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

Tanulmányok / Studies - Bacsó Béla: Képtest - testkép / Picture-body - Body-picture

(Spectacular and futile attempts included those of orientalism, to which the leading ideologist of post-colonialism, Edward Said, reacted with such short-sightedness and racism/

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) Martin Warnke writes: "Goya knew the opportunities offered by academism, the vacuum left behind by the collapse of body language, which they sought to fill with gestures borrowed from antiquity."

35 Or more positively, the "look from below" ("Sicht von unten"), to use Werner Hofmann's expression,

34 was continually present in the painting and art of the period. Each artist tried to respond to this collapse, this lack of body language, as best as he or she could. It is in this sense that significant works of the 19th century became body pictures. Wilhelm Hausenstein, who was among the first to write a book on the nude in art, identifies surviving elements of the antique gestural idiom and formal order in the painting of Ingres.

35 This would explain why Ingres avoids using colors that evoke flesh, and why he adopts the meaningful postures of the Venus representations. What makes Ingres still important and interesting is the way he represented himself in the image of the East, engaged in a debate with himself. Degas recalls one of his visits to Ingres, when a person he did not know and whom he calls an idiot, was also present. Turning his eyes from Homer to The Turkish Bath, the visitor called out: "Ah, and this one here, Monsieur Ingres, this is where charm appears and joy... and perhaps something more," to which Ingres replied: "I have a variety of brushes, sir."

56 (77/. 8) Ingres did indeed have innumerable brushes, but he made a point of painting not after nature, but from memory, using other masters for models. This was what Degas adopted, together with the uncompromising desire to modulate the model to a point where it is impossible to determine how much of the appearing figure is charm and pleasantness and where the monster begins. With this remarkable insight of Degas in mind, we can say that painting can consider the naked body the symbol of either beauty or falsehood, but it has to abandon the ideal and to find real nakedness.

3 Uwe Fleckner, in his excellent analysis, 3S not only traces the development of the "Ingres effect," but also explores the significance of The Turkish Bath as the summation of the oeuvre. Allow me to recapitulate a few of his points that have bearings on the appearance of the modern body picture. The picture itself stands before us as "a still-life of flesh" (Günter Metken), in which the bodily completely refrains from flirting with the mythologem (unlike in the earlier Venus Anadyomene; Musée Condé, Chantilly); nothing, in other words, defends the body as body from the viewer's look, while the painting is also completely self-sustained. There is no plot related, which only enhances the pictorial effect. Fleckner thinks the conversion of the first version into a tondo (Madonna picture) produces a clash with a picture type of great tradition, and consequently meaningfulness. This late work by Ingres is on the way towards an abstract visual idiom, the body-producing quality of strong contour, and avoids, despite all applied and quoted elements, any iconographie reference. "The exotic subject, the 'distant alien,' becomes a metaphor of the 'close alien,' the erotic woman."

39 This orientalism has nothing oppressive or degrading about it; it refers back to itself instead, through the self-quote of the former, Raphaelistic, lukewarm, and sterile The Bather of Valpinçon (Musée du Louvre, Paris), and at the same time to the fear of, and to the deformed relationship to, the body that was typical of 19th-century society and culture. The master had never used this "brush" with such boldness; he was 82 when finishing what he had so much experimented with. In The Great Odalisque (III. 9), as Karl Rosenkranz was right to point out, beauty was still overcome by the sensual effect. "Ingres's well-known Odalisque is such a picture [i.e. one where the sensual enchants as sensual, provoking a restricted and restricting excitement]. The figure is incomparable, just like the execution, while all the whole situation radiates is sensuality. [...] Ingres could claim that the painting faithfully follows the Eastern customs; while this may be true, he cannot ward off the limiting and oppressive effect of showing us a slave, rather than free beauty."

40 The late work, in contrast, is the vivid and varied representation, as well as veneration, of the human body, without painterly compromises, where beauty and monstrosity heave against one another. In the wake of the radical extension of pictoral thematization, recent art history has highlighted the censorship element in connection with pictures. David Freedberg refrains from establishing a standard with which to measure excessively sensuous, or even offensive and obscene, representations - examples of which were seen by earlier ages, too -, suggesting that we know, if we know, what pornography is, or rather that our reaction, be it the simplest sensuous impression, includes an indication of this. The reaction to a photograph and a work made after the same sheds some light on this. Baudelaire railed against photography as something encouraging the abandonment of judgment, as the photograph was supposed to show everything as it is. Delacroix and Courbet used photographs as models.

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' We could say with Baudelaire that a real painter has nothing to fear. Julien Vallou de Villeneuve's erotic photographs of the early 1840s may really have served as arousers of desire; while painting somehow "repainted" them: Delacroix, for instance, idealized them, while Courbet made them more corporeal (III. 10). Freedberg thinks the realism of photography and the similarity of realistic painting produce a censorship effect and reaction; "what is realistic is ugly and vulgar," while art is beautiful and ethereal,

42 nakedness represented by art (painting) is beautiful and idealistic, a nude photograph is ugly and provocative. Whatever the 19th century thought about the photographed female body although the early nude photographs typically showed the naked woman in a "Titian posture," or, as in Eugène Durieu's photograph,

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' in "Ingres's position" and with drapes -, they did have their influence on the painting of the age. Zola saw a lack of individuality in photography, and considered it a mechanized construction of images: "If there were no personality, every picture would be a mere photograph."

44 Painting, like literature, felt challenged by the need to reproduce reality in as perfect a fashion as possible, while being horrified by the closeness and filthy ugliness of the same reality, wanting, as a consequence, to remain master of the represented reality, to make the represented more than the mere replication of