Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Naked People
This place had TONS of naked people and after about the 15th nude, my mind naturally turned to -- no, not that -- get your head out of the gutter. I started thinking about all the different ways artists were USING naked bodies in their work.
Sometimes it's easy to figure out. Here's a virgin stroking a unicorn. THIS artist painted THIS picture -- so he could sleep with the model. But not every use of a nude is bluntly obvious. I mean, what about this painting. By Steven Lewis.
Steven Lewis: "A half torso of a man in the ocean and he's painting the bottom half of three women's torsos that are crowned by, like a ring of flowers. They're really just kind of genitals that are standing there. There's a heart that's been ripped out of his chest. And there's Mickey Mouse with his shorts off, naked kind of laughing and pointing as the beer cans kind of wash up on he shoreline."
Or this one. By Katie West.
Katie West: "There are nude women in various poses, juxtaposed and intertwined and it unrolls from one side and rolls onto another side and -- is about 100 feet long."
Or this work by Eduardo Rodriguez --graphic photographs of naked male torsos. And each one has a phrase written on the model's legs or stomach with sticky-back letters:
Eduardo Rodriquez: "This one says 'Naked Virtue.' This one says, 'Exploit me.' This one says, 'Swallow my pride.' This one says, 'Too much candor is foolish.'"
[FADE AND LEAVE UNDER]
Turns out that for this artist, THESE nudes are political. -- To shock you into avoiding stereotypes. Steven Lewis's nudes are about doubt and alienation. And Katie West -- She painted her subjects without clothes because it was easier.
Katie West: "Clothes are hard."
We like the naked body in art. We like it in life too, but experts will tell you -- not for the same reason. Paul Richard has been writing about paintings for the Washington Post since 1967. He's spent a LOT of time thinking about art and naked people. No, not like that. Will you GET you mind out of the gutter!
Paul Richard: "Humans have a tendency to personify really difficult, abstract thoughts."
He says one of the key ways we?ve done that over the past 30-thousand years is by using naked people -- mostly naked women -- to stand-in for things.
Paul Richard: "She's liberty leading the people over the barricade in 1830 in Delacroix's big paintings. She's -- her breasts are right in your face, you know? If you go down to the Labor Department -- and look at the friezes above the door you?ll see 'Prosperity' and 'Abundance' and they don't have shirts on either. That's what the Greeks gave us. They took the divinities, they turned them into beautiful people and they took their clothes off."
[Sound from a Life Drawing Class
Teacher: "Now initially what we'll do is quick poses. And there'll be 7 one-minute poses."?]
This is a life drawing class. The only place -- it's safe to say -- that a man is going to see a 250 pound naked woman walking around this particular suburban Jewish Community Center. Now, artists will tell you: they love to draw nudes. And -- NO! Now stop that or I'm gonna turn this piece around right now! They like it because it's a great subject. Katie West.
Katie West: "There's really nothing else like it. It has cylinders, circles, lines, shading, personality. It has life! Flowers are cut. A tree maybe. But it doesn't have that pulsing of blood under the surface that you can see you know -- you can almost see a heart beat."
Besides that, the nude has been there for thousands of years to give us hope. That the pulse of life will return after the death of winter. Paul Richard
Paul Richard: "She's young and beautiful in the spring, like Marilynn Monroe or the virgin in the garden with the unicorn. She's triumphant and majestic in full summer like the Statue of Liberty. And she's scary and dead and ugly and witch-like in the Fall."
THIS, he says -- not sex -- is what we see when we see a nude in a classical painting or statue. Or do we? Artist Steven Lewis.
Steven Lewis: "I find a lot of Baroque painting very sexual -- religious painting very sexual, you know whether it's a repressed sexuality that's represented in these kind of more religious images or not, the fact is, you almost lose the story in the tumult of bodies that are depicted in the paintings."
So in a way it IS about sex. Paul Richard.
Paul Richard: "Of course it's about sex."
Katie West: "No. Not at all. I'm not sure I really understand that angle."
Artist Katie West.
Katie West: "I've talked to men about this and I think men and women do view the human body in a different way -- especially the female body. Men are much more visual when it comes to their sexual response so perhaps they see the female body in a more sexual way."
So it's mostly a guy who'll go to a museum saying he's there for this
[Music -- Mussorgsky "Pictures At An Exhibition"]
But who doesn't mind if it also slips over a little into this
[Music - The David Rose Orchestra "The Stripper"]
Let's take for instance -- Goya's most famous work -- the Majas. Two nearly-identical paintings of the same woman, prone on a daybed. One dressed. One naked. Today, two of the Western world's great works of art. Originally though? A peep show. Paul Richard
Paul Richard: "When Goya painted his clothed and naked Majas, the wealthy politician who acquired them for his private quarters could pull strings and one would lift, revealing the delicious other. I bet you know in which order he showed them."
About a year ago, I'm standing in front of the Majas at a Goya exhibit at the National Gallery of Art. There are two high school guys right in front of me. One says, "Which one do YOU like?" -- The clothed one's on the left -- and he says, "I like the one on the left. I love the way the light plays off the blouse. And look at the brush strokes right here. Isn't that amazing? Which one do you like?" And the guy says "Dude! The one on the right." When the friend asks "Why?" he says "Dude! She naked!"
[music - Opening bars of "Brick House" by the Commodores plays -- through wolf whistle]
I'm Richard Paul
[Music continues -- "Brick House" by the Commodores]
Oh she's a brick house
She's mighty, mighty just lettin' it all hang out
Oh she's a brick house
(fade)
