Nude Bodies: The Controversial Aesthetics of Exposure

Transcription

1 Nude Bodies: The Controversial Aesthetics of Exposure Chris Kent Victorian Review, Volume 42, Number 1, Spring 2016, pp. 1-4 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: For additional information about this article No institutional affiliation (29 Oct :14 GMT)

2 Nude Bodies: The Controversial Aesthetics of Exposure Chris Kent Nude was a relative term for Victorians, and perhaps all the more thrilling for that. It generally applied to the female body, for both in art and in fact, male nudity was in low demand. Men s fashion saw the triumph of the tubular suit, that egalitarian outfit that, if anything, privileged the physique of men with thin legs and shoulders like coat hangers. Combined with high collars, spats, gloves, and the newly fashionable beard, it meant that about ninety-nine per cent of the properly dressed male body was concealed in public. The general fashion rule for the male body was the less of it showing, the better. Women s fashion, by contrast, featured strategic nudity. If the female body from the waist down was taboo territory, the bust, arms, shoulders, and neck were very much in play. Queen Victoria, who was proud of her shoulders (Munich 64), required décolleté dresses for ladies appearing in court, strictly enforcing that rule until she was almost seventy, when she made known that she would give permission to those, such as infirm or older ladies, who applied through the Lord Chamberlain to wear a high dress. No lady who has a good neck and shoulders will wear a high dress, a fashionable dressmaker confidently predicted ( The Queen and Court Dresses 7). On the stage, nudity is the only wear, reported a London newspaper in 1869, noting the scanty costume worn by Nelly Powers as Robinson Crusoe in the Christmas pantomime of that name at Covent Garden ( The Pantomimes 11). Attractive women played almost all the parts, male and female, in the pantomimes, burlesques, and extravaganzas that were generally the most profitable productions in the Victorian theatre. The few men on these stages were reduced to playing comic roles, including old women. Transvestism ruled because the female body put bums on seats. Male dress enabled the female body, and above all the female leg, which Victorian women s fashion conspired to mystify and conceal, to be openly displayed. The ballet, simultaneously vulgarized and incorporated into spectacles, saw the triumph of the flaring tutu, knee-length and higher, and the reduction of male dancers to lifting devices. Women were increasingly popular in music hall and circus acts. The diarist Arthur Munby, a close observer of the female body, thought it [was] not well to see a nude man fling a nude girl about... or to see her grip his body in mid-air between her seemingly bare thighs (qtd. in Smith 54). The first human cannonball, the beautiful and sensational young Lulu protege of the notable Canadian acrobat William Hunt, who styled himself the Great Farini was actually a boy in drag (Peacock 198). So incensed was the American actress Olive Logan that in The Nude Woman Question, she denounced the nude drama and the leg business that were driving respectable, legitimate actresses like herself off the stage (193). Victorian Review 42: Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada

3 victorian review Volume 42 Number 1 Queen Victoria was an enthusiastic patron of the nude in art. She and Prince Albert frequently gave each other nude paintings and statues as birthday presents. She evidently subscribed to the view of William Etty, a prominent painter of the nude, that God s most glorious work [was] WOMAN, that all human beauty had been concentrated in her (qtd. in Lambourne 282). Reconciling the female nude and Christian morals entailed certain artistic conventions intended to discharge the nude s eroticism. The most familiar was to distance the nude subject in space, time, and culture by situating it in pre-christian Greece or Rome, or in the harems and slave markets of the Islamic Middle East. However, the medieval English setting of Edwin Landseer s Lady Godiva s Prayer (c. 1865) was too close for some critics comfort (Smith 55). The model Eliza Crowe, who claimed to have sat for early sketches of Landseer s controversial painting, also modelled for Etty. Much better known by her professional name, Madame Warton, she conducted a tableau vivant troupe that was the best known of its era. Tableaux vivants were perhaps the most controversial manifestations of Victorian nudity. These productions went under several names, such as model artists, poses plastiques, and living pictures. In them, one or more women (and occasionally men if the subject required them) would pose immobile, claiming to reproduce a famous statue or a grouping from a well-known painting, usually involving the nude figure. Their production values and quality varied widely. The lowest might simply be a single woman striking a classic pose on a platform or revolving turntable in some sordid drinking place, as described with evident repugnance by George Gissing (2: ). The better shows involved multiple figures and perhaps some scenery. Common to all tableaux vivants was what we would call a simulation of nudity but what for Victorians viewers was nudity itself. This nudity was achieved by flesh-coloured silk tights and a vest that completely covered the body but fitted so closely as to seamlessly reveal the body s entire form, from ankle to neck. Given that the conventions of nudity in art involved the editing of details of the genitalia and body hair, a figure so covered would indeed look entirely unclothed, especially at a distance in some smoky, ill-lit dive. Needless to say, such shows had a low reputation, and the women who appeared in them were commonly, and often justifiably, classed with prostitutes. Among the numerous sexual partners of Walter, the unknown author of My Secret Life (1888), was a woman whom he assisted in the management of Madame Warton s troupe after the latter s death (Walter ). She was both a model and a prostitute, a combination that to many Victorians seemed automatic. The artist s model was a figure of fascination for Victorians, and the artist s studio a transgressive site. The nude model was gaining an identity in such controversial paintings as Manet s Le déjeuner sur l herbe ( ) and Olympia (1863), in which distinctly contemporary-looking nude women 2

4 Forum: Victorian Bodies boldly return the viewer s gaze. Musetta, of Giacomo Puccini s La bohème (1896), and Du Maurier s Trilby (1894) further projected the artist s model into public consciousness. The advent of photography, which was quickly directed toward the nude body, facilitated artists access but also extended that access to a wider public, whose interest in the nude body lacked traditional legitimacy hence the increasing usage of the now-familiar term pornography. Photography reproduced the physical details and identifying features of the model in ways art had generally avoided in the name of the ideal. The resurgence of the passive female nude in British art from around 1870, which Alison Smith suggests was a rearguard assertion of masculinity in response to the women s movement, increased public consciousness of the artist s model (Smith 133), as did the attention paid to her by the burgeoning purity movement, for which she served as an exemplary victim of male sexual privilege (Smith 221). Protecting the artistic sanctity of the nude was clearly becoming more difficult by the mid-nineteenth century, as it was being exposed to eyes that lacked the appropriate cultural qualifications. An artist who addressed this issue with unusual directness was Matthew Somerville Morgan ( ), an Anglo-American popular artist who, in 1875, created Matt Morgan s Living Pictures, a tableau vivant production, first exhibited on Broadway, that toured America in the following decades, attracting widespread criticism and acclaim. Morgan trained as a scene painter and was chief artist for the 1869 Covent Garden pantomime mentioned above. The following year, he mysteriously left England for Spain and, in 1871, arrived in New York, where he quickly relaunched a successful artistic career. What made Morgan s tableaux vivants different was that he employed his expertise as a scene painter and his knowledge of theatre production, particularly lighting, to create striking reproductions of some of the best-known and controversial contemporary French nude paintings, including Jean-Léon Gérôme s Phryne before the Areopagus (1861) and Cleopatra before Caesar (1866), and Alexandre Cabanel s Birth of Venus (1863) paintings in which the nude female body is flagrantly exhibited. Within a gilt frame, against a carefully painted background, brilliantly illuminated by well-directed limelight, Morgan s tableaux presented attractive young women posing in flesh-coloured tights. His show created a sensation. The press, which he cultivated, covered it extensively and helpfully. Morgan s show drew well, attracting the attention of Anthony Comstock, who was just beginning his notorious career as chief protector of America s morals. Comstock tried unsuccessfully to shut it down. Morgan fought back, giving a bit of ground by deploying strategically placed wisps of gauze which, of course, only served to draw attention to those parts of the body they pretended to conceal while stoutly defending the artistic merit of his tableaux. If the paintings his tableaux represented were fit to be exhibited at the Paris Salon, to hang on the walls of rich New Yorkers, and to be reproduced by major art publishers, he declared, then they were fit for the eyes 3

5 victorian review Volume 42 Number 1 of the general public. Morgan employed some of Etty s arguments about the supreme beauty of the female body and dismissed his critics by observing that to the lewd mind, all things are lewd (qtd. in McCullough 75). Perhaps his most interesting and original defence of his tableaux was his claim that they were actually superior to their originals in that the paintings of Gérôme and Cabanel offered necessarily inadequate painted representations of female beauty, whereas he offered viewers the greatest work of the Creator alive, in the flesh, the real thing. His viewers, he maintained, were seeing what the artist saw: the actual nude model. They were privileged to penetrate that exciting space, the studio itself, for the breathless two minutes or so that his beautiful models posed frozen before their eyes. Thus did Morgan claim to confer on his Victorian audiences the cultural credentials of connoisseurship that entitled them to appreciate the (fully covered) nude body. Works Cited Gissing, George. Workers in the Dawn Edited by Pierre Coustillas, 2 vols, Harvester, Lambourne, Lionel. Victorian Painting. Phaidon, Logan, Olive. The Nude Woman Question. Packard s Monthly: The Young Men s Magazine, vol. 1, no. 7, Jul. 1869, pp McCullough, Jack W. Living Pictures on the New York Stage. UMI Research P, Munich, Adrienne. Queen Victoria s Secrets. Columbia UP, The Pantomimes. Pall Mall Gazette, 2 Jan. 1869, p. 11. British Newspaper Archive. Peacock, Shane. The Great Farini: The High-Wire Life of William Hunt. Viking, The Queen and Court Dresses. Pall Mall Gazette, 6 Feb. 1889, p. 11. British Newspaper Archive. Smith, Alison. The Victorian Nude: Sexuality, Morality and Art. Manchester UP, Walter. My Secret Life Grove, The Working Body: Re-forming the Factory Body Jessica Kuskey This image on the 1832 title page of John Brown s A Memoir of Robert Blincoe (fig. 1), foregrounds the centrality of physical deformity in Blincoe s life story: he is knock-kneed, both feet are turned outward, his legs are disproportionately short compared to the length of his arms and torso, and his non-functioning left index finger is displayed prominently against the brim of his hat. The illustration invites the reader into the book to discover what kind of life could have produced this body. In addition to telling his life story to Brown, a middle-class journalist who composed and published the Memoir for him, Blincoe testified before Parliament as to the long-term effects of factory work, displaying his deformities and scars as evidence authenticating the book s claims. Early nineteenth-century debates over the factory question created a variety of opportunities for even illiterate workers like Blincoe to describe the physical impact of factory labour and make their 4