Imre Györgyi szerk.: A modell, Női akt a 19. századi magyar művészetben (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2004/2)

Tanulmányok / Studies - Berecz Ágnes: Egy bizarr délután / A Bizarre Afternoon

A Bizarre Afternoon ÁGNES BERECZ [SUMMARY] If there is an activity that involves dealing with disrobed people on a regular basis and earning reputability (this is not to mention the attendant cultural pleasures), it is art history, a classic Western pursuit that has been struggling with sculptures of Greek youths from its inception. Ever since Winckelmann, very many art historians, aestheticians and philosophers have busied themselves reconciling nudity and science. Analyzing and dissecting, they have been writing the history of naked bodies, in other words rewriting the urhistory of art and distancing it from the dubious, amateurish and carefree pursuits of voyeurs. Of course, the assumed antagonism between enjoyment and science, pleasure and historical rigorousness, can be thrown into relief not only by naked bodies: Venus can be replaced by an apple or by a view of a non-existent harbor, especially if the apple was painted by Cézanne or the harbor by Claude. Viewers, whether professional or amateur, will soon betray an aptitude for deriving pleasure from things other than naked bodies, practically anything they cast their eyes on: a thing or a body need not be beautiful or taboo to make transparent the essentially erotic quality of looking, the relationship between vision and desire, between vision and disgust, i.e. between vision and body. Since Ingres and Manet, the history of Western nude painting can easily be read as the history of looking upon the relationship between vision and desire as a problem, and of searching for an answer to the question "Is it possible to construct a way of looking which welcomes the presence of pleasure and evades the deceptions of desire?"' There was in classic modern painting another type of picture beside the nude often in conjunction with it as a generic hybrid - that was capable of problematizing the multi-layered relationship between artist, model and viewer: the studio scene. Along with the naked body exposed to public view, the painted - which is to say the revealed and concealed - process of making paintings or sculptures g became the best testing ground for new paradigms in ° modern painting, as well as an illustration of them. £ The subjects of the nude in the studio or the painter and his model, as well as their innumerable versions, could model the act of representation and looking while referring to various iconographie types and tradiN tions in Western painting, from St. Luke painting the m Madonna through Susanna and the Elders to < Pygmalion. What accounts for the frequency of pictures belonging to this type and the special status of the type g2 itself is that it could quickly react to changing conven- tions of representation while being able to use a whole host of historical references. In other words, it had the potential to reflect dialectically on those dualities modernism so relished. In 1911, four years after Manet's Olympia was hung in the Louvre next to Ingres's Grande Odalisque, József Rippl-Rónai, who was living in the western Hungarian town of Kaposvár, began his first large composition with nudes: My Models in My Garden in Kaposvár (Modelljeim kaposvári kertemben). The multi-figure plein-air painting was not the result of a whim, but the penultimate work in a five-piece series. My Models in My Garden in Kaposvár and another work from 1911 represent the turning point in the sequence, i.e. the point at which the idyllic family tableaux set in the garden of the Róma villa give way to a nonetheless convivial scene full of naked female bodies. But what are four naked women doing in the middle of the garden in the company of Rippl-Rónai's wife, adopted child and two dogs? The female figures in this painting are trademarks of Rippl-Rónai, occurring in pictures throughout his œuvre. Like his fellow-painter Zeuxis or Paris, Rippl-Rónai is eyeing naked women, but they are not Helen's rivals or the beauties of Croton, rather painter's models. At first sight, the painting seems a modern idyll, in which the painter views posing models while the dogs laze and while his wife Lazarine and his adopted daughter Anella look quietly about. However, the two possessive determiners in the title leave no doubt as to who the central character is: Rippl-Rónai himself, the painter who on his return from Paris did his best to become the key figure in modernist painting in Hungary, a goal he fully achieved. Although My Models in My Garden in Kaposvár is organized around a center consisting of nudes, it is a real generic hybrid somewhere between portrait, tableau and studio scene. Rippl-Rónai treats the garden of the villa as an interior, a closed, domesticated environment, which gives room for contemplation of the female family members and the dogs, but also for painting, and which is therefore now an ad hoc studio. Rippl-Rónai, the figure of whom enters the scene from the right and almost reproduces the déhanchement pose of his models, employed a device typical of studio scenes and painter portraits: the picture-withinthe-picture. Yet it is enough to look at the models in the garden on the one hand and at the canvas under preparation (it is meant to function as a mise-en-abîme) on the other to see that their sequences are not the same. A more careful look reveals that the four nudes