Victorian nude art comes out of closet

NEW YORK, Sept. 26 (UPI) -- A provocative new show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, "Exposed: The Victorian Nude," challenges conventional ideas about Victorian prudery by establishing that the nude was one of the most produced, collected, and exhibited categories of painting and sculpture in 19th century Britain.

Even Queen Victoria admired Edwin Landseer's "Lady Godiva's Prayer," a discreetly painted nude riding a horse through Coventry that the queen accepted as a model of chastity. She also commissioned several nude paintings of the wood nymph variety as birthday presents for her husband, Prince Albert, who shared her artistic tastes.

The nude was strangely absent in art in Britain before 1800 despite British society's randy reputation, in contrast to the popularity of the naked human form in the rest of Europe at the time. That began to change when European art flooded into England after the Napoleonic wars.

Nudity was being explored in depth by British artists by the time Victoria ascended the throne in 1837 and continued to be explored with enthusiasm in the 20th century by such artists as Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud, who is currently enjoying a retrospective in London.

Unfortunately -- or fortunately, according to taste -- depictions of nudes in classic, literary, and exotic settings were often an excuse to produce art that titillates or even masks deviant sexual interests that once were considered an assault on public morality. Occasionally, Victorian artists even stooped to pornography, illustrated in the Brooklyn show by two of Aubrey Beardsley's audacious ink drawings dated 1896.

Organized by the Tate Britain museum in London, where it was immensely popular, "Exposed: The Victorian Nude" includes more than 150 displays ranging from paintings and marble and bronze sculptures to works on paper, photographs, popular illustrations, and what most Victorians called "dirty films" with titles such as "A French Lady's Bath" and "Lady in Her Boudoir."

The show is organized thematically instead of chronologically and will be on display at the Brooklyn Museum through Jan. 5.

All the celebrated British artists of the day - Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and Frederic Leighton - are represented as are all of the popular schools of art expression of the period ranging from the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetes to Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. It opens with William Etty's 1832 mythical boatful of classic nudes titled "Youth at the Prow, and Pleasure at the Helm."

Etty's work, a hoot if there ever was one, so outraged the Morning Chronicle when it was first exhibited that it declared editorially "no decent family can hang such sights on their walls." Today the chief criticism of this painting would be that it is badly done, a pastiche of the artistic styles of the Venetian Renaissance artists and Peter Paul Rubens that is stilted and even silly.

There is a great deal of bad art in this show but there are some very fine works to offset them and inspire the admiration of a 21st century audience.

Leighton's powerful, dramatic bronze, "An Athlete Wrestling with a Python (1877)," is one of the finest large scale works ever inspired by the classic sculpture, "The Laocoon," and Alma-Tadema's intimate 1882 oil, "Tepidarium," showing a recumbent nude girl resting on a fur rug after a lukewarm Roman bath, a feather fan strategically held to insure modesty, is delightful and as gorgeously painted as a Paolo Veronese nude

Pears Soap Company brought "Tepidarium" with the intention of using it in an advertisement but never did out of concern that its frank eroticism might shock customers.

The outstanding photograph on display was taken by author Lewis Carroll of a pre-pubescent Evelyn Hatch posing as Titian's "Venus," made at the request of the child's parents in 1879. The show's catalog makes it clear that Carroll was clearly not a pedophile but merely shared in the enthusiasm of many British for nude pictures of children.

The photographic display includes 1890s fig-leafed strongman Eugen Sandow striking classic poses not unlike pictures made for homosexual magazines today, and flower-garlanded actress Viola Hamilton assuming provocative poses for Hana Studios, which sold photos of celebrities at the turn of the last century. There also are amusing cartoons from various publications showing the British public being scandalized by nude art.

The show ends with paintings by Gwen John and Walter Sickert, dating to the early 1900s (Victoria died in 1901) that show female nudes, warts and all, with sagging breasts and abdomens, and a mini-collection of male nudes that would seem to be aimed at homoerotic tastes, including John Singer Sargent's "Nude Boy on a Beach," painted in Capri.

"Exposed: The Victorian Nude," is a show that has something for everyone and is not to be missed. After it leave the Brooklyn Museum it will travel to Japan for final tour exhibitions in Kobe and Tokyo.