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

Tanulmányok / Studies - Linda Nochlin: Erotika és nőábrázolás a 19. században / Eroticism and Female Imagery in 19th-century Art

entire article, The Apples of Cézanne,

4 to a convincing demonstration of the centrality of what one might call the apple-female sexuality syndrome in the artist's oeuvre. Prof. Schapiro places the breast-apple metaphor in the context both of Western cultural history and of Cezanne's psychological development. There is obviously a timehonored connection, dignified by the sanction of high culture, between fruit and women's inviting nudity: apples and breasts have been associated from the time of Theocritus' pastoral verse down to Zola's eroticized paean to fruit in Le Ventre de Paris. Cezanne's Amorous Shepherd (III. 5.) is convincingly interpreted in the light of this time-honored association by Prof. Schapiro. Thus, despite the laughable triviality of Achetez des Pommes and its ilk as images, the echoes of a grand, universal and time-honored metaphor still reverberate in them. In any case, man's erotic association of inviting fruit and a succulent, inviting area of the female body lends itself easily to artistic elevation: sanctioned by tradition and prototype, it may be raised to the level of the archetypal though it may indeed also sink to the level of the ridiculous. No similar sanctions exist for the association of fruit with male sexuality, exemplified in a modern counterpart of Achetez des Pommes titled Achetez des Bananes." (III. 6.) While there may indeed be a rich underground feminine lore linking food - specifically bananas - with the male organ, such imagery remains firmly in the realm of private discourse, embodied in smirks and titters rather than works of art. Even today, the food-penis metaphor has no upward mobility, so to speak. While Sylvia Plath may compare - disappointedly - the male organ to turkey giblets, and Dr. William Rubin may describe - disapprovingly - the penis of the impotent male as "limp as a noodle," or to return to the banana metaphor, Philip Roth may nickname the heroine of Portnoy's Complaint "The Monkey," the linking of the male organ to food is always a figure of meiosis - an image of scorn, belittlement or derision: it lowers and denigrates rather than elevates and universalizes the subject of the metaphor. In the nineteenth century, and still today, the very idea - much less an available public imagery - of the male body as a source of gentle, inviting satisfaction for women's erotic needs, demands and daydreams is almost unheard of, and again not because of some "male-chauvinist" plot in the arts, but because of the total situation existing between men and women in society as a whole. The male image is one of power, possession and domination, the female one of submission, passivity and availability. The very language of love-making attests to this, as does the erotic imagery of the visual arts. Indeed, as John Berger has astutely pointed out, the female nude of tradition can hardly call her sexuality her own. Says Berger: "I am in front of a typical European nude. She is painted with extreme sensuous emphasis. Yet her sexuality is only superficially manifest in her actions or her own expression; in a comparable figure within other art traditions this would not be so. Why? Because for Europe, ownership is primary. The painting's sexuality is manifest not in what it shows but in the owner-spectator's (mine in this case) right to see her naked. Her nakedness is not a function of her sexuality but of the sexuality of those who have access to the picture. In the majority of European nudes there is a close parallel with the passivity which is endemic to prostitution.'"' One might add that the passivity implicit to the imagery of the naked woman in Western art is a function not merely of the attitude of the owner-spectator, but that of the artist-creator himself: indeed the myth of Pygmalion, revived in the nineteenth century, admirably embodies the notion of the artist as sexually dominant creator: man - the artist - fashioning from inert matter an ideal erotic object for himself, a woman cut to the very pattern of his desires. There are, happily, signs of change which go beyond such ephemera as the male nude fold-out popular in a magazine a few months ago. Years ago, Alice Neel, in her spectacular nude portrait of Joe Gould, took a step in the right direction. Sylvia Sleigh wittily reversed the conventional artist and model motif in her recent Philip Golub Reclining, representing a heavy-lidded male odalisque, recumbent against the foil of her own alert verticality. (7//. 7-8.) Miriam Schapiro furnished the miniature artist's studio in Womanhouse (in Los Angeles, winter-spring 1972) not only with a nude male model, but a still-life of bananas as well. The growing power of woman in the politics of both sex and art is bound to revolutionize the realm of erotic representation. With the advent of more women directors, the film will have to reshape its current erotic cliches into more viable, less one-sided sexual imagery. All this still remains largely in the future. To borrow a phrase from Erica Jong's Fruits and Vegetables, a collection of poems which itself is a sign of the times in the freshness of its fruit imagery, "The poem about bananas has not yet been written."

7 NOTES First published: Nochlin 1972. 1 Two noteworthy exceptions in the recent literature immediately spring to mind: Studies in Erotic Art, sponsored by the Institute for Sex Research of Indiana University, edited by Theodore Bowie and Cornelia V. Christenson, containing articles by Bowie himself, Otto J. Brendel, Paul H. Gebhard, Robert Rosenblum and Leo Steinberg; and Donald Posner's illuminating and convincing Caravaggio's Homo-Erotic Early Works which appeared in the Autumn 1971 Art Quarterly. " One can of course question to what extent such highly charged subjects could ever be considered "realistic" or "objective" in the nineteenth century, or at any time for that matter. Andersen, Wayne: Gauguin's Paradise Lost, New York 1971, 247. 4 Schapiro, Meyer: The Avant-Garde (Art News Annual XXXIV), New York 1968, 34-53. Created by the author with the sympathetic cooperation of the male model at Vassar College. 6 Berger, John: The Past Seen from a Possible Future. In: Selected Essays and Articles, Harmondsworth 1972, 215. Jong, Erica: Fruits and Vegetables, New York 1968, 13. The poem continues: "Southerners worry a lot about bananas. Their skin. And nearly everyone worries about the size of bananas, as if that had anything to do with flavor. Small bananas are sometimes quite sweet. But bananas are like poets: they only want to be told how great they are. Green bananas want to be told they're ripe. According to Freud, girls envy bananas. In America chocolate syrup and whipped cream have been known to enhance the flavor of bananas. This is called a banana split."