The Naked and the Nude
I usually try not to reek of the classroom this much, so first, forgive me if all this sounds like an insulting, incomplete and biased reprise of Art Appreciation 101. In the last paragraph, I try to make my case for the personal importance of this academic/Cliffs Notes discussion.
I’ve always liked
Robert Graves’ poem, “The Naked and the Nude,” but I make the mistake of assuming that everyone hears the same distinction Graves does between the two key words and concepts in the title.Parallel to Graves’ dichotomy, I think that in intellectual history there are only two philosophical or aesthetic traditions in all of art (verbal, visual, musical): the Classical and the Romantic. They supersede or encompass everything else.
Of course, Classical and Romantic features are not often black and white; any given work or artist might be a mix, showing some tendencies of both traditions, both sensibilities.
Graves’ “The Naked and the Nude” sits in the classical or neoclassical or Augustan tradition, which values wit, urbanity, cleverness, and brain power over the romantic values of intense feelings, pastoral settings (as well as Nature's violent forms), idealism, earnestness, and the power of the heart and emotion or intuition or mysticism or spirituality over rationality and logic and restraint and symmetry.
It’s ironic, then, that Graves seems happy to have his restrained Nude folks becoming romantically, full-out Naked in the end.
In this context, Moskowitz's “Hard Ball III” painting, posted here November 19, is, yes, minimalist or abstract expressionist or some other “ism.” But for our (larger) purposes today, it reflects a classical sensibility: spare, trim, reliant upon a trick of neurology and the perception process for its effect—all of which are antithetical to Romantic effusiveness.
In today’s paintings from the Detroit Institute of Arts, there might be room for debate. Does each of these three women belong to one tradition more than the other, Classical or Romantic? If not, how are the features blended? And which of them is naked, which is nude? I’m temporarily omitting the painters’ names for the sake of more honest guessing.
I repeat, responses don’t have to claim all of one tradition and none of the other. Feel free to mix and match. What are the Classical and Romantic elements in any one painting?
By the way, this is not just some academic's B.S. compulsion to categorize. I think the Classical and Romantic are two ways of being in the world—for individuals, for regions, for cultures and segments of cultures. In your truest self, are you more Classical or Romantic? What do you like and dislike about your answer? Surely responding to those questions tells us something worth knowing about ourselves, our country, our times.
And as the quip goes, "I'll show you mine if . . . ."
The Naked and the Nude
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