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

what exists. Jonathan Crary develops Foucault's views when he says the new modes of perception "were disciplinary techniques that required a notion of visual experience as instrumental, modifiable, and essentially abstract, and that never allowed a real world to acquire solidity and permanence. Once vision became located in the empirical immediacy of the observer's body, it belonged to time, to flux, to death."

45 Freedberg detects two influences: being horrified, on the one hand, by the reality of the represented, and being driven, on the other, by a desire to instill the represented with complete vitality; the "fear of real body" versus the wish to "make an image come alive."

46 A nice example of this horror of, and attendant attraction towards, life is Flaubert's letter to Laurent Pichat: "You think I'm not nauseated by the same lowly reality the representation of which revolts you so much?"

4- Writing on Courbet, Hofmann also noticed this letter, as it was written at the time as the painter was working on his studio painting. And he was right to notice it because Courbet's work is an answer to the realistic challenge, the pictorial representation of the relationship of art and reality: an allégorie réelle. The peculiar narrative of the picture relies on the allegory of showing one thing and saying another, being indeed an allegory of a reality that cannot exist in the picture as reality. "The painter (i.e. himself) makes nature come alive on the canvas, and what is enlivened awakes him. This renewal is what deeply moves art, and carries away society."

48 The company in the picture hardly notices any of this. The literary counterpart of such representation is when individual lives, which never cross each other, are presented in a carefully, realistically drawn social milieu, and the primary and most meaningful content is what is between the people. The spacecontinuum opening, developing, moving between people is very important in literary realism, although writers prepare its development almost imperceptibly. This is what Zola exploits in the racecourse scene in Nana, as the elusive alternation of animalistic and human, in the whirling space where everything dissolves to prepare the undoing. Hofmann sees clearly that in Courbet's picture the naked woman, the counterpart of the society lady, is neither idealized, nor demonized. Seen from this angle, The Origin of the World may not appear obscene at all, though representing a nude with legs spread as if the body were nature certainly tries the sensibility of the censor in the viewer. André Masson may have relied on this when making his work for Lacan in 1955 that was to cover the Courbet picture,

49 and in which the female genitals become inseparably one with the landscape, constituting an allegoric reference to the origin of all nudes, the eternal Venus Genetrix, nature as the mother of everything. The nude entered the force field of beautiful and erotic attraction, and cannot escape what Georges Bataille describes thus: "When transgression has no possibility, desacralization has open way."

10 The work surrenders itself, cancels its relationship with beauty, and becomes open to desacralization. The naked body as a work of art validates this irreconcilable duality, yet as a work it demands autonomy, and in this sense the opportunity of transgression is not available, though this is what it encourages, stirring up the desire to desacralize. To use Maurice Merleau-Ponty 's expression," the "affective neutrality" breaks through in the bodily involvement, in "erotic understanding", human existence can be considered permanent embodiment, bodily involvement transports one into a certain state or condition. Manet's painting powerfully provokes this being beyond itself, and involves a break with academic painting, petitbourgeois prudery, empty eroticism concealed with mythologems. It is enough to remember Nana's appearance as Venus Anadyomene at the beginning of the novel: "Nana was next to naked. She appeared in her nakedness with a calm audacity, confident in the all-powerfulness of her flesh. A slight gauze enveloped her; her round shoulders, her Amazonian breasts, the rosy tips of which stood out straight and firm as lances... It was Venus rising from the sea, with no other veil than her locks. [...] Nana still preserved her smile, but it was the mocking one of a destroyer of men."

52 This is the complete degradation of the mythical, a theatrical scene of the apotheosis of the everyday and human, carefully orchestrated by Zola, who makes the flesh-andblood woman fill the place of the mythic being, banishing her to the obscene, and at the same time prudish,

55 coldness of marble. The novel is, as it were, the elaboration of this stepping out, presenting the social vegetation that takes place between the apotheosis of woman and the rotting of her beautiful body. If we want to understand the peculiar position of 19th-century art vis-à-vis the pictorial and literary representation of the body, we must consider Manet's painting in correlation with Zola's writings on art. With his defense of Olympia, Zola also justifies his own art; Manet's works can even be considered the forerunners of the later novels. In his essay on Manet, Zola celebrates the creator of Olympia for painting something as it is. "The whole world started booing, finding this body shameless; they may have been right, because, after all, this is flesh, our artist represents a young girl on the canvas who has lost her first freshness in her nakedness. When our painters paint a Venus, they correct nature, they lie.'"

4 Later he noted, apropos of the 1884 Manet exhibition, organized after the death of the painter, that in his painting truth clashed with the centuries-old lies of the eye, and that he was able to paint beauty again, because he hit on the living and humane, breaking the sediment of history and mythology that had gathered on the pictures.

55 Writing in The Art Monthly Review in 1876, Mallarmé said seeing Olympia is experiencing her as if it were for the first time.''

6 Valéry thought the painting unique because it translates seeing into the visible, as it stands alone, and attains its own visibility and comprehensibility only because it teaches us to see something.

57 The painting stands before us as the evidence of its own inconsumable and always imperfect nature; the self-revealing body is the eternal antithesis of the ideal, opening in its shocking presence the "sensual archaeology" of what each age leaves behind, in and around us.

58 Which is why Michel Foucault was right to say that nakedness becomes visible thanks to us.

59 TRANSLATED BY ÁRPÁD MIHÁLY