Art: Shy About the Nude

Until the present century, it was often a rather risky business for an American artist to do a nude. When the painter John Vanderlyn exhibited an inoffensive Ariadne in New York in 1815, his great rival John Trumbull was able to stir up enough scandalized protests almost to ruin poor Vanderlyn forever. When William Page tried to exhibit his 1862 Venus in Boston, there was such an outcry that the painting was whisked from public view. At the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where on Ladies’ Day the Greek statues were draped, the great Thomas Eakins posed a male and female model together and as an upshot of the incident had to resign from the faculty.

For all this Puritanism. U.S. artists have inevitably been drawn to art’s greatest theme, and a good sampling of the results can be seen in a show opening this week at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. One effect of reaching far and wide for paintings of a single subject matter is to show that America has had some pretty wretched painters. But good and bad, the nudes are a fascinating reflection of the changing styles and attitudes that were a part of the making of the nation.

A Most Modest Venus. The earliest work is by James Peale, the brother of the more famous Charles Willson Peale.

James’s picture, painted around 1800, is a classical Venus, treated so gingerly that the figures are the essence of modesty. Boston’s William Rimmer, though he was a physician and anatomist, and though he was a sculptor who must have known the classic Greek and Roman models, felt constrained to leave out the genitals when he painted a floating male figure in Evening, Fall of Day. Ralph Blakelock, who ended his days trying to paint million-dollar bills in a Middletown, N.Y., asylum, possessed a talent that still has the power to haunt. His small Wood Nymph is set in a fantasy forest, as dreamlike as a landscape by Ryder.

As the Brooklyn exhibition shows, U.S. artists could be both superb and silly. In 1874, Henry Gray did a classical female figure swathed in great swirls of red, white and blue bunting, which he called Birth of the Flag. Only three years later, William Morris Hunt turned out his Bathers, a simple, naturalistic scene showing a young boy poised to dive off the shoulders of another. George Fuller of Deerfield, Mass. painted a pale Arethusa that might have been a model for the white-robed girl in the old White Rock ads. Yet Fuller’s younger contemporary, Louis Eilshemius, a sad-eyed man who called himself “Supreme Spirit of the Spheres,” could produce an enormously imaginative Afternoon Wind composed of wispy figures being whisked through the air like leaves swirling in a breeze.

“We’ve Got to Be Men.” With the 20th century, the nude came into its own, only to disintegrate in the last 15 years under the probing abstractionist brushes of Willem de Kooning and others like him. The exhibition has a rare nude by Maurice Prendergast, a delicate bit of impressionism by Mary Cassatt, an angular Girl Wearing Bandanna by Yasuo Kuniyoshi. But even when the nude is at its most vigorous, its treatment varies dramatically from artist to artist. William Glackens’ Nude with Apple is in standard studio pose—a composition of color rather than a slice of life. John Sloan, realist though he was, thought most painted nudes pornographic, concealed his in a kind of armor because “works of art are made of wood and bronze and oil paint, not flesh and blood.”

Guy Pene du Bois took the opposite approach. “We’ve got to be men first of all,” he said. “The artist can come later.” In Edward Hopper’s painting, the nude is sculptured mood — a figure almost unbear ably vulnerable to the dawning day. one more way for Hopper to show the emptiness of the crowded city and the aloneness of its people.