THE ARTIST AND THE NUDE

“Cul’t Lichnostey” Magazine, №3, 1999

The nude is one of the most popular themes in painting. Picasso, a very prolific artist, dedicated a great number of works to this theme. It was one of the favourite motives in works of Chagall, Dali, and many, many others. It is a staple theme. In jazzmen slang, it's a gas.

Traditionally, there are two characters present in this genre: the Artist, or Author, which is almost always a self-portrait, and the Model. The latter is usually a young woman. No matter whether she is dressed or naked, beautiful or not quite so beautiful, she is invariably longed after, comprising an object of contemplation and admiration.

This theme has always allowed for a vast number of variations. Senor Velazquez chose to portray himself in the midst of the Royal Family, which was a rather daring move for the court artist whose means were limited by the rules. But the Master was just too good, and hence was permitted such a frivolity. After all, he did not just happen to be on the canvas and has only turned his head away from the easel, brushes and palette in his hands, like a waiter standing by a table and holding his tray. In fact, tools of the trade would be often put into artist's hands to point out that he was there in professional capacity.

Rembrandt was audacious enough to have Saskia seated on his knees, his face beaming with utmost delight.

So with models everyone was having his own fun, quite in contrast to themes sacral, which were full of canons, laws and censure.

Vermeer, for instance, gave no expression to his face at all. Instead, he positioned his back in the centre of the composition, and it is over his back that one is allowed to glance at the model.

Rubens, rapturous before the prodigiously buxom beauty of his youthful wife painted her faintly covered by luxurious furs, having prudently left his aging self out. The artist in this case has succeeded, without actually appearing on the canvas, in retaining his virtually implied and active presence therein.

The XIX century was the time of thick novels and gargantuan canvasses. Every issue was approached very seriously and with great ambition. Monsieur Courbet at the time produced t he Artist's Studio , a painting of ten meters in length. In the centre of the canvas he placed a nude, and around her – the whole Parisian society, ambling about, conversing, viewing, inspecting through the l orgnette , quizzing and discussing the artist's work, the artist himself, the model, and the very act of creation. This takes away the mystery, subjugating everything to the public taste and offering it for sale.

Joke

An artist tells his model: “I just cannot bring myself to work today. Why don't we just sit down and have a cup of tea?” “OK, she agrees.” So they sit down and have a cup of tea, conversing about petty matters. Suddenly the artist looks out of the window and sees his wife coming. “Quick,” he cries, “undress and lie down! Or she will start suspecting things!”

Here is the most banal pick-up line. You are beautiful, I am an artist and would like to have you model for me.

An “artist” can be easily substituted by “photographer”, “director”, and so on. Unfortunately, all the variants have lost much of their former pull over the past forty years. The ladies are always suspicious of foul play, yet later, back home or in a confession to a lady friend they may reproach themselves for cowardice and the missed opportunity. Their fantasies are as elusive as they are titillating. They come down to the natural aspiration to become immortalised as a heroine, to uphold forever the vernal blossoming of their lives.

Everyone likes having their picture taken. Nothing can be easier – just buy a cheap camera and keep on snapping. There you are, forever. Such a sham, surrogate immortality feels somewhat unsatisfactory, however. Everybody knows: to simulate eternity, one needs a master, an artist. Everyone has seen actresses without make-up. And there is another tangible component in this daydream, which is thirst for acute sensations.

One very good-looking young woman, a professor's daughter, who used to model in our college studios, once told me that she was prodded to do this by erotic fantasy. She would get thrilled by the idea of undressing in front of some twenty males. I asked her for how long the thrill had lasted. She admitted that she actually felt something of this sort only at the moment when she walked out on the podium and took off her robe. She was received with a prosaic expression in the eyes of young artists, examining her as if she were a piece of pottery. “This nearly offended me, although I suppose, it's normal. They were just doing their business, to them I am no more than a jug.”

Wonderful stories about the Parisian boheme have been retold on numerous occasions. Famous artists would fall in love with and often marry their models, bestowing their work as a gift. Wives and partners featured as models and muses. Famed Dina Verni appears to have posed for Maillol since she was 15, later she became his sole heiress. It is owing to her that today there is a Maillol Museum in Paris. She has made history. A visitor in Tuillerie can now marvel at numerous statues decorating the garden, for which she was a prototype to a much greater degree than copies of antique sculptures.

The muse is the artist's eternal reverie and necessity, an embodiment of beauty in the world. This is the key motive of Nabokov's Lolita , which has nothing to do with base cravings of an ageing pervert. The quest for the muse and her discovery constitutes love. Her irretrievable loss is every artist's tragedy.

An artist chooses a model. The why and how occurs through a mass of incidents and coincidences, similarly characteristic of falling in love. Expectation is followed by quest, then again come expectation and hope.

I walk along the street. Down to the Underground. Fall in love five times within a single street block or underground passage. They walk by me. Wind blows up her hair and sticks to the t-shirt. The sun is laughing at me through her eyelashes. Is this her? – It is always Her.

Beautiful and mysterious, they flit by. My muses are swift as swallows. I cannot approach them . Nor can I stop them . Tell them the truth, and you will be taken for the tritest dupe. And that indeed is the way you feel as soon as you aspire to stop the moment.

All that you are left with is craving. It will store and multiply itself inside of you until a chance encounter, your neighbour or your neighbour's obscure girlfriend agrees to sit for you.

Convincing a woman to undress, not for purposes of lovemaking (which is not so difficult) but in order that you just look at her, yet thereby breach through all her barriers and secrets, is the greatest art. Only those who regard their bodies as perfect would easily agree. But such women do not exist. I am not talking about utter fools .

Muses we choose

The ideal of feminine beauty has varied considerably in time. It has always corresponded to the spirit of a particular age and its objectives and aspirations. Women whose parameters did not fall into the limits established by the ideal of the time were made to feel unhappy.

A sporty Spartan lass and the Venus de Milo are not quite the same thing. Apart from the two, by the way, there was Venus Kallipygos, alias "Aphrodite of the Beautiful Buttocks", whose virtues largely lay in the spheres that her name designated.

Fashion would once feature spindly-legged gothic beauties, whose degenerately protruded bellies would contrast with minimalist breasts. They were replaced by voluminous matrons of the baroque era. Romantic peewits of the Napoleon era, a la Madame Recamier , Ellen Kuragina, and Natasha Rostova succumbed to broad-faced pug-nosed brawny girls of post-revolutionary and Stalinist years. The latter image came, in fact, as a healthy alternative to sallow and turquoise-skinned morphine addicts that were so popular in the decadent period preceding the Revolution that brought an end to bulimic muses. After the term of socialism was over, so was that of the ideal of a sturdy working-class beauty whose low bottom would epitomise high stability.

Perestroika eagerly embarked on its own quest for a beauty ideal. The parameters were given a simple centimetre expression. Not much was given to democracy: 180 plus for the height and 90/60/90 for the rest. Whoever does not fit must leave the premises! This metric rampage humiliated and trampled upon the vulnerable selves of millions of young women who aspired to impart the charming spell of their blossoming over the entire human race. The earlier black-and-white dreams of becoming movie stars, radiating mysterious smiles from black-and-white screens and newsreels have been replaced by heavily coloured hallucinations with glossy covers of fashion magazines.

Beauty contests and the podium create a myth of transporting one from the prose of life into a different sphere, effecting a transition into a different phase, which is almost eternity. You can get a ready-made ersatz of it by having your portrait drawn by a self-proclaimed artist from Arbat, for a decent price. A clicheesque “Have you had your portrait painted recently?” calls on everyone to regularly sit as an artist's model. The results of these engagements are characterised by similar artistic means, manner, quality, and even the price, no matter whether they take place on Arbat, Nevsky, Montmartre, or Broadway. The process is closely reminiscent to having your instant photo taken in the Underground, with a Polaroid camera. The idea is different, however: for a little cash you buy a moment of transcendental illusion – I am being painted, I am a Muse!

Curiously enough, our age of liberal democracy has failed to create a new sustainable ideal of feminine beauty. A simple reason for this is that the omnivorous and condescending standards of our time reject any canons. Today, the vacuum is vividly felt even in the highest eschelon of haute couture.

Once I had a wonderful redhead model for me. We started when she was about 16. Her hair piled on her head like an enormous haystack, the colour of intense imperial gold. She had huge emerald eyes and a snow-white body of pearl that only redheads have, which spring would turn into a racing ground for flocks of freckles. She was not particularly tall, but proportionally and carefully chiselled. Four years flew by for me in utter delight and rapture that poured into many canvasses. Then she got married and had a baby. To commemorate the good old days, she and I embarked on yet another work. Her body had not yet recovered from childbirth. She was still breastfeeding, her breasts were swollen, and her tummy had not yet regained its tautness. All that would cause her a great deal of anxiety, which made it impossible to work. She would repeatedly spring up from the oval “deluxe” chair where she was supposed to be cosily ensconced like in a shell, and yell at me. “ What do you think you are doing ? Make my tits smaller ! Remove the belly! You not an artist but a sadist!”

It would be absolutely no use attempting to explain to her that the state of her body was not repulsive for me and that my business had nothing to do with the changes that had occurred to it. She would only listen to herself . Eventually, I had to finish the canvas alone. I did it with all the tenderness, delight, and a faint sense of irony that can hardly be condemned. But that was our last canvas.

So who are they, this sweet duet, the artist and the model? He is the Lord, the Creator. She is the Goddess, the One that He creates. She has awakened in him the will to create. She is a reason, a stimulus, and an object that has consummated his passion, love, contemplation, and inspiration.

In this context, the story of Pygmalion is more than appropriate, although it does not seem to exactly fit into the procrustean bed of our reasoning. In fact, no life-model would ever be embedded as a precise match in our creative mould. Instead, it makes an audacious intrusion, causing unforeseeable changes. This breathes a new form in our ideas, and it is only then when they become alive.

Let He Who Creates Me Come!

There exists such a thing as erotic art. We shall not discuss it here however, although erotica can also present a model. Art primarily affects human feelings . Emotions provide the levers and pulleys. But everything pertaining to emotions excites, in particular, sexually.

This does not necessarily mean that painting and sculpture had to be swept with naked bodies. The Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow is almost a Puritan establishment. Yet it is quite curious watching young people, who are high school or university students, as they exit the premises. Their gazes appear vacant, speech is incoherent, and legs are tallow. So many times have I experienced this condition myself, noticed it in others, and never could understand and explain it, blaming here the age and there the weather! Well, my friends… Here we are dealing exactly with the realisation of that great power of art which causes craving to awaken inside of us. This is not only the need to create, but most importantly the most fundamental will to live and multiply, to expand and to love.

It may be just my fancy that has not been supported by research, but those nebulous longings of nuptial beauties, expressing themselves as a wish to transgress and become a muse, represent one of the most basic and natural instincts of creation. I wish to be a Goddess! Let He Who Will Create Me Come!

Myth of Pygmalion

This is a legend, and neither I, nor anybody else knows if it's true or not. But every myth came out of the womb of reality. An ancient Greek sculptor, who by some accounts was also the King of Cyprus, had carved of ivory a statue of a beautiful woman. History is silent on whether it was inspired by a model or the sculptor's mind's eye. The image though was so beautiful that one could only dream of such a beauty. He carved his dream and fell in love with it. In fact, he rather fell in love with the creation of his own hand. He gave her a name: Galatea, sleeping love. He longed for the impossible, wanting Galatea to come alive, so he could possess her. Aphrodite conceded to his repeated pleas and brought the statue to life.

Pygmalion (oh, how lucky he was!) and Galatea were wed. What an idyllic, beautiful story! The most beautiful of all love novels!

Alexander Tokarev
(Notes taken by Ekaterina Volkova)