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Nude Today
with Dr. William A. Lipsmacker
Saturday, December 15, 2007
This week: Reclining Girl by Boucher
with Dr. William A. Lipsmacker
Saturday, December 15, 2007
This week: Reclining Girl by Boucher
I feel like a rumpled sheet.
Boucher’s Reclining Girl always takes me this way. It is an oddly
involving work. Painting is capable of many effects, but it remains
essentially the medium of the voyeur: we visit the exhibition halls to
stand and watch, our hands deep in our pockets. Yet it is Boucher’s
peculiar achievement to have painted one of the world’s great erotic
paintings, in which the primary effect is to place the viewer inside
the frame, rather than peeping lecherously from behind some
convenient curtain.
To make the audience feel themselves participants, actually present
within a fictional scene, is more commonly the province of literature.
Not a little ink has of course been spilt conveying intensities of
erotic experience by way of the pen. Yet Boucher stands far above
the groping phrases of Nin and Miller. He arouses us with one simple
scene: the greatest sight in the world, a young woman naked and in
full bloom.
She is young and lovely. Her hair is worn up, announcing her official
entry into womanhood, and presenting a delicious formality that
contrasts with the dishabille discovered lower down. Her breasts
and pubis are concealed from us, we see only her plumply alabaster-
pale legs, buttocks and back, their realistic curves carefully observed
from life (they were the curves of Miss Marie-Louise O’Murphy: ah,
to have been in the studio that day). Her pose is rendered in
superbly controlled perspective as her young thighs splay carelessly
across the sheet, creating the painting’s plane of depth.
Here is the brilliance of the artist. For whenever I encounter this
work (and I recommend private study of a good reproduction; the
original is hung in Munich’s Alte Pinakothek, which does not allow for
long personal encounters), I find myself forced into the place of that
rumpled sheet. Gazing on the illusion of all-round depth, the shape
of her concealed parts is pressed upon me. We do not watch this
painting; we enter it.
This prodigious technical achievement is the equivalent, one feels, of
adding 3D to cinematic films today. It is the obscene product of
consummate skill and foresight. Boucher has had the audacity and
wit to construct the painting’s perspective around the reclining girl’s
hips, and then proceeded to fully realise his intention through the
sheer brilliance of his draughtsmanship.
Here is one mighty pinnacle of what may be achieved with
perspective. Far from those endless Renaissance colonnades where
the human figure becomes almost secondary to the tyranny of the
perfect line, here we recline in a voluptuous Rococo world where the
curve is regnant. Perspective now exists to make everything fully
rounded. Every curve of Miss O’Murphy’s body is rendered in depth
for our pleasure, and the total reality of the curves we see makes us
sense those we may only imagine.
It is no accident that Boucher was the teacher of Jacques-Louis
David, a painter of prodigious technical gift: he was himself a
master. In the Reclining Girl, Boucher has given the world a great
gift: the opportunity to recline forever on a couch with one of the
prettiest young girls of his day. The erotic is not all that the nude
can accomplish, but it is a fit subject for art, just as the twentieth
century demanded it must be for literature. Boucher’s work couples
technical brilliance with frivolous delight, and reminds the most
serious of us that fun and skill need not be far apart.
© lizardmagazine.com, 2007
LAST WEEK: Female Nude by Modigliani
Boucher’s Reclining Girl always takes me this way. It is an oddly
involving work. Painting is capable of many effects, but it remains
essentially the medium of the voyeur: we visit the exhibition halls to
stand and watch, our hands deep in our pockets. Yet it is Boucher’s
peculiar achievement to have painted one of the world’s great erotic
paintings, in which the primary effect is to place the viewer inside
the frame, rather than peeping lecherously from behind some
convenient curtain.
To make the audience feel themselves participants, actually present
within a fictional scene, is more commonly the province of literature.
Not a little ink has of course been spilt conveying intensities of
erotic experience by way of the pen. Yet Boucher stands far above
the groping phrases of Nin and Miller. He arouses us with one simple
scene: the greatest sight in the world, a young woman naked and in
full bloom.
She is young and lovely. Her hair is worn up, announcing her official
entry into womanhood, and presenting a delicious formality that
contrasts with the dishabille discovered lower down. Her breasts
and pubis are concealed from us, we see only her plumply alabaster-
pale legs, buttocks and back, their realistic curves carefully observed
from life (they were the curves of Miss Marie-Louise O’Murphy: ah,
to have been in the studio that day). Her pose is rendered in
superbly controlled perspective as her young thighs splay carelessly
across the sheet, creating the painting’s plane of depth.
Here is the brilliance of the artist. For whenever I encounter this
work (and I recommend private study of a good reproduction; the
original is hung in Munich’s Alte Pinakothek, which does not allow for
long personal encounters), I find myself forced into the place of that
rumpled sheet. Gazing on the illusion of all-round depth, the shape
of her concealed parts is pressed upon me. We do not watch this
painting; we enter it.
This prodigious technical achievement is the equivalent, one feels, of
adding 3D to cinematic films today. It is the obscene product of
consummate skill and foresight. Boucher has had the audacity and
wit to construct the painting’s perspective around the reclining girl’s
hips, and then proceeded to fully realise his intention through the
sheer brilliance of his draughtsmanship.
Here is one mighty pinnacle of what may be achieved with
perspective. Far from those endless Renaissance colonnades where
the human figure becomes almost secondary to the tyranny of the
perfect line, here we recline in a voluptuous Rococo world where the
curve is regnant. Perspective now exists to make everything fully
rounded. Every curve of Miss O’Murphy’s body is rendered in depth
for our pleasure, and the total reality of the curves we see makes us
sense those we may only imagine.
It is no accident that Boucher was the teacher of Jacques-Louis
David, a painter of prodigious technical gift: he was himself a
master. In the Reclining Girl, Boucher has given the world a great
gift: the opportunity to recline forever on a couch with one of the
prettiest young girls of his day. The erotic is not all that the nude
can accomplish, but it is a fit subject for art, just as the twentieth
century demanded it must be for literature. Boucher’s work couples
technical brilliance with frivolous delight, and reminds the most
serious of us that fun and skill need not be far apart.
© lizardmagazine.com, 2007
LAST WEEK: Female Nude by Modigliani
