne's
paintings
absorbed Picasso at this time, and in
particular
his bathers. No other Cezanne
painting
of a nude
in an interior with this kind of structure has
emerged,
and
nothing
in
any
other artist's work that I am familiar with could
have
provided
the model for his formulation. Picasso's
previous
work leaves us somewhat
unprepared
for the radical
departure
he took in Demoiselles. All these factors do not
entirely preclude
coincidence, but their
conjoined weight
make it
very probable
that at a
stage
in Picasso's search for a new form of the erotic
nude, Cezanne's
painting quickened
his solution.
At first
glance
this little work of Cezanne's seems
hardly
capable
of
serving
as a model for one of the most
important,
if not the most
important painting
of the
early
twentieth
century.
In contrast to Cezanne's small boudoir
painting
with
two
figures,
Picasso's
huge
canvas with its five
figures
lacks
a chair, a mirror, a servant, a
pot
of leaves etc. But if we
55
Daix, op. cit., p.
182 and Barr, pp. 17, 34, 59, 60.
56
Venturi, op. cit., p.
122.
57
Pierre Daix, "II
n'y
a
pas
d'Art
Negre
dans ((Les Demoiselles
D'Avignon>)",
Gazette des Beaux-Arts, LXXVI, (1970), pp.
247-269.
While Daix's insistence on the total lack of
any impact
of tribal art
on Picasso's
painting
is overstated, his focus on the
impact
of Matisse,
Derain, Ingres, Cezanne, Greek and Etruscan art etc., on Picasso's
work at this time is
very important.
See John
Golding,
"Les 'Demoi-
selles
d'Avignon"', Burlington Magazine, C, (May 1958), pp.
155-163
for an
interpretation
that
regards Negro
art as crucial in the
develop-
ment of Picasso's
painting.
See also the discussion
by Rubin, "Picas-
so", in "Primitivism", op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 241-243, for
precise
documen-
tation. If one reads the latter article with care it seems to
justify
Daix's
claim.
58
Cezanne
already tangled
with
images
of
"public exposure"
in
The Eternal Feminine
painted
about 1875-77. See Gotz Adriani,
examine Demoiselles
closely
we see the
amazing
transforma-
tion that Picasso
appears
to have
wrought upon
elements in
the Interior. The contour of the middle
figure
echoes Cezanne's
nude in the Interior (as does the seated
figure
Cezanne's seated
nude in the Three Bathers, and the
figure
with one arm raised
Cezanne's
figure
of St.
Anthony
in the
Temptation).
The
fragmented
blue and
grey
curtain on the
right
side of his
painting duplicates
the same motif in Interior and the
sienna-colored
drapery
on the left
duplicates
Cezanne's curtain
on that same side. The
strong diagonal
on the lower left hand
side of Demoiselles
preserves
the
spatial
thrust of C6zanne's
canvas; in both works the foot of the nude is
contiguous
with
it. The tilted table with the fruit on it is a variation on C6zanne's
tilted floor with its
pot
of
leaves,
and the mirror is
probably
echoed in those small fractures of form next to the "borrowed"
nude in Demoiselles.
Perhaps
even that black servant
girl
on
the
right
in Interior has
something
to do with the masked
figures
on the
right
in Picasso's
painting.
He said that
they
were not based on tribal
examples
and his work
up
to
Demoiselles
might
lead us to believe him; at least on a conscious
level he
may
have had other
images
in mind.57
Nothing
is
directly copied
from C6zanne -
perhaps only
the
upper
contour
of the central nude
excepted
- but
everything points
to an
inspiration
of crucial
importance
to Picasso's work.
And what does this transformation mean in terms of the
structure of Picasso's
painting?
Cezanne's frontalization of
figure
and
space,
with the still
lingering
echoes of Delacroix's
voyeurism, may
have made such an
impact
on Picasso while
he was
painting
Demoiselles that he
changed
his
image
from
a scene in a bordello with male customers and with a moral
overtone, to an
image
of
primal
erotic encounter between
female "initiators", with the
voyeur
now the
exposed penetrator.
The
private viewing
of an
"object"
of desire is transformed
into a
public
confrontation with the sexual act.58
Steinberg
enriches our
understanding
of the
painting
when he
suggests
Cezanne Watercolors, (New
York
1983), p. 44, for an
apt description
of the
painting:
"...sardonic
allegory...
in which the female
principle
personified
receives
homage
of the world of men
lying
at her feet.
Typical representatives
of the
religious
and
worldly professions,
surrendering
to their instincts, do obeisance before the fairer sex...the
harlot
reigns
as the inevitable
complement
of man.
Exposed
as she
is to the lustful
gaze
of these men, she seems to be
delighting
in this
black-mass
parody
of an Ecce Homo; she is
clearly getting
back at
the emient
corrupters
who
exploit
her and the social class to which
she
belongs."
That also incudes C6zanne who
portrays
himself in the
painting.
In the earlier
painting,
Modern Olympia,
still in the framework
of the traditional erotic nude, C6zanne
paints
himself as a client
being
shown the
sleeping
nude who is unveiled
by
a blackamoor. While the
voyeur
is included in the
painting,
he still sees while not
being
seen.
He makes that
very
clear
by
the formal
arrangement
of the
painting
placing
the nude above him and
lighting
her
up
like an
object
on
stage.
See Adriani, pp.
38-40.
144
that the tilted table with its
angular
melon
wedge
on a direct
line with the covered lower
parts
of the central nude "is" male
genital
intrusion.59
The
history
of the
painting
and its transformations tell us
about the
probable
role Cezanne's work
played
in Picasso's
formulation as well as about his
borrowings
from other artists,
including quotations
from his own work. From 1905 on there
are
drawings
and
paintings inspired by
Cezanne's bathers that
chart Picasso's
change
from a fluid
drawing
manner to one
closer to the
plasticity
of Cezanne's
figures.60
Picasso also
did a series of
drawings
and
paintings
of women
fixing
their
hair or
having
it fixed, which show this
change:
some indebted
to a motif in
Ingres'
Le Bain Turc
(Louvre),
while others
perhaps
to Titian's Venus
Anadyomene
in
Bridgewater House, London61.
However, one
painting
in
particular,
done in the summer of
1906, in Gosol, with
drawings
and
painting
studies for it,
seem to be indebted to Cezanne's Interior. Called La Toilette,
it is a
large painting
of a woman
fixing
her hair with her arms
raised in an
angular position
above her head
[Fig. 15]62.
She
looks into a mirror held
by
a female of the "Grecian"
type
with dark brown hair, draped
in a
garment
of blue, grey
and
violet. The hair of the nude is sienna colored and her
body
a
salmon
pink;
a
deeper pink
defines the floor
plane
in contrast
with a wall
painted
a rich violet
grey.
The color
vocabulary
is
a
simplification
of the warm and cool contrasts in Interior,
and will be found
again
in Demoiselles.
While still rendered in the
lyrical
manner that characterizes
Picasso's work
through
the summer of 1906, the
simplicity
of the
two-figure motif, the
frontality
of the nude, and the
flattening
of the floor and wall
planes point
in the direction
of Cezanne. The
angle
of the mirror and the
profile
of the
woman
holding
it exist in an "inner"
space
that is blocked
from
complete encounter, an echo of that
privatism
that still
pervades
Cezanne's
painting,
but the
space
is not
yet
Cezannesque.
The
impact
of Lautrec and the
Symbolist painters,
which
added to Picasso's natural
urge
towards an
expressive image,
resulted in his
making
his
figures large
and
putting
them
up
close to the viewer. The
surroundings
were a flattened and
59
Steinberg,"...B.rothel, Part 1", op. cit., p.
23.
60
See Pierre Daix, Picasso the Blue and Rose Periods, (Greenwich
1967), pp.
254 f.
61
Daix, Blue and Rose Periods, pp. 389, 300-01, 320-21.
Figure
XV. 36 on
page
301
might
even be a
drawing
after Titian. See Clark,
op. cit., fig.
95. This motif
appears
in several
drawings
and
paintings
of 1906.
62
Daix, (1967), op. cit.,
fig.
XV.34 and
pp.
300-01.
63
Daix, (1967), op. cit., p.
320 f.
64
Daix, (1967), op. cit.,
fig.
XVI.32 and XVI.33, p.
328.
65
Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso
(Paris 1970),
Vol. 22, fig.
461.
66
Daix, (1967), op. cit., p. 330, figs. D.XVI.8, D.XVI.9. See also
simplified
version of traditional
perspective,
like that
preferred
by many
artists in the nineteenth and
early
twentieth centuries.
While I think that Picasso saw Cezanne's Interior sometime
in the first half of 1906,
it would have been the
two-figure
motif and the color contrast that
engaged
him at that time
and not the reverberations of a new kind of
space
in which
to accomodate a "frontalized"
figure.
All
through
1906 Picasso looked at Cezanne's bathers,
and from the autumn on he made his
figures very
solid and
sculptural.63
Two small
paintings
in the Barnes Foundation,
one of three nudes with a curtain, and one of a
single
nude
with her arm lifted
contiguous
with a curtain, of
importance
for Demoiselles, clearly
show that Picasso was
thinking
about
Cezanne's nudes in a new
way [Fig. 16].64
This is also true
of a
drawing
with four
figures
and a curtain in the
Berggruen
Collection in Paris: the left two nudes were transformed in
the autumn of that
year
into that remarkable
painting
of the
Two Nudes in the Museum of Modern Art.65 The nude still
combs her hair, and in two
pencil
studies she cradles her head
while
doing so, but turns her
body
to us: almost a blend of
Cezanne and Delacroix.66
Yet all these
nudes, even the
big sculptural ones, still
belong
to a domestic ambiance.
They engage
in
caring acts, or look
fondly
towards each other, hold hands, or cast down their
eyes. They
all seem remote and internalized and that is true
of
many
of the
portraits
and even the
self-portraits
of that
year:
even Gertrude Stein, of all
people,
looks inward with
unfocused
eyes.
In the first
stages
of Demoiselles this domestic
ambiance continues, even if as a bordello
parlor,
and the lack
of
eye
focus is still the case. "No modern
painting engages
you
with such brutal
immediacy.
Of the five
figures depicted,
one holds back a curtain to make
you
see: one intrudes from
the rear; the
remaining
three stare
you
down. The
unity
of the
picture,
famous for its internal
stylistic disruptions,
resides
above all in the startled consciousness of a viewer who sees
himself seen".
[Underline
for
emphasis
is mine, J.
B.].67
And so we have
Steinberg's interpretation
of Picasso's
variation on the erotic nude. In "The
Philosophical
Brothel"
he
carefully
addresses the 19 full
composition
studies for
D.XVI.15 Nude and Faun, a watercolor of Autumn 1906. Here the
nude is almost
entirely
frontalized and the
large proportions
of her
body
and rather
grotsque
facial features seem to
anticipate
what
Steinberg
calls the
"aggressive
nudes" in Demoiselles. In "...Brothel,
Part 2," op. cit., p.
42 he misreads this
figure
as
making
a
pointing
gesture
and therefore
suggests
that it was a sketch for the
pointing
partner
in Two Women: "...she stands alone, but alone with a
goat
footed faun
traipsing up.
What connection is there between the
gift
of the
satyr
and the
finger
addressed to the mind?" I think none,
because this
figure
is not
pointing
at all but
holding
her hair like the
Venus
Anadyomene.
67
Steinberg,
"... Brothel, Part 1", op. cit., p.
21.
145
15) Picasso, ((La Toilette)), oil on canvas, 1906,
Albright-
Knox Art
Gallery,
Buffalo. Photo:
Albright-Knox
Art
Gallery, Buffalo, New York, Fellows for Life Fund, 1926.
68
Steinberg,
"... Brothel, Part 1", op. cit., p.
22 "The Picture is a
tidal wave of female
aggression;
one either
experiences
the Demoi-
selles as an
onslaught,
or shuts it off. But the assult on the viewer is
only
half the action, for the viewer, as the
painting
conceives him on
this side of the
picture plane repays
in kind". Elizabeth Hutton Turner's
article, "Who is in the Brothel of
Avignon?
A Case for Context", Artibus
et Historiae, 9
(1984), pp. 139-57, introduces us to an
interpretation
that
emphasizes
caricature. I think that she
provides
another
important
"archeological" layer.
I am less convinced that the
"physical
culture"
examples
she introduces were direct sources. She
injects
some
Demoiselles, putting
them in a
sequence
of
development along
with a number of
drawings
and
paintings
of
single figures.
He
then builds
up
a
complex meaning
of the work that
rightly
frees it from the constraints of
being
"the first cubist
painting".
His
insights
are
impressive
but I would like to add an
emendation that takes into account the
impact
of Cezanne's
Interior on Demoiselles. This shifts its
meaning away
from
being
"a tidal wave of female
aggression"
to a variation in
the
genre
of the erotic nude where initiators encounter
participants.68
The
early
versions of Demoiselles are set in a brothel
parlor,
contain five women, a man seated at a table and a man
entering through
a curtain
carrying
a book
[Fig. 17].
In a few
preparatory drawings
he carries a skull. In the later version
he turns into a woman, the man seated at the table
disappears,
and we are left with five women, a curtain and a table with
fruit on it. In the
early
version facial features seem not to
concern Picasso and are often not even indicated.
They begin
to
appear
in the
Philadelphia water-color, the last
study
before
the
painting,
and then in the finished
painting eyes
stare
everywhere [Fig. 18]. In the earlier version the
space
is
"Baroque":
in the final version it becomes almost
unbearably
compressed
and frontalized. In the earlier version there is an
enclosed narrative content, perhaps
not unlike Delacroix's
original concept
in Le Lever in the final version
figures
and
space
direct the erotic encounter to a
participating
viewer.69
When in the course of
changing
Demoiselles did Picasso
look
again
at Cezanne's Interior and understand not
only
the
significance
of the
ambiguity
of the
position
of the
figure
but
the whole structure of the
painting?
"Consider the contrast
of
gesture
in the two
pictures.
Picasso's
painting
of the Two
Women ends a
period
of
preoccupation
with woman as a
closed
body,
restricted to
self-sealing attitudes, folded hands,
arms crossed, limbs locked
together,
and elbows that cleave
to the trunk. Then in Demoiselles - all elbows out! " 70 While
I believe that Picasso had C6zanne's Interior in mind from
1906 on as he did the bather
paintings,
and that he borrowed
wonderful humor into the discussion of a
painting
that has
always
been treated with
deadly
seriousness. Such humor, however, is not
sufficient to
explain
the "shock" that the
painting
still
produces
when
one encounters it. I do think that it was
probably
a "serious
joke"
on
one level, but
perhaps
that is also true for most
examples
in the
genre
of the erotic nude.
69
Daix, Cubist Years, op. cit., pp.
191-196 and
Steinberg, "...Brothel,
Part 1 and 2", op.
cit.
70
Steinberg, "...Brothel, Part 2", op. cit., p.
42.
146
16) Picasso, ((Three Nudes)), oil on canvas, 1906, the Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania.
Photo: The Barnes
Foundation, Merion Station, Pa., U.S.A.
the
figures
from it and from them as well, as he discovered.
the
implications
of "all elbows out", he addressed Interior with
a new kind of
recognition. Finally
Demoiselles would become
a "collection" of
single
confrontational motifs in a "Cezannes-
que" space.
There is a series of small ink studies that
Steinberg
reproduces
in his first "Brothel" article that
plots
this
understanding.
As we watch one
figure
in
particular
come
from behind to
emerge
as the central
figure
in Demoiselles,
147
17) Picasso, Study for ((Les Demoiselles d'Avignon),
pencil and pastel on paper, 1907. Kupferstichkabinett
der oeffentlichen Kunstsammlung, Basel. Photo:
Kupferstichkabinett,
Kunstmuseum, Basel.
with both her elbows out, we watch everything else in the
painting gel.71 The angularity of the curtains becomes impor-
tant, the "lying, sitting standing figure" second to the left
suddenly puts her arm up and elbow out, and the
Cezannesque
"squatter's" elbows become the contours of triangular shapes
that echo the intruding table
-
sharp angles are suddenly
everywhere.72
The central figure with her elbows out engaged Picasso
in several drawings and oil studies in the spring of 1907. In
those studies, as in the studies of the whole composition, I
think he had several sources in mind.73 Then in the watercolor
and the final painting Picasso returns to the specific source
of that figure and copies Cezanne's nude from Interior for the
same ambiguity of position he previously used in La Toilette,
the nude turned to us and to the mirror at the same time.
The contour of the upper left side of the body and the figure's
breasts are almost exact duplicates of the Cezanne. And if
we now look at the mirror and the servant in Interior and
71
Steinberg, "...Brothel, Part 1 ", op. cit., pp. 24-5, figs. 6-12, 632,
633, 637, 641, 642, 644.
72
Steinberg, "...Brothel, Part 1", op. cit., p. 24.
73
Daix, (1979), op. cit., p. 194, reproduces several studies in
gouache, oil and charcoal of a figure with arms raised above her head
in a "squared" off format that looks as if it were based on some kind
of "primitive" sculpture. In early versions of Demoiselles that figure is
down to the
pot
of leaves on the tilted floor, they
are all there
still
together
in Demoiselles, transformed into fractures, tribal
mask and fruit on a tilted table.
Everything
but the mask-like faces and the almost
squared
proportions
of the
painting
are in the small
Philadelphia
watercolor. The warm and cool color scheme of Cezanne's
painting
has been
preserved
and
simplified.
Even the
yellow
and
green
at the bottom of Interior were considered and then
given up.
In one of the earliest
composition
sketches in
pencil
and
pastel,
a table in the
foreground
contained a
pot
of flowers
in
yellow
and
green [Fig. 17].
In this
drawing
the left hand
curtain is a warm
orange,
and an area filled in behind the
flowers is crimson. Could it be a coincidence that the
relationship
between the
pot
of flowers and the dish on the
table with those
angular
melon slices is the same as the
pot
of leaves to the
tray
the servant holds in Interior?74
While the
Philadelphia
watercolor assembles all these
Cezannesque elements, the final version seems to
disrupt
its
unity by including
those masks and
staring eyes.
While
Steinberg
almost succeeds in
accounting
for them, perhaps
a female
voyeur's
variation
may
shift the
emphasis.
Here is
Steinberg quoted
at some
length:
"Even before the revision of the
right
side of the
painting
under
impact
of
Negro art, Picasso wanted his doxies
depersonalized
and barbaric. In the end, his reason for
making
them
savage
was the same reason at the
beginning
for
making
them whores.
They
were to
personify
sheer
sexual
energy
as the
image
of a life force. If Picasso in
1907 felt, as
Joyce did, that 'female
coyness
and male
idealism were
counterparts,
that the
sugaring
of love and
courtship
was a
part
of the
general self-deception
and
refusal to
recognize reality...',
then he would, in this
picture,
project sexuality
divested of all accretions of culture -
without
appeal
to
privacy, tenderness, gallantry,
or that
appreciation
of
beauty
which
presupposes
detachment and
distance... And the assimilation of African forms was but
the final
step
in the
continuing
realization of an idea - the
trauma of sexual encounter
experienced
as an animalistic
clash, a
stripping away
even of
personal
love -
again parlor
reverting
to
jungle; again,
Nietzsche's "wild naked nature
with the bold face of truth".75
indebted to the
"Ingres, Ger6me, Matisse" version of the
languid
nude, while the final
figure already
formed in the
Philadelphia
waterco-
lor
belongs
to the frontalized
angular type.
That
change may
relate
to studies like the above.
74
Daix, (1979), op. cit., plate II, p.
21.
75
Steinberg, "...Brothel, Part 2", op. cit., p. 43.
148
If whores
personify
sexual
energy
as an
image
of a life
force for
Picasso, and if these five women are still in a bordello,
then the curtain has
opened
on
private parlor games
and
everyone
is a
participant.
But are these women
savage
and
barbaric, the faces of female
aggression? Perhaps only
if
you
are a male
voyeur.
It is true that Picasso has invested the
whole
painting
with a
disturbing
sexual
energy,
but that has
always
been the
purpose
of the
genre
of the erotic nude. In
using
C6zanne's Interior as a model Picasso had a
prime
example
of such a
"charged"
work. But Picasso did not
play
the role of the
voyeur
even to the extent that C6zanne did
when he offered
up
that
bouquet
of flowers to the viewer.
Picasso
changed
the final version of Demoiselles from a "moral"
peep
show in a bordello
parlor
to a universal
acknowledgement
of the sexual encounter between man and woman. Could the
universality
of that encounter be made more concrete than
Picasso made it in Demoiselles?
Picasso collected these women from
everywhere
in Ce-
zannesque poses
seen from the front, side and back; lying,
sitting
and
standing.
He then collected their faces to suit their
bodies not
only
from the tradition of Western art but from
non-western
places
as well. The
irony
of the bordello as a
universal
pot pourri:
no discrimination there! The
figure
to the
left sounds the leitmotif of
sculpture.
As she holds
open
the
curtain she relates to it like those Cezanne bathers that lean
against
tree trunks or whose bodies resemble their forms.76
She is from the time and
place
where Western historians first
find "civilized" culture. She is formed like an
Egyptian
statue
with a
profile
like those painted tomb
images
with one
frontalized
staring eye.
The two central nudes are Mediterra-
nean
(Iberian)
in mask as well as
body. They
are Western
conceptions
of the female nude first formed in Greece. The
figure parting
the curtain in the back
may
be an
analogue
to
all those blackamoors who are a stock attribute of the
genre,
now included as
part
of the collection. The
squatter
on the
lower
right
is
primordial,
whether indebted to tribal art or not.
Her mask is unformed or
preformed
like her
body:
the farthest
76
Culminating,
of course, in the
large Philadelphia
Bathers. See
Venturi, op. cit., p.
719.
77
After Demoiselles some
expressionists
returned to the
image
of woman's
sexuality
as
temptation
and the cause of male
anguish,
as
they
had rendered her in the North in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, and as Cezanne had
painted
her in his
early
work. De
Kooning painted
the nude woman with such erotic
energy
no male
could confront her: all breasts and abdomen and vulva like those
swollen Paleolithic "Venus" stones. Lachaise did the same but in a
manner that formed her as a
great
earth
goddess
for men to
worship.
Picasso
spent
the rest of his life after Cubism
using every
other artist's
image
of the nude, including
his own, to find all sorts of
ways to have
18) Picasso, Study
for the
((Young
Ladies of
Avignon>,
watercolor, 1907, the
Philadelphia
Museum of Art,
Philadelphia.
Photo:
Philadelphia
Museum of Art,
The A. E. Gallatin Collection.
polarity
from the Western
voyeuristic
nude that one can
imagine.
Some of the
figures
stare out at the viewer as
initiators; and the
irony
of it all is that a woman
may
have to
congratulate
that arch "user" of women for
having
created
one of the most
powerful images
of woman's erotic
appetites.
At the
very least, he confronted them. It would still be awhile
before women artists added their variations to the
genre [Fig.
19].77
In this
study
of the
changes
in the direction of confrontation
and encounter that C6zanne and Picasso
played upon the
more traditional
voyeuristic depictions
of the erotic nude like
Delacroix's, I have been
examinig
a
prime
case of the relations
all of her at one time. She is still made as an
"object"
of desire in
Lucian Freud's bizarre erotic
paintings,
and sometimes
only
as an
object
as
Philip
Pearlstein
paints
her in his studio of
things, perhaps
no
longer
in the
genre
at all. And new
voyeurs
who never made
images
of their desires before now
vary
the
genre:
women make nude
images
of men and women, and men render men
directly
instead of
in the
guise
of a St. Sebastian.
Recently,
artists like
Nancy Spero
deal
with the themes of
voyeurism
and encounter
by drawings
of
exploited
and tortured woman and with women in self-liberation and self-love.
But the
copying goes on, for some of her nudes are like the
lyrical
drawings
on Greek
pots,
some have Etruscan sources and others
seem indebted to
Egyptian
motifs.
149
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150
between
constancy
and
change
that define the
parameters
of
a
genre.
The element of
constancy
in the tradition of the
genre
of the erotic nude seems to be about
voyeurism.
The
changes
we have noted in C6zanne and Picasso
emphasize
confronta-
tion, the
opposite
of the
voyeuristic. Perhaps
this
opposition
defines the
parameters
of the
genre
and if one examined all
the
examples
so
categorized,
all variations would fall in
between. What
aspect
of the
genre
is
emphasized
at a
given
time is
probably explained
in
examining
the realm of social
and
political
events while the
continuity
in the
genre
is the
purview
of culture.
The results of a
study
of
parameters
would
provide
us with
a
theory
of
genres
which
may
also
provide
us with a model
of
community.
While artists make
singular objects,
the
repository
of value
may
lie not in the
unique
art
object,
because
it, like the artist, is
impermanent.
It is in the communication
to viewers of shared conventions that
longevity
resides and
these conventions sustain artists and direct their contributions.
When theoreticians (and practitioners) acknowledge
that
art is
intrinsically
a communal
activity,
then
they
will contribute
a
meaningful
model of
continuity
and
change.
The
egoistic
one based on radical innovation will then be
judged
as not
only incapable
of
providing
an account of what art
practice
is
really about, but as an
essentially
destructive model. "In
my
opinion
one does not substitute oneself for the
past,
one
just
adds a new link".
151

The Genre of The Erotic Nude

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Delacroix's "Le Lever," Czanne's "Interior with Nude," Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon,"

and the Genre of the Erotic Nude

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