Open Letter To Artists (From An Art Critic) - Part 46
A Sad Case of Beating the Chest
by
Joan Altabe
Have you heard this one? It almost sounds like a joke.
The chalk drawings of a Florida figure artist were taken from view in a county library because they showed bared breasts too near the children’s section.
As if children haven't seen breasts since birth. As if children think of nudity in the same way adults do. As if there aren't a bevy of bared breasts in the Florida state museum, some decidedly sexually loaded. I'm thinking of Bathsheba at her Bath by Domenico Gargiulo and Eros Revealing a Sleeping Venus to a Bashful Satyr by Guiseppe Bartolomeo Chiari.
In fact, bared breasts have been a subject of art since pre-history. One example even served as an emblem for patriotism. Eugene Delacroix's celebrated painting Liberty Leading the People, which depicts a bare-breasted female raising the tricolor of the French flag in battle, ended up on a French postage stamp. This uncovered part of female anatomy was intended as a reminder that Liberty is the mother of France.
Bared breasts have also been used in religious works - in fact, right here in Florida. You can see a clear feeding of the infant Jesus in Giuseppe de Ribera's Madonna and Child at the state museum. As well, there are countless images of Mary nursing Jesus on church walls, like the Shrine of Our Lady of La Leche in St. Augustine comes to mind.
Of course, the Florida library isn't the only instance of skittishness over a woman's unclad upper body.
Probably the height of silliness occurred in a women's modeling class at the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of Art toward the end of the 19th century. Female students who wanted to study the figure were kept from drawing nude females for fear it wasn't ladylike. They had to use cows instead.
Here's a better known instance of silliness: To keep TV audiences from seeing the partially bared female breast of an aluminum statue in the Justice Department's Great Hall during his news conferences, erstwhile Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered it covered up. This, even though the 12-foot high figure, known as The Spirit of Justice, stood there for 66 years. Ashcroft probably saw the metal breast shining over his head on TV when he was giving news conferences. One wonders why he didn't just stand clear of the statue.
Anyway, if the uncovered breast is OK for churches, a European government and publicly funded museums, why isn't it OK for a library?
The answer may lie in the warring of two old ideals that continue to hold. The Renaissance ideal held that bodies stand for truth and beauty, and the medieval notion held that bodies stand for shame.
— by Joan Altabe
|
March 31, 2008
|
Print Version - 
PDF (1.81 MB)
Discuss article | 
Print this page | 
The views and opinions of individual authors/contributors expressed on the FAR® web site do not necessarily state or reflect those views and/or opinions of Fine Art Registry® or its agents or subsidiaries.
Fine Art News Feed
