Flagstaff
Arizona
Dresden
Dresden
Psalm 73:19
"How are they brought into desolation, as in a moment! they are utterly consumed with terrors."
Magritte : Dangerous Liaisons
Chess: "Flagstaff" "Arizona" "Dresden"
In Greek art the nude represents triumph, innocency and
transparency, as well as erotic freedom.
In Greek art the nude represents triumph, innocency and
transparency, as well as erotic freedom.
Kenneth Clark on Naked, Nude, and Ideal Form
George P. Landow, Professor of English and the History of Art, Brown University
Kenneth Clark opens his classic study, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, by pointing out that
The English language, with its elaborate generosity, distinguishes between the naked and the nude. To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. The word "nude," on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenseless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed. In fact, the word was forced into our vocabulary by critics of the early eighteenth century to persuade the artless islanders [of the UK] that, in countries where painting and sculpture were practiced and valued as they should be, the naked human body was the central subject of art. [3]
Clark continues that "in the greatest age of painting, the nude inspired the greatest works; and even when it ceased to be a compulsive subject it held its position as an academic exercise and a demonstration of mastery" (3). It did so, he explains because the nude as a conceptual and artistic category always involved the notion of an ideal abstracted from the reality we confront in our everyday lives. As such, we may add, the nude in art plays a role similar to that of the hero in epic: it provides the means and occasion to figure forth what a particular society takes to be greatest excellence. The nude, therefore, "is not the subject of art, but a form of art" (5), in part because "The body is not one of those subjects which can be made into art by direct transcription — like a tiger or a snowy landscape. . . . We do not wish to imitate; we wish to perfect" (5-6) — an idea, like so many others, perhaps first formulated by Aristotle "with his usual deceptive simplicity. 'Art,' he says, 'completes what nature cannot bring to a finish. The artist gives us knowledge of nature's unrealized ends.' A great many assumptions underlie this statement, the chief of which is that everything has an ideal form of which the phenomena of experience are more or less corrupted replicas. . . . Every time we criticize a figure, saying that a neck is too long, hips are too wide or breasts too small, we are admitting, in quite concrete terms, the existence of ideal beauty" (12-13).
This nude as idea form can embody not only "biological needs" but also the harmony of classical art, the energy and ecstasy of romanticism, and the pathos of the sufferings of Christ and His martyrs, and "when we see the beautiful results of such embodiments, it must seem as if the nude as a means of expression is of universal and eternal value. But we know this to be historically untrue" (9).
References
Clark, Kenneth. The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form. Bollingen Series 35.2. New York: Pantheon Books, 1956.
The Naked and the Dead
Norman Mailer (Wingate, pp. 721, 15s.)
In the matter of The Naked and the Dead our duty as liberal and educated people is clear. If it comes to a showdown we stand by Norman Mailer. His book is tremendously good, and perhaps better than that. There has been some conjuring up of the ghost of what Henry James called "that Rhadamanthus of English literature - the Young Person." Presumably British grown-ups have enough moral fibre to read without becoming demoralised, a book about soldiers fighting, frightened, swearing (which everybody knows most soldiers do all the time - and in any case almost everybody has been a soldier; even the women have been in uniform by the hundred thousand), and about soldiers and their women and soldiers getting wounded and killed. As for the Young Persons, those belonging to what used to be known as the working classes are commonly enlightened very early about elemental things, and the other boys and girls are not nowadays brought up prudish. But in fact "The Naked and the Dead" will only be scavenged for obscene passages by those whose taste or fancy is already for such nourishment. It is a powerful, well-planned and excitingly intelligent book: a far more remarkable achievement than there is space to describe here.
An American brigade is fighting the Japanese on a Pacific island. We are made intimate with individuals of all ranks from the G.I.s to the General. (Some of them are perfectly respect-able, kindly, and restrained.) From time to time there is a flashback to the private home life of one or another of our heroes, and these passages, though brilliant in their analysis, are in some cases the weakest links in the sequence: in their compression they are a little too magazine-slick. When one considers that Mr. Mailer is still only 26 years old, the range and the grasp he shows seems extraordinary. His assessment of something nearly as universal as fear inspired by danger comes out in the superb dialogues between the General and his aide. Most people who reach three times 26 never tumble to a fraction of what Mr. Mailer has already found out about the psychology of the men who want power. In the long future which may be ahead of mankind the misfortunes of the masses will seldom any more come to them from a lone dictator - much from countless bosses and managers like Mr. Mailer's not altogether detestable General. And what a lot this story tells us about that subject of such prime interest in the twentieth century: the Americans! One feels, of course, that Americans get too much to eat in war as in peace. How can one not become rather more animal than befits a human being with so much rich food to eat? "The Naked and the Dead" is a little too long - not much; and one must insist that the construction is masterly.
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