Chit Chat with ARTalk’s Anna Brzyski
UK Professor and Art Historian Anna Brzyski is leading tomorrow night’s ARTalk, and in case there was any doubt about why you should come, we decided to give you a sneak peek at some of Brzyski’s infinite wisdom. To learn more about the evolution of the nude form in Western art, plan to meet us at LAL @ Loudoun House at 7pm. ARTalk is free and everyone is invited, so bring your pals!
ArtBeat: As an art historian, what do you think is the most significant/prolific/transformative period for the nude in art?
Brzyski: If one takes as a criterion the number of nudes produced and shown in public exhibitions, then certainly the 19th century was the most prolific period. However, this was not true everywhere. While the nude ‘ruled’ the Paris Salon, it was scarcely visible in England and Central Europe. In terms of the most dynamic and controversial periods, I would have to choose either the turn of the 19th century or the present. In both instances, the nude was/is used by artists to tackle socially sensitive areas, in particular those pertaining to sexuality.
ArtBeat: Who are three artists working with the imagery of the nude, living or dead, that we should definitely know about and why?
Brzyski: Jacques Louis David, because his work set the standard for the imagery of the heroic male nude in the 18th and the early 19th centuries; Egon Schiele, because he took away the nude’s neutrality and made the image of the naked body explicitly sexual and erotic; and Robert Mapplethorpe, because he paved the way for the contemporary explorations of the body as a site of homoerotic desire.
ArtBeat: Naked or nude… What’s your take on the difference?
Brzyski: The naked is a body without clothing, a person in various states of undress; the nude is a convention of art practice; it is an aesthetic object or the body aestheticised into an object of artful gaze.
ArtBeat: What are some historic scandals that have arisen from the display of nudes? Any artists who’ve been arrested, galleries who’ve been shut down?
Brzyski: In Europe, Eduard Manet’s Olympia caused quite a stir when it was exhibited at the 1865 Paris Salon. Egon Schiele was arrested and charged with producing pornography in Vienna at the turn of the 19th century. In America, Horatio Greenough’s semi-nude sculpture of George Washington caused a minor scandal when it was unveiled in 1841. All those examples are from the 19th century.
More recently, one should mention the controversy surrounding exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s explicitly homoerotic and sadomasochistic photographs. Here, however, the issue was not just the appropriate or inappropriate nature of these images, but the federal funding of the show.
ArtBeat: Why do you believe the nude is such an enticing and yet polarizing subject of visual art?
Brzyski: It is not the nude, but rather how the nude represents something – gender, class, race, sexual orientation – that is generally problematic. What’s appealing is what is not supposed to be appealing in the nude – its erotic potential.
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