Viewing the greats
The Body Laid Bare: Masterpieces from Tate is one of the blockbuster exhibitions of the year for the Auckland Art Gallery and a barrage of publicity is in place to tempt people to the show.
This is such an obvious group exhibition theme, nudes a cornerstone of European art, featuring over time and in all genres of styles and conveying a range of different messages, but I couldn’t actually recall having seen it used before.
So this exhibition, toured from the Tate Collection, is pertinent. It is filled with many of the great names of art and, especially if you haven’t done the European tour, allows you to see some of the wonders that fill art textbooks, in real time.
One of the most ambitious travellers in the exhibition would have to be Rodin’s The Kiss (1901-04), this mammoth marble block is a logistics nightmare. I often find when faced with the international greats that they can seem curiously different to what you expect.
And amid the sensuous modelling of the two figures intertwined, I couldn’t quite get over just how large the man’s hands are, almost scary things, as they folded around his lover.
Collecting a historical survey around a theme is actually an interesting way to study art and to study history. In one sense, you could think that a nude body doesn’t date, after all without the fashion accessory of clothes wouldn’t a body from the 1890s (the date of the earlier works in the show) be much the same as today?
But, of course, the works are extremely different. Not just from what sort of bodies are represented, but by the rationale as to why the artist has chosen to paint a nude at all. This rationale is how the exhibition is arranged, divided across a number of galleries, which collect together ideologically similar sorts of reasoning.
On the whole this follows chronologically, with the first grouping ‘‘The Historical Nude’’ showing biblical and classical studies, all that soft smooth flesh, and ending with ‘‘The Vulnerable Body’’ which is mainly composed of large format photography from the 1980s, mostly motivated by political issues.
But there are still some irregularities and surprises. The Kiss was surrounded by a whole grouping of Hockney semierotic homosexual drawings on one wall and Picasso’s satyrs — strange things indeed — on another. Curiously, it all fits together.
The middle section of the exhibition resonated most with me, partly I think because it was a highlight to see such a range of painting styles.
It featured everything from a soft impressionist study of a woman bathing, The bath, 1925, a beautiful study with the colouring turning nearly abstract in the main body of the work, by Pierre Bonnard, to Matisse’s famous expressive brushwork.
Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico’s famous bust in The uncertainty of the poet, 1913, a picture of a nude sculpture next to that bunch of bananas, is there, as is Lucian Freud’s love of flesh in all its grotesqueness.
There are realistic nudes and cubist nudes, abstracted, thickly and thinly painted, in domestic scenes, postured, natural and some awkward. And there are less well known works that were still amazing.
This giant blend means the exhibition will indeed have something for everyone. And I do mean everyone, there may be the odd drawing that you might want to hurry a younger viewer past, but the show has not been collected to shock, but to inform, and with this direction it maintains a great deal of integrity.
There are realistic nudes and cubist nudes, abstracted, thickly and thinly painted, in domestic scenes, postured, natural and some awkward ...