The nude at tea time

BUBBLE BATH (2022)Painting by Lucy Klimenko.

The nude at tea time? What does this wacky title mean? How can the genre of the nude be juxtaposed with the drink of tea, in addition to be consumed exclusively at five o'clock in the afternoon? Indeed, I have gone out of my way to amaze you this time, in that, in pursuit of the purpose of telling you about the art of the United Kingdom, I wanted to eschew its more academic, tedious and purely art-historical narrative and focus exclusively on four great masters, whose work has "disrupted" the previous tradition of the nude, as well as anticipated current trends in the genre. What has been said, however, does not seem to justify the citation of the aforementioned beverage, an undisputed identity "flag" of U.K. customs and traditions, aimed at opening my review devoted to David Hockney, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Richard Hamilton.  Having reached this point, I feel obliged to reveal the mystery: among the aforementioned four masters, it is David Hockney, creator of Seated Woman Being Served Tea by Standing Companion (1963), who has inspired my whimsical title, as the work in question not only refigures the ritual of tea, but proposes it as an intimate event to be consumed without clothes and in a bare setting, a place where, in addition to the two effigies, a long sky-blue curtain, a minimalist chair and a vase of flowers peep out. Having resolved the above question, I proceed in the narrative by briefly introducing to the creative peculiarities of David Hockney, a traditionally trained artist who has appropriated various styles and trends of modernism and contemporary painting, mainly oriented toward the models of Herni Matisse, Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso, as well as interested in the study of the Italian Renaissance and Egyptian painting. Leaving aside a further elaboration, it is good to highlight how, probably also in the case of Seated Woman Being Served Tea by Standing Companion, he mainly portrayed beloved people, generally depicted in pairs, just as it is evice, in addition to the above-mentioned masterpiece, also from My Parents, a painting that depicts the artist's father and mother, highlighting the feelings, which the master felt for the latter figures. In fact, when the subject is human beings, Hockney demonstrates a desire to capture his relationships with them, even showing a certain tenderness in his rendering of people he admired and who really mattered to him. Abandoning tea, but maintaining the "nudist" theme of the United Kingdom, I turn to Francis Bacon, a master who, mainly focused on portraiture, made multiple violently distorted subjects, to be understood as icons of humanity wounded and traumatized by postwar dramas, rendered as isolated raw flesh, imprisoned and tormented by existential dilemmas, stylistic peculiarities that are also found in the nude genre, well exemplified by Lying Figure of 1966. Precisely with regard to the latter masterpiece, the painting has its earliest origin in 1962, a period during which Bacon began to portray figures lying on a bed through the creation of the triptych titled Three Studies for a Crucifixion, a context in which his nihilistic vision of existence, inexorably marked by the inevitability of death, but still charged with a point of reference, became apparent. In fact, the composition of Lying Figure demonstrates the artist's debt to artists such as Cimabue, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Poussin, Van Gogh and Picasso, who are evoked through the creation of "mannerist" figures, whose bodies are portrayed in a forced foreshortening. The latter vision is, once again, the artist's response to the evils of war, a sad episode in which human nature was revealed in its "unprecedented" violence, fear and isolation, feelings that seem to be reflected in the nature of an entire era.

A GOLDEN RATIO (2022) Painting by Machone.

.THREE RHYTHMIC NUDES (2023)Painting by Stephen Conroy

 I continue the story with Lucian Freud, a German artist naturalized British, who made, in about 2002, Portrait on a White Cover, a painting aimed at representing the commitment that the master turned throughout his existence to the genre of the reclining nude, which, in this specific case, portrays Sophie Lawrence, a woman noticed by the artist at the Tate, an institution where she was working in publishing and Freud was preparing his retrospective. It is good to highlight how the effigy, who had no sentimental, kinship or friendship ties with the artist was immortalized without prejudice or bias some, pursuing an anti didactic and revelatory purpose, aimed at eschewing the desire to convey a specific character trait and thus avoiding the presumption of definitive knowledge of the subject. What is immortalized on the canvas is, consequently, the unknowability of humankind, a factor that grants extreme freedom to the effigy, which is genuinely perceived by the viewer. In conclusion, we come to Richard Hamilton's He foresaw his pale body, the seventh in the series of illustrations dedicated by the artist to James Joyce's Ulysses, which the master conceived in 1947, that is, while he was doing his military service, so much so that he only began to make sketches during the following year, to shelve the project in 1950. The latter was resumed in 1981, but circa 1990 dates the aforementioned masterpiece, aimed at depicting Leopold Bloom's body from above, a perspective that puts the viewer in a position to identify with the point of view of the effigy, who, in the interior monologue from the book, imagined his own bathing in this way: he "envisioned his pale body reclining within it, naked, in a lap of warmth, oiled by a meltingly scented soap, gently lapped." Finally, the narrative on the UK nude continues through the work of Artmajeur artists such as: Paul Stowe, Spiros Politis, and Liam Ryan.

CROUCHING GIRL (2012) Painting by Anthony Barrow.

VALENTINE (2020)Drawing by Paul Stowe.

Paul Stowe: Valentine

The aforementioned tradition of the British nude reaches the present day through the Hyperrealism of Paul Stowe, a 1970s-born draughtsman whose figurative investigation deals primarily with the human figure, the animal one and still lifes, subjects rendered through unique, unprecedented and somewhat visionary lighting. Speaking of the drawing Valentine, the pencil work, which depicts a nude man carrying an equally undressed woman in his arms, pursues the intent, just as revealed by the artist himself, of having the visual narrative continue in the viewer's mind, who may imagine the effigies successively locked in amorous intercourse, or separated by an unexpected quarrel. Personally, I saw in the aforementioned drawing the moment prior to the making of a tender embrace, an act that would manifest itself similarly to that captured by Man with Woman on his Lap (1905), a sculpture by Norwegian artist Gustav Vigeland (1869-1943). In fact, the latter masterpiece shows a man, who, seated and clasped with a woman crouched in his lap, bends his head, striking her cheekbones, giving rise to the semblance of a loving relationship, which seems to revolve around love and protection. The next step in this tale could end in the explication of a kiss, just as in Auguste Rodin's Kiss, a masterpiece in which the two nudes about to join their lips were inspired by the sublime metrical tradition of Dante Alighieri, masterfully explicated in the Divine Comedy when it speaks of the love between Paolo Malatesta and Francesca da Rimini, characters who fell into temptation while reading Lancelot and Guinevere, later killed by Francesca's husband and destined forever to wander, like damned dove-like souls blown by the wind, in the infernal circle of the lustful.

"STATUESQUE" (2022) 3/25 (2022)Photography by Spiros Politis.

Spiros Politis: "Statuesque"

Spiros Politis, a British photographer with a passion for portraiture, has definitely been fascinated by the human body, a set of bones, muscles, organs, etc., which has led him to make studies of dancers in motion, in addition to the more classic nude images. This passion also emerges in "Statuesque", a shot made entirely with the camera, in which the smoothness of human skin is interrupted, below the model's breasts, by a succession of horizontal lines, intended to dilate in space the body colors, which are also propagated just after the end of the extension of the flesh. Such a vision, just as the artist himself reveals, takes the full name of Nausica statuaria, leading us to believe that the artist was inspired by the eponymous character from Book VI of the Odyssey, a female figure who, probably in love with the unattainable Odysseus, is understood as the literary meaning of inexpress love, to be interjected as one of the earliest probable examples of unrequited love. In any case, the hero's failure to mention his encounter with Nausica to his wife suggests the existence of a deeper level of affection than the one he encountered with the other women in the Odyssey. Finally, speaking of art history, it is possible to compare Statuesque's aforementioned horizontal lines with those, this time created by shadows, found in the "Nu Zebre" series by Lucien Clergue, a French photographer extremely attracted to death: cessation of life that he found in sand, in arenas filled with the blood of bulls, in the corpses of birds on the banks of the Rhone, in ancient tombs of monasteries, and in naked bodies, as if to remind us that we are only passing through on earth.

JULIANA NUDE. (2022)Painting by Liam Ryan.

Liam Ryan: Juliana nude

On the subject of painting, on the other hand, worth mentioning is the work of Liam Ryan, an Irish artist born in 1963, who, having grown up and trained in the U.S., lives in the U.K., a country where he experiments with figurativism by, primarily, pastel, acrylic or a combination of both mediums, through which he mainly investigates the female figure. As for Juliana nude, the work, which depicts the South African model of the same name from life, was made in just two hours, repurposing a subject extremely dear to the history of art: that of the seated nude. Among the most famous examples of the genre I would like to mention Seated Nude (circa 1909) by Pablo Picasso, a masterpiece in which a female figure resting on a high-backed armchair is depicted through the Cubist procedure of fragmenting and multiplying vision. In fact, the painting is part of a series, which, made between late 1909 and 1910, represents a synthesis of the earlier experimental and three-dimensional Cubist work on still lifes and portraits, aimed at taking the name Analytical Cubism. The resulting manipulation and fragmentation of space, as well as the creation of multiple viewing angles, generate a "blurred" female form, although she is still distinguishable in her features. At the opposite end of this "narrative" is the sharpness of the image quickly made by the artist in Artmajeur, well-defined in the body, but distinctly more intuitive and hurried in the execution of the background against which the woman is placed.