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

Tanulmányok / Studies - Werner Hofmann: Venus ég és föld között / Venus between Heaven and Earth

supplied by an excursion on a Sunday afternoon, when the painter saw women bathing in the Seine at Argenteuil, and unclothed them in his imagination, thus discovering his inclination for nude painting. At about the same time he was studying Giorgione's Concert in the Louvre; and finally he borrowed from Raphael's The Judgement of Paris, which he knew from a print by Marcantonio Raimondi. Enough illustrious models, one might think, to ennoble a scene of intimate companionship. Yet it was precisely his paraphrasing that attracted hostile criticism, since it offered two aspects vulnerable to attack: Manet's intendedly reassuring echo of the Renaissance was considered blasphemous; and if that wasn't enough, all such allusions were also taken as an admission of his lack of originality. The scandal rested on two perceptions, which the comparison with Giorgione and Raphael brings out clearly. Giorgione endows the nakedness of both women with the complete lack of self-consciousness of beings who find themselves in their state of nature. That may be seen from the fact that they have apparently not undressed

—we see drapery but no garments. Manet, on the other hand, leaves us in no doubt that his nude has been parted from her clothes and underwear. Not only is the woman completely exposed, but her gaze directed at us makes dubious capital out of her situation and makes her "available" for any viewer.

21 Manet had taken over this gaze from the Raimondi print, but had also given it a new charge, whereby he endowed it with an unwavering directness and uncompromising candour. On top of these provocations came the strict, prosaically brittle quality of the picture's formal structure, which was bound to alienate the public. Cabanel, on the other hand, offered no challenging or disparate food for the eye. Instead he did everything possible to recommend his Venus as a lissom partner in bed. This "frothy product" belongs in the genre worked by the public's favourites, to which the philosopher Proudhon dedicates a few sarcastic remarks. He contrasts them with his friend Courbet, who was talked about as a public nuisance both before Manet's time and contemporaneously with him: "At the Salon exhibition of 1863, which I visited only once and then very briefly, the figure of a naked woman could be seen in the place of honour in the Great Hall, lying down and displayed from the rear; I assumed this was a Venus Kallipygos. While showing off her shoulders, her slim waist and her well-rounded buttocks, this Venus also had her head turned towards the viewer. Rogueish blue eyes, like those of Amor, a challenging expression on her face, and a sensual smile were all turned on us. Like the boulevard tart she seemed to say: would you like to come along with me?"

22 How would have Proudhon reacted to the inviting look offered to the viewer by a nude preparing for bed in a picture by Jacob van Loo? Perhaps he would have approved the innocence in this Coucher à l'italienne (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon), an innocence that he found to be lacking in the "Coquette Venus" in the Salon. In the struggle between the Salon and the avant-garde the subtle neo-Platonic dialogue between "Heavenly and Earthly Love" developed into an irreconcilable antagonism. Neither the naked nor the clothed Venus could any longer be viewed impartially. Exactly how that happened may be seen in two pictures by Courbet, which, despite the ten years that separated them, form a kind of diptych. (III. 9-10) The two Young Ladies by the Seine (1856-57) were immediately perceived as females touting for business. Proudhon was not the only critic who saw in the women the moral depravity of the Second Empire. The metaphors he reached for in order to stigmatise them

—vampires, demons, Circes

—approached the pathos of Baudelaire's poetry.

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' What repelled both the philosopher and Philistine in Proudhon, the "devilish seductive power" of these two Venuses, was what simultaneously attracted him: "she lies [he writes of the girl who is looking out of the picture] on the green grass, presses her burning bosom to the earth, while her half-open eyes dream a dream of love..." A counterpart to the Eros that was for sale, and waited only for the male purchaser, was the lesbian couple painted in 1866 that even today bears the innocent title "Sleep." Courbet painted it for Khalil-Bey, a rich oriental living in Paris who already possessed Ingres' Turkish Bath (1862). The two women are lost in a dream-like female embrace that excludes any role for a heterosexual partner, except insofar as the latter is present in the male gaze of the viewer. Both the two coquettes, who seductively clothe their nakedness, and the two lesbians, who are unconcerned about their nakedness, bring us back to the dichotomy between the clothed and the naked. The former bear the hallmarks

—the stigma?

—of sex for money, while the latter are consciously placing themselves beyond the societal norms. On both these incarnations of "femmes damnées" (Baudelaire) the moralists lay the measuring staff of their prejudices. In his deliberate provocation of these prejudices, Courbet unconsciously adopts the disillusioning angle of vision that Goya had used at the beginning of the century, when he painted the two Majas. In the dialogue of the two lying figures, which the "painter as procurer"

24 transmits to the viewer, both are complicit in their perception of the other. The steady gaze endows both pictures with a challenging edginess. In both cases we are looking at a professional public presentation. Distanced in their way of coolly offering themselves the Majas reflect the matter-of-factness of the picture title, which amounts to a profanation of both (!) the Venus topoi. Goya evidently resists the idea of providing the picture with a baptismal certificate in poetic form. He makes public what was formely customary in the private sphere. In contemporary documentation, the Venus of Urbino was simply labelled "donna nuda", and similarly the Velázquez Venus (National Gallery, London) was simply a "mujer desnuda". In the 19th century, as the "sublime d'en bas"

15 began to crowd out its opposite, artists began to distance themselves ever more frequently from the traditional pictorial alibis for nudity of classical and allegorical sujets. "Bathers" or "sleepers" increasingly had to forego the ennobling identification with Venus or naiads. In this process of "removing the aura", Courbet's position vacillated. Sometimes he availed himself of the protective cover of allegory and mythology; at other