home  |  blog  |  writings  |  recent exhibitions  |  biography  |  contact francis cunningham writings A Vision of the Nude (Abridged for Linea) Francis Cunningham September 25, 2006 A Vision of the Nude Francis Cunningham I paint odalisques in order to paint the nude. Otherwise, how is the nude to be painted without being artificial Henri Matisse In this quotation from a letter written during the 1930’s, Matisse summarized the place of the nude in twentieth-century art. For him the classical nude had become a dead convention. So, he set out to find for himself one he could paint. This happened when he discovered odalisques in Morocco and found a nude in situ, convincing because of its context. But the crisis of the nude was deeper. The rise of modern art, and non-figurative painting especially, had displaced the nude as a primary art form. Even as instruction from the live model continued at places like the Art Students League, the human figure served in a reduced capacity as a teaching aid for the most basic instruction in the visual language. We who were students in the 1950’s and interested in the nude, were searching for more. The lack of rigorous training directed toward a specific visual goal – the nude – combined with a view of humanity that saw the model as more than a studio prop for learning to draw, paint and sculpt, led my sculptor colleague, Barney Hodes, and myself to develop new approaches. By focusing on the model, we were working on a nude that was neither idealized and classical nor modernist and anti-classical. It wasn’t a nude people expected or could readily categorize – a Venus or Apollo, say, or a Picasso or a Modigliani. It would be a different nude, and when we founded the New Brooklyn School of Life Drawing, Painting & Sculpture, Inc. (1979-82), we were on our way to articulating what that nude could be. What began as a personal quest for me in the 1950’s and for Hodes in the 1960’s became something much larger. We founded a school to rediscover the nude for ourselves as well as the students, and to develop techniques necessary for painting and sculpting it. We ourselves did not command certain techniques such as those common to the French academic tradition, because they had, in fact, largely been abandoned. Our plan was simple: we looked to the human being in front of us – the model. For us, the model became the center around which every class was based. That was how our curriculum evolved. Personal History At the Art Students League in the 1950’s, there was no longer an agreed upon vocabulary of the nude. As a student I observed what Robert Brackman, Robert Philipp and Frank Mason were teaching in their classes. But any instructor at this time could offer only that portion of the artistic discipline he knew. The residual fragments of the academic tradition, once vibrant at the League and elsewhere, did not amount to a coherent program in the nude. In the larger world the nude no longer existed as a meaningful subject of art. Where to go? For me, it meant 12 years of exploration. About 1970 I finally arrived at a nude I could call my own. At the same time I saw the first glimmer of a change in outlook that fortified my direction. I was teaching at the Brooklyn Museum Art School. Like an unexpected shaft of light, the naked human being became the subject of the nude. I saw it happen. The jockstraps came off the male models. That was the physical manifestation of a changing outlook, and one that happened everywhere and seemingly all at once. With the removal of the cover-up, the models, women as well as men, ceased being studio props. The models now could be seen for who they were, human beings existing in their own right, needing no excuse or purpose other than being themselves in order to be drawn, painted or sculpted. The importance of this shift in outlook cannot be overemphasized. One had to have lived on both sides of the divide and have experienced the earlier classical viewpoint to register the meaning of this change, for it was a quiet revolution, without fanfare and trumpets. At that time, in the U.S. and Europe, few people, working artists in particular, were giving thought to the nude. It had been moribund for years. In 1970, if you were an older artist and not involved with the nude or teaching at an art school, you might have missed altogether the changed attitude underlying the removal of the jockstraps. If you were a young art student, you would not have been aware of a change. As a layperson, you would have known Vietnam, student uprisings, hippies, flower children and the beat generation, but probably not what was happening in art schools. This was not an intellectual revolution in style, manner of thinking and looking, brought about by artists and academics, but a cultural reorientation expressing itself through models – part of the larger cultural changes of the late 1960’s. All models were participants, young and old, but most of the new models were young and athletic, dancers and actors, happy with their bodies and looking to support themselves. We now had models who understood movement and how the body works. No longer were the models seen as “shapeless…[and] pitiful,” as Kenneth Clark described them in The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1953). Nor were they aspiring to emulate in their poses the idealized nudes of classical antiquity or the Renaissance. Now they could be seen as everyday people, like you and me. Why had this view of the human being not been possible before? The centuries-old boundary between the naked and the nude was disappearing before our eyes. While in the grip of the classical tradition one literally could not see the naked human being in any way other than as a vehicle necessary in the creation of ideal or idealized form. This was Kenneth Clark’s view of the nude, and it was the dynamic Matisse was struggling with in wanting to paint a meaningful nude. Throughout the twentieth century, the modernist movement was consciously dismantling academic technique – the vehicle of classical tradition. For the artist, tradition has always been synonymous with technique. Traditions are handed down from teacher to student. You cannot go to college, take classes, earn an MFA, and expect to acquire technique automatically. There just isn’t time for it. No one should expect such understanding from a layperson. Nor often do those in positions of influence – museum and gallery directors, critics, art historians, curators, trustees – grasp the connection. Practioners do. Without this understanding, how then are the non-artists to comprehend the fragility of technique? In all the arts, it is easy enough to eliminate but extraordinarily difficult to recover. What Kind of Nude? Through the forties, fifties, and sixties those painters interested in the figure, clothed or nude, approached it with whatever training they possessed. This diverse group included many names now familiar: Alfred Leslie, Alex Katz, Jack Levine, Larry Rivers, Aaron Shikler, John Koch, Alice Neal, Philip Pearlstein, and David Levin, among others. At that time, one approached the nude from either a conservative or modernist standpoint, working with what remained of the nineteenth-century tradition or making a personal statement about the human figure in whatever way one chose. Neither approach appealed to me. My two greatest influences were Edwin Dickinson and Robert Beverly Hale. From Dickinson I learned to trust my own eyes in observing whatever was before me. My painting vocabulary came from him. From Hale I learned, as did so many others, anatomical form concepts. Years later, their teachings coalesced into my own vision. My breakthrough came in 1971 with a painting of Mimi Scherb, a model I’d worked with at the League and afterward. This painting resonated with people. At a faculty show at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, my colleague Barney Hodes said that upon seeing the painting, he felt that the future lay with the figure. When I exhibited the piece in a 1975 solo show at Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Robert Brackman’s widow remarked that these paintings united the perceptual training and practice of Dickinson with the conceptual disciplines of Hale. She hit the nail on the head. After I’d left the league in 1959, I gradually trained myself in what I needed to know in order to paint a life-sized nude: underpainting, perspective, the drawing problems of the life-sized figure. I discovered empirically that you had to coordinate what your eye sees with what you know of the relative proportions of the body. After Mimi Scherb came the greatest good fortune in the person of my godmother, the painter Polly Thayer, who had a thorough academic training at the Boston Museum School in the early 1920’s under Philip Hale. She was a master draftsman, and she challenged me to understand the logic of ideal form – to rely not on what you see but what you know. I resisted with every bone in my body. It was a war between seeing and knowing. The nude requires both. After months of work when a nude was nearly complete, Thayer would come from Boston and give me a critique. Over two or three days, she and I would draw in charcoal and white pastel on top of the painted surface. Occasionally, raw flake white or a razorblade would excise a passage. From her I learned not to over-model, not to dig holes in the form, to relate the figure’s proportions so that one leg did not appear as if it were shorter than the other, and much else. While remaining true to the model, with pain and suffering I would translate her critiques into my own “Dickinsonian” painting vocabulary. Dickinson’s teaching vocabulary was perceptual. In the entire time I studied with him, he had given our class about an hour on perspective, and only because we’d begged him. Dickinson, a living master of perspective (see his Ruin at Daphne in the Metropolitan Museum), didn’t teach it in class nor did he take up anatomy. He stayed clear of all subjects – perspective, anatomy, composition theory, color theory and the like – that might function as a “preconceptions” and distract us from what the eye sees. He wanted us to record in paint or charcoal the shapes of “color-value” we saw in nature from a “station-point,” without interference from conceptual theories or concern for the “what-it-is” of the objects or shapes before us. A mud puddle is as interesting to a painter as a human being; to paint either requires the same detachment from expectations, such as “the human being is ‘beautiful’ and the mud puddle ‘ugly.’” Dickinson, never in any way insistent, invited us to give ourselves over completely to the eye, the plumb-line, the “how-high-for-how-wide” of perception and the “how-light-for-how-dark,” the “how-warm-for-how-cool” of what was before our eyes. Our eyes were what mattered, not those of someone else, the instructor, or some bygone master of the past. It was incredibly exciting as we learned to see and to trust ourselves and our eyes. Dickinson’s teachings were highly selective: he addressed some issues and left out others. In its relationship to academic painting, his was a revolutionary training for the eye. At the same time, it was frustratingly incomplete for the budding painter, for there was no direction beyond that of seeing. This, too, was intentional on Dickinson’s part. He did not wish to influence us in “the art of it.” Hale, on the contrary, knew nothing of perception. His teaching was entirely conceptual: anatomy, specifically artistic anatomy. This meant learning to mass the various anatomical parts of the body into geometrical form concepts. For example, the head might be seen as a box with a section cut away to receive the cylindrical column of the neck, around which twisted diagonally the rope-like sternocleidomastoid muscles, with their origins in the mastoid process of the skull and their insertion into the heads of the clavicles. Or the head could be conceived as an egg in front with a ball behind – rounded forms – and modeled with light and shade accordingly. Hale taught us to model these geometric form concepts with light and shade to express three-dimensional form. He showed us where the light and shade went but not how to do it, for he himself could diagram but not draw what he taught about three-dimensional form. We were taught to establish a single light source, regardless of what was happening in nature, normally from the upper left or upper right, and to light all the forms of the figure consistently, no matter what was before our eyes. We could take the hand and reduce fingers to cylinders and the carpus to a quarter of an apple, and we were encouraged to draw the hand from any position. In this manner, Hale went through the entire body twice in the course of a year, with frequent reference to the drawings of Renaissance masters. For the art student, at least two years are necessary to establish a grasp of gross human anatomy – the skeleton and the origin and insertion of muscles and their function. Beyond that, it takes a lifetime. As for the study and practice of form concepts – drawing is unending. What is necessary is that language of form be taught, hands on, and learned through practice. It is one of those subjects that cannot be learned from a book. Although Hale himself did not draw, he could diagram brilliantly. So, as he lectured we were left writing down his concepts, while illustrating them with our own scrawls, for we had been taught concepts, but not drawing. I learned to draw with Edwin Dickinson, but I had Hale behind me. I had studied with Hale for nearly three years before entering the Dickinson class. Early on, in the Dickinson class I discovered I could create sculptural, tactile sensations of form and space with observed “color-spots” alone. Dickinson recognized this in my work, remarking one day, “You could put a fishing pole into the middle of that painting” (a compliment I have not forgotten). I discovered as I continued to paint, that such form and space could be consistently realized if you didn’t think the color-value but actually saw it. In conjunction with the conceptual aspects of drawing, color-spots became my essential tool to analyze and explore the movement, gestures, and character of a specific model. Color-spots, I became convinced, were a tool anyone could use, and for many different ends. They became the basis for my own teaching. Grounded and assured in my technical knowledge, I was still searching: what kind of nude? Always before my eyes there has been the unexpected, unnamable and never-before-seen beauty of the individual model. The result in my painting has been a nude that appears startlingly real and present in your own space – a particular person. This is a nude that visually connects with the classical nudes of the past, and yet it moves into new terrain. For the viewer, this nude embodies a tension between old and new, a tension sensed before it is understood. It is unexpected and therefore demanding, requiring a close look with an open mind. Months of work have gone into each nude. Exploring the designs within each figure’s design and the way they reveal the model’s character and inner qualities will not take place in a minute – the rewards come with sustained looking. For the painter, and equally for the sculptor, this nude opens up possibilities that cry out to be explored. Collaboration Hodes had begun his career working non-figuratively. His large abstract sculptures made during the sixties, carved in wood with incredibly sensitive surfaces, were biomorphic. The way these three-dimensional shapes related to each other, to my eye, implied the nude figure. We became kindred spirits, sending students to each other’s classes. From Hodes I learned the full impact of three-dimensional form, and today I see my nudes as sculpture as well as painting. A few of our contemporaries were thinking along the same lines and we came together to work. Alfonso Solimene was interested in how the body moved. Salvatore Montano at Pratt, one of Hodes’ teachers, was pushing the envelope past Hale’s conceptions of anatomy and movement. Later on, we had, briefly, the corporeal mimes, Thomas Leabhart and Daniel Stein, assistants to Etiénne Decroux, and the actor/director Torben Bjelke, member of Eugenio Barba’s Odin Theatre, who worked with us on multi-figure design. How were we to go past the teachings of our mentors to arrive at a nude satisfactory to us? This quest has comprised a life’s work. At no point did we ever consider this nude to be private property. On the contrary, it is there for anyone to explore. Amidst a kaleidoscope of questions and contradictions, Hodes and I founded the New Brooklyn School. The New Brooklyn School – Part I In 1979 Hodes and I began the New Brooklyn School (NBS) after drastic cutbacks at the Brooklyn Museum Art School thwarted our plans to implement what would have been a turn toward the figure in their curriculum. It was a plan based on the human body that called for intensive study of anatomy, geometrical form concepts, movement, and visual perception. We founded the NBS with Hodes and Montano in one room and myself in another at “old PS9” in Brooklyn. Everything we did revolved around the model, who was literally the heart of the school. Every class was established to explore a particular aspect of the human figure. Our goal was not just to create life-sized paintings and sculpture of the nude but to explore the nude as subject. No one who has not taken up the nude can have any idea how immensely difficult it is, complex beyond any form in art. With so much necessary technique lost by the fifties and sixties – the time of our own apprenticeship – the task was made that much more difficult. By 1979, our own work had centered on the nude for many years, and so we knew firsthand the unique encounter one has with the figure on a life-sized scale. In essence, you can’t hide what you don’t know. And, if, as they say, you missed the mark, your painted or sculptured figure might look like a figure, but it wouldn’t appear as if it could get up, move about, and take other positions. For us, what we wanted was an anatomically functional nude. Working in scales above and below life-sized, you can get away with pretty much whatever you want, but with the life-sized scale, if you miss by an eighth of an inch, one leg will appear shorter than the other. Why does this matter? We cared about such a nude, this anatomically functional nude, because we were concerned with the human being before us, seen in his or her completeness: emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and physical. We were not concerned with making a static “art nude” – a nude whose only function is to occupy a particular pose in a given painting or sculpture, a nude who cannot get up and walk around. We knew that by examining the body’s outside, we had an extraordinary handle on the person’s inner life. A person’s history informs what you see, as does their present state of mind. We believed that there was more to be communicated about the human being than any idealized form of the nude had ever succeeded in doing. As Ted Shawn, father of American modern dance, told his dancers, “Every little movement has meaning.” The same holds true for the visual artist. As a school, we evolved organically. We didn’t begin with a particular philosophy, we asked questions. Each of us, including students, had knowledge to offer, conviction and determination. Our program grew out of our needs. I was responsible for organizing the basic painting class and drew heavily from the teachings of Edwin Dickinson. Students learned to organize color-value relationships by means of “color-spots,” working from sight. We added classes in tonal drawing in which students would train their eyes to observe without preconception – to do in charcoal what they were doing in paint. We needed to teach perspective to ensure that the students understood how to place the model’s feet on the ground and how to relate the body spatially to surrounding objects. We encouraged Montano and Solimene to develop a course in the anatomy of movement. Both had worked extensively from the cadaver. We brought in mimes, actors, and dancers to demonstrate and explore the physiology and meaning of movement. We wished to teach the meaning of gestures, not as signposts – the “mad, sad, glad,” as choreographer Alwin Nikolais put it – but gestures in their natural and nuanced expression. The questions we asked about the nude concerned its humanity not just the nude as artifice. How does the inner person manifest itself through the body? How does an individual move? How do the parts of a person function and what do the movements mean? Aware and grateful to our artistic ancestors, we did not want to teach from the past. None of us had any interest whatsoever in teaching a particular style of drawing, painting, or sculpture. We went into each other’s classes to learn, faculty working alongside students, and we encouraged each other to investigate any aspect of drawing, a painting, and sculpting the model that arose. Montano taught figure drawing in a way that emphasized how the body moves, in scrolls and quick sketches. We advised sculptors to paint and painters to sculpt and everyone to draw. The New Brooklyn School – Part II In order to set up and run an art school, one needs money and a line of credit from people who have a steadfast confidence in the endeavor. The two are linked inextricably, as we soon learned. People will not give money to a cause they don’t support, and they won’t support what they don’t understand. It was not for lack of trying. The New York State Council of the Arts rejected our proposal for funds. In the process, we learned that a major cultural institution reviewing our proposal had recommended that the NBS not only be denied a grant but should also be put out of business because if we succeeded we would set art back a hundred years. At the same time we approached three major patrons of the arts: two rejected us outright and the third wrote us a check for one hundred dollars. What lay behind their responses? Aesthetically, the NBS posed a challenge to modernist art. Our approach to the nude – the nude observed directly from nature in its full humanity – stood in apparent opposition to cubism, fauvism, surrealism, or any other twentieth-century “ism” including photorealism. The terminology did not exist to describe what we were doing. Words like “figure,” “figurative,” and “nude,” had lost a precise meaning. Our lack of a sanctioned “ism” suggested to some that our endeavor lacked currency. We had great difficulty explaining our ideas because they had no direct reference point in bygone academies or contemporary art schools. We were putting the figure back together again by bringing the visual into balance with the conceptual. Economically, small as we were, we threatened at least potentially, the modernist art establishment, a hugely profitable business. In retrospect, I see that the public and private sectors of the art world we encountered behaved predictably – protect your investment. In our country, art may seem democratic, the art world liberal, and the avant-garde open to “the new,” but, we discovered this is really a façade for business decisions. One man, Mason Harding, an attorney and old friend with a lively interest in painting and sculpture, understood us and became instrumental in founding the NBS. Several others gave us substantial support. Our students were extraordinary in their help, but we needed more. We weren’t another in a long line of neo-classical revivals, and we received no help from that quarter. But I believe the most powerful obstacle we faced, and still face, is the puritanical fear of the body in American society. This is ironic, given the ubiquity of pornography today. To complicate matters further, our concept of the nude didn’t celebrate youth over age or “beauty” over imperfection. We weren’t looking for a prototype because we knew firsthand that no two people are alike. The idealized view of the body that governs advertising and the fashion industry, while useful for commercial purposes, for us seemed debased. We challenged this concept of the beautiful body by working directly from the model. The idea embodied in the nude we undertook is that the individual human being is inherently beautiful in never-ending and surprising ways. This is sufficiently novel to require time to be understood. In our dealings with the larger world, we had little time to learn or explain. By June 1982 our monthly rent increased from $1200 to $4000. We were up against it. We had a vision, alive and functioning, but we went broke. As Hodes put it, it was all so stunningly simple that it seemed to pass everyone by: forget the ego and work on the human being unencumbered by clothes and baggage. The NBS was not about hotshot artists, prizes, or the awarding of degrees. It was about the nude. In order not to abandon our enterprise entirely, we joined with the New York Drawing Association to form the New York Academy of Art in the fall of 1982. Hodes and I became co-founders with lifetime tenure, but the collaborative character that we tried to maintain disappeared and in due course our classes in the life-sized nude were cancelled. We found ourselves setting up a commercially viable art school, one that continues to this day, but not along the lines we had in mind. I resigned from the Academy in 1985; Hodes was forced out the following year. What made the NBS unique was our collaborative program focused exclusively on the human being. This, in an era apathetic and even hostile toward figurative work, proved a task we could not bring off. 2006 – Why the Nude? While there continues to be no agreed upon vocabulary or form for the nude and only a limited market, we can either bemoan this fact or embrace the current diversity of expression. Both Hodes and I opt for the later because we think the nude is wide open for re-exploration. Still the question persists, why the nude? There will be, I suspect, as many different answers as there are artists. Here is one. Each of us has a body, and embedded within its physical properties are its emotional, intellectual, and spiritual aspects. We are at once individuals but also members of corporate society – the human race. Without a passionate and sensitive observation of this very fact of our being, there can be no nude in art. This conviction was present, albeit in a different form, in Greece and again during the Renaissance. Why the nude today? Stripped of every mark of rank and distinction, the nude presents us with our shared humanity. Something so simple can direct us past differences of a kind that lead to prejudice, injustice, and violence. As the embodiment of our shared humanity, the nude carries us beyond the parochial differences of class, creed, and nation. I think of it as art for life’s sake. Instead of humankind serving as a toy for the artist to play with, let the subject come first, in its proper place – the subject to which the techniques of art are directed – as has always been true of the art of the human figure in periods of health. Such study of the human being requires science as well as art, something Hodes and I discovered at the NBS. The anatomy of movement calls for a measure of factual understanding of physiology and psychology. Their translation into art requires a new understanding of form concepts and a visual language to express them. How do you visually express Montano’s concept of the spine as a coiled spring under compression in which there are more degrees of movement in the individual vertebrae than in the sum total of the spine itself? How does this differ visually from Robert Beverly Hale’s classical and static “S” curve? These form concepts, still waiting to be articulated, will extend beyond those of classical Greece and the Renaissance to include the entire range of human movement in its anatomical expression. This enterprise will draw on technological tools such as computers, x-rays and scans; whatever is needed to examine and organize the material. For Hodes and myself, this opportunity is not hypothetical for briefly we lived the experience. I think of the nude in terms of particular human beings. I see beauty in all the models before me, old or young. We need to look with fresh and questioning eyes at classical concepts of beauty. We should redefine beauty to include the beauty of the individual person, to which, in addition to wonder, amazement and awe may be added other emotions foreign to the Greeks – as art historian Kenneth Clark wrote about Rembrandt – including pity. In contrast to the ancient Greeks and masters of the Renaissance through the nineteenth-century, we today do not distinguish between the naked and the nude. As such we can focus on our corporeal humanity in a different way. Just what does this entail? No one person has more than a fraction of an answer to this, or to any of the questions raised in this article. But the benefits of artistic collaboration have been demonstrated in such places as the Bauhaus and Black Mountain, as they were for us, briefly, at the NBS. As far as the nude is concerned, a giant, creative act lies ahead, waiting, far too big for any one person or isolated group of individuals. There also is an audience, I’m convinced, waiting. ****** Contributor Listing: Francis Cunningham was an instructor at the Art Students League, has taught master classes, and continues to teach in Studio 6 workshops. His work is represented by the Laurel Tracey Gallery http://www.laureltraceygallery.com in Red Bank, NJ.