art

The oldest art school in the United States, PAFA had emphasized the study of the nude model since 1805, when figure painting and portraiture were in high demand. Thomas Eakins, once a PAFA instructor, was famously fired after he uncovered a male model in front of a class that included female students.

100 years later, the scandal had worn off 18-year-old women painting nudes, and we did it often. It didn’t take long to get desensitized by the daily sight of soft penises and drooping breasts, and I stopped equivocating the naked body with sexuality. When friends and family questioned the classroom emphasis on the nude, I told them something like, ‘skin, flesh, bones, and blood are some of the most complex subjects to paint accurately.’

At some point it felt like everyone in my painting program, students and teachers, was so focused on the challenge of capturing the nudes that we were offended by inquiries to their eroticism, much less the idea that we should think conceptually about figure paintings beyond expressions of craft.

As Clark put it: “Since the earliest times the obsessive, unreasonable nature of physical desire has sought relief in images, and to give these images a form by which Venus may cease to be vulgar and become celestial has been one of the recurring aims of European art.”

Of course, most students would grow out of this academic mode and mature into our own unique voices, painting different subjects or finding new mediums altogether. But there we were, a little art factory hard at work making “cheap nudes,” and many of our professors were excellent teachers because their own bodies of work were cheap nudes.

One day, with a wild hair of confidence, I approached a professor I admired outside of class. He was working on a huge multi-figure painting, and I don’t recall the details of our conversation, but I know I asked him something about the meaning of so many nude figures in the scene. He recommended I seek out Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia, who taught down the street at University of the Arts.

Paglia studied the psychosexual narratives in Western art through the lens of the Marquis de Sade, whose dominating idea of man’s will-to-power she posed to subvert Rosseau’s widely accepted theory of nature as benevolent mother goddess.

“When social controls weaken, man’s innate cruelty bursts forth,” Paglia argued. “Theremoved is created not by bad social influences but by a failure of social conditioning. Feminists, seeking to drive power relations out of sex, have set themselves against nature. Sex is power.”

As a student, I was turned off by Sexual Personae before I got far into the book. Paglia was edgy, and the opening chapters read more like a coke-fueled rant than an academic work. I revisited her for the sake of this essay, hoping to understand my professor with the benefit of hindsight.

“Male fear of woman’s self-containment is written all over mythology and culture,” Paglia wrote. “The fascination of woman’s autonomy is plain in Ingres’ The Turkish Bath…Ingres’ painting is oddly round, a rose window or Madonna rondo turned pagan peephole, through which we spy the plump nude bodies of a dozen women amorously entwined, like lesbian flower petals.”

A chapter dedicated to William Blake made me wonder if Paglia might have been a better fit for Jeffrey Epstein’s art advisor. “trespassing is always subliminally erotic. Piercing a temenos—a sacred space of mind, body, bedchamber or nature—is always a domination and defilement. Blake’s Infant Joy evokes an impulse toward criminal trespass. Reading it, we hover at the edge of a forbidden locus of experience.”