Gender, Legends and Art Nudes: from myths to reality, from reality to the abstract

Vesa Matteo Piludu

University of Helsinki

Department of Art Research

ÉDOUARD MANET, Olympia 1863

Olympia

With Olympia, Manet rebels against the art establishment of the time. Taking Titian's Venus of Urbino as his model, Manet creates a work he thinks will grant him a place in the pantheon of great artists.

But instead of following the accepted practice in French art, which dictates that paintings of the figure are to be modeled on historical, mythical, or biblical themes, Manet chooses to paint a woman of his time - not a feminine ideal, but a real woman, and a courtesan.

His model, Victorine Meurent, is depicted as a courtesan, a woman whose body is a commodity.

While middle-and- upper class gentlemen of the time may frequent courtesans and prostitutes, they do not want to be confronted with one in a painting gallery.

A real woman, flaws and all, with an independent spirit, stares out from the canvas, confronting the viewer, something French society in 1865 is perhaps not ready to face.

A Bar at the Folies-Bergeres1881-82

Manet, Dejeuner sur l'herbe, 1862-1863

When this painting was first shown to the public at the Salon des Refuses in 1863 it caused an outcry.

What upset the critics the most was Manet's audacity in 'copying' the old masters, by parading vulgar modern figures.

These were not nymphs and shepherds of myth, but modern Parisian city dwellers indulging their petit-bourgeois passion for picnicking in the country

The Painter’s Studio (1855) by Gustave Courbet

The Origin of the World

It is said that a Turkish diplomat called Khalil-Bey, while passing through Paris, ordered a painting from Courbet, that would be this one.

Khalil-Bey was an art collector and he had already bought another painting from the same artist named The Sleep, picturing two women lying naked on a bed in sensuous poses.

Courbet, the sleep

Jean Léon Gérôme, Pygmalian and Galatea

Gérôme: Pygmalian and galatea, 1890

Jean-Léon Gérôme Working in Marble, or The Artist Sculpting Tanagra, 1890

Degas’ nudes

The Bathers are not idealized women.

They are engrossed in their own thoughts.

The general public called the pieces ‘disgusting’ and even artists found them ‘disturbing.’

Degas, Woman Bathing in a Shallow Tub, c.1886

George Seurat, Poseuses 1886-88

Sunday Afternoon on the Island of la Grande Jatte 1884-1886

Erich Heckel, Standing Child, 1910

Erich Heckel, Girl with Doll

Otto Muller, Tree nudes. 1912

Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. (Marcel Duchamp. 1912) depicts the motion of the mechanistic nude with superimposed facets, similar to motion pictures. The painting shows elements of both the fragmentation and synthesis of the Cubists, and the movement and dynamism of the Futurists

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)

Figures on a Beach 1931