Behind the Scenes with a Pair of Paintings
Reaching (Regina) and Reaching (Peter)

This week we will begin exploring a pair of paintings, Reaching (Regina) and Reaching (Peter).  As we have already explored the behind the scenes of Reaching (Regina), this week we will begin with Reaching (Peter). In following weeks we will take an in depth look at the role anatomy plays when painting figures.

They were not planned to be a pair of paintings.  Francis recalls being in his studio working on Reaching (Regina). When Peter saw the nearly finished painting, he laid down on the floor and took the pose you see in the painting. He took this pose as a natural response to the pose Regina was in.

Knowing the background on Peter may help to understand the acting out of his response to the painting as contrasted to a verbal description of what he was experiencing when he saw the painting.  In his younger years, Peter was an athlete. When he was in his early thirties he had a stroke that left him almost entirely paralyzed on his right side. If you look closely at his right arm and his right leg in the painting , you can see that they are not quite normal.  What you are seeing is not a mistake in the painting, it is capturing the truth of a particular model.

The stroke also affected Peter’s speech. He could no longer talk in words, he could only make guttural sounds to indicate yes, no or maybe.  These sounds are how Francis and Peter communicated. Peter is a very intelligent man and during his posing Francis conversed with him on a variety of subjects from philosophy to politics, literature and other subjects.  Francis continues to be amazed at the depth of the conversations they had with Peter’s limited means of conversation.  There was, in fact, much he could say with the expressions of his face and body and the inflections he would impose on the sounds he made to express his meaning.

One of the most important observations about Peter is that he is, like Regina, an anatomically functional nude.  Both figures appear able to get up and change pose. They are not locked into their position on the canvas. In general and in most paintings you will find that the figure is fixed in its position by gravity. For example, this may happen because the painting makes clear that the body is standing on the floor or seated in a chair or that an arm rests on a piece of furniture.

In Reaching (Regina), the figure is seen from above and is more directly lying flat on the floor than is Peter in his pose. He is in an unusual position. He is not positioned fully on his side - there are rotations. There is no definitive point where the disposition of his pose has been fixed. Taking this into consideration, you can turn the painting upside down or on   it’s edges and make an entirely different observation about what the subject is doing within the painting.

When John Walsh, former Director of the Getty Museum, first viewed Reaching (Peter), Francis turned the painting on it’s four  edges. Walsh was amazed at the impact he felt seeing the figure in a different position. 

When the painting was turned 90 degrees so  Peter's back faced up, Walsh remarked, "he’s just flying through the space!"  In this position you are no longer viewing a man lying on the ground, partially crippled, reaching out. Walsh remarked how his attention was drawn to the designs and shapes that occur at the back of Peter's right knee and on his left leg, to the shapes on the sole of the foot.

"How often do you stop to look at the sole of a foot?", Walsh asked. The anatomically functional nude is able to accomplish these different things but a painting or sculpture is of course static, so viewers will have to use their imagination empathetically to identify with the figure's immediate presence and with its ability to change positions.

With most of Francis’ paintings the figure is to some degree anchored by the nature of the pose. If a figure standing on the floor is turned upside down there still will be this figure standing on the floor, but seen upside down. With Peter, as you turn the painting, you will notice how completely he changes.  You see him first in his reaching pose and then as you turn him, so his back is facing up, he seems to be flying and what is a purple drapery on the floor becomes a cape. Turning the painting once again, he seems to be plunging with velocity downward.

The notion of asking the viewer to empathetically allow an anatomically functional figure to get up and move around was not a part of the requirements for a nude figure in classical art. The Greeks who could make the gods take human form were not concerned with this concept nor was it a concern in the Renaissance, where figures are designed to take their place on the canvas in an idealized form.

Francis regards these two paintings of Reaching (Regina) and Reaching (Peter) as expressions of what the anatomically functional bodies of a particular man and woman can accomplish today.  They bring an immediacy to the body and the human figure because of their potential for changing position and so Francis suggests they are not separated and apart from our space. They are in the room with you. While the viewer always seeks to bring a painted or sculpted figure to life, this particular kind of presence would not happen if these figures were not anatomically functional.

Next week, we will begin to delve into anatomy and the role it plays when painting figures. 

Come meet Francis in person at the Masters Exhibition Opening Reception, at the Century Association on October 2, from 5pm - 7pm. Just email fc@franciscunningham.com to receive a personal invitation from Francis.

It's 1975. "Patrick" and the New York scene.

Today we have a story from 1975, of course from the New York art scene involving Dick's exhibition.  In order to set it against the historical background we go to Wikipedia where we find this handy chart about art movements from the 1950s to 2000s.

We look in the column devoted to the 1970s and find a handy list of hot movements of the time, but not what else artists are doing. Our blog entry halts and we have to find a better source of information on the period. We're interested in the stable of the Castelli Gallery as it is a good measure of what is going on in New York major galleries in that decade than the rather new movements listed on Wikipeidia, and we find the exhibition history on the gallery website.  Here is how 1975 looks at Leo Castelli.

 In short, Castelli is showing abstraction and pop art.  That leads us to assume, perhaps too soon, but our time is limited today, that there is little coverage of the kind of representational painting Dick does.  We make a short stop at Allan Frumkin Gallery, today know as George Adams which is known for representing figurative artists such as Jack Beal and Philip Pearlstein.  Here is a statement from their website.


"REALIST AND FIGURATIVE ART  The gallery has long been known for representing Realist and Figurative artists such as Jack Beal and James Valerio as well as handling works by Alfred Leslie and Philip Pearlstein."

We don't find anything on what the gallery is showing in the 1970s and we move on to the generals.

Another element to the backdrop of what Dick is doing at the time is the photorealist movement beginning late 1960s and early 1970s, a reaction to Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. While the Abstract Expressionists, Minimalists and Photorealists are fighting it out, from what Dick tells us, Philip Pearlstein and Lennart Anderson are painting nudes and showing in New York galleries.

In 1975 Dick has a show in New York which features life-sized figures, including nudes such as "Patrick."

"Patrick" is in the European tradition of the idealized nude- three-dimensional and standing in space- except that he's a particular human being.

Here is the story;

"This painting of "Patrick" was taken down from the walls of a prestigious New York gallery without my knowledge and put in a back room. It was 1975 and the occasion was my third one-man show which, in addition to still-life and landscape, included four life-sized clothed figures and four life-siize nudes.

That Saturday opening I bounded up the stairs to the main second floor gallery to be congratulated, coming down, by the man who had introduced me to the gallery. He never spoke to me again.  On the following Tuesday my sister-in-law saw the show and called, saying that she had seen a man waving a catalogue and wondering where the painting of "Patrick" was? A gallery attendant then ushered him in to a back room, and she followed. 

At the age 44 and in full stride I was still an innocent about the art world. I called Walter Terry, dean of American dance critics and a friend of my wife's and     also myself, and I said, "Walter, what do I do"?  The reply came without hesitation- "go to the gallery and them them either it goes up or the whole show goes down."

I did that.  Well, I brought out the sweat on the gallery owner's upper lip. Not a good sign.  He said the head of a company was coming in to buy a large, million dollar unfinished sketch by Claude Monet of his house-boat, and that the man's wife had died of cancer and that he'd be upset.  The conversation continued on until I said, "Look. When he comes in, detain him on the first floor, take the painting down, and put it up when he leaves."  "Hooray," the dealer said, "Cunningham has got the answer."  A few weeks later the letter came, saying I'd never have a one-man show there again.

When the head of the Brooklyn Museum Art School, where I would teach for 18 years, Augustus Peck, heard about this he said, "You'll get a gallery in New York, but you'll never get a good one." Gus Peck was wrong on one count; I have had no gallery in New York, good or bad.

Why were the powers-that-be-disturbed by a particular, male, human being, nude?  Why are some people still disturbed? Is it the male nude?  Is it the particularity?

Today is not 1975.  We have had far more exposure to the body through television, movies and the performing arts.  We have now reality TV and "The Biggest Looser," where we see 350 or 400 pound bodies, but I suspect we're as much voyeurs now as we were then- afraid of our own bodies, looking at them with something between shame and distrust.  

Let's look at "Patrick" as being ahead of its time in taking up the nude in the classical art form but with the subject, a particular human being.

-Francis Cunningham"

Further Thoughts on the Nude: The Relationship of the Contemporary to the Classical (Part 3/3)

Continues from part 2

Francis Cunningham On the Beach, Tom Johnson (1997) oil on linen 55 x 70 in.

Francis Cunningham Man Walking (1999) oil on linen 72 x 36 in. Private Collection.

In being open to the particular model one opens up the entire range of human expression through the body. When the model is nude one experiences this directly, unencumbered by baggage. It is shown by the small patterns within the larger movements. These are the adjustments, the little give-aways that a Nureyev, Baryshnikov or any great dancer or actor will show you and which will pass by you in a flash. They color the movement. They are expressed in painting and sculpture by what I call the designs within the design. But unlike acting, dance, movies or video, in painting and sculpture one has the opportunity to explore these designs at leisure, to meditate, examine and ponder.

Francis Cunningham Two Figures, Red Background (1992) oil on linen 78 x 52 in.

          I am also suggesting the reintroduction of reason and science into the artistic process – not in the sense of technology as in video and computer art, but science taken as the rational and experimental study of a subject, here the nude. We have gone past the anatomy of Leonardo and Michelangelo, codified in the 16^th century by Vesalius. As expressions of their world they are, in a sense, as out-of-date as are the politics of the 16^th century Italian city-states. But, and it is a large “but,” the raw information that Leonardo and others developed and that Vesalius formulated is still valid and the mass concepts and form theory developed and practiced in the Renaissance are as valid today as they were then. So also is the classical attitude towards humanity in so far as it is civilizing and humane. It is just that we have broadened the scope of anatomy, movement, gesture and our attitude toward the human being.

In taking on the particular individual nude as subject for painting and sculpture I am not advocating license, crassness or whatever may be demeaning. 

Philip Pearlstein Male and Female Models With Balloon Chair and Old African Drum (2000) Courtesy Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York

                                            Odd Nerdrum Iron Law (1984) 115 x 82.7 in.

                                              Lucian Freud Lying by the Rags (1989-1990)

                                         
The body is magnificent in how it functions, noble and as intrinsically beautiful in its daily self as anything depicted in classical art.

How you view the world will determine what you see.
                                                                                       *****************

Addendum 

December 26, 2009 

and 

February 24, 2010 

 Polykleitos Doryphoros ca. 450-40 B.C. from Pompeii, marble, 212 cm. Naples, Museo Archaeologico

Why the anatomically functional figure?  I regard myself as a classicist.  I go back to Greece, to my experience of Polykleitos and Phidias in Naples, the real presence of the human being in art, not just the human body.  If the Greeks in fact confined the human being to a few poses and to one or two points of view – station points from which to view the work – their figures feel real, existing as real presences.

                           Francis Cunningham Regina Standing Side View ('07-08) oil on linen 80 x 36 in. 
With the anatomically functional figure the figure feels real from many points of view, because it is not confined to its position on the canvas or as sculpture, but communicates its capacity to move about and take other positions.  Furthermore, expressively, it is not confined to a few poses and to those proportions which are defined as beautiful, but it opens up the whole range of expression through the unrestricted range of the body’s positions. 

                                       Francis Cunningham Reaching - Regina ('93-96) oil on linen 72 x 48 in. Private Collection.

                                            Francis Cunningham Reaching-Peter (1994-96) oil on linen 72 x 48 in.
For the Greek artist, the body and spirit are one.  So they are with me, and what I have sought to do is to bring the intellect, emotion and spirit back into the body. 
      In comparison, the “New Realism,” as Philip Pearlstein embodied it, intentionally avoids narrative and the intellectual, spiritual and emotional life of the subject.  The press release for “Pearlstein/Held: Five Decades” at Betty Cuningham gallery, November 19, 2009 – February 13, 2010, comments that, “By the late 1960’s Pearlstein had committed to the ‘New Realism,’ as stated in John Perrault’s manifesto:
No stories; no allegories; no symbols. 
No hidden meanings; no obvious meanings.
No philosophy, religion, or psychology.
No jokes.
No political content.
No illustration.”

Philip Pearlstein Two Nudes in Studio (1965) Oil on canvas 24 x 18 in.  Westheimer Family Collection © Philip Pearlstein
     
We had to have Pearlstein – we are lucky to have him – because, as he has said, “I rescued the human figure from its tormented, agonized condition given it by the expressionistic artists and the cubist dissectors and distorters of the figure, and at the other extreme I have rescued it from the pornographers, and their easy exploitations of the figure for its sexual implications.”  This quote, from Irving Sandler’s essay for the Betty Cuningham show, is followed by, “Unlike painters of the nude in the past, Pearlstein continues to portray what he sees without interpretation.” 
      Likewise, I portray what I see without interpretation.  I do not interpret, I present.  Pearlstein had to strip away all the barren and sterile expressionist, cubist and neo-classical baggage that hung around the human figure.  He cleared the decks.  It was a prodigious achievement.  It makes possible tearing down the barrier Kenneth Clark describes between the naked individual and the nude. 

                                           Francis Cunningham Three Figures (1993-99) oil on linen 72 x 96 in.
     
What I “see,” and this is tightly bound to the color-spots and the specific individual human being, has been described by Martin Sheen, the actor: “If you don’t leave home with the true sanctity of being, you won’t see that sanctity in anyone else.”  I see that sanctity in every person I have painted, nude or clothed, not because I approach them from a theologically intellectualized point of view but because I am convinced and awed by the universals of geometry, arcs and angles, and the staggering uniqueness of the color-values seen from my station point, unrepeated and unrepeatable. 
      A friend, author and educator, on seeing the figure of Genay Sundra in Three Figures remarked, “She is a goddess.”  For me, the gods and goddesses of antiquity and idealized form are as dead as they are to Pearlstein and other figure painters of today, but I have found also that they are not truly dead; they have simply moved into individual human beings.  I say this not because I “think” this or would like to believe it, but because this is what I see.  

Further Thoughts on the Nude: The Relationship of the Contemporary to the Classical (Part 2/3)

Continues from part 1

                     Francis Cunningham Mimi Scherb (1971) oil on linen 50 x 32 in.

Returning to what is necessary in the making of an anatomically functional nude, you will need not one station-point, as with the conventional camera, but many, as in motion pictures or video. The difference is that in painting and sculpture multiple station-points are incorp

orated in one image in which the eye of the viewer does the moving whereas in motion photography multiple station-points occur by means of many images over time. In painting the life-sized figure, John Singer Sargent said you must draw it as if it were a mile away and paint it as if you were on top of it. That is because seen from a mile away (infinite distance) the parts of the body appear in their actual proportional relationships without visual distortion, whereas the color-value relationships that express the body’s forms only can be seen from close up.

Francis Cunningham Dancer - Regina (2003-04) oil on linen 77 x 54 in.

The way the artist overcomes this apparent incongruity – the body viewed simultaneously from a mile away and close up – is by employing multiple station-points in drawing or sculpting the figure. This is done by changing horizon lines and moving to the left or right of the principal vertical axis, so as to communicate the actual proportional relationships of the parts of the body one to another. It is a process that cannot be accomplished by measurement alone; it requires from the artist in addition to seeing, knowledge, and above all, empathy. The body has to feel right, and if it feels right it is right.

                                     Francis Cunningham Jeff (with skull) (1985) oil on linen 66 x 58 in. Private Collection

Francis Cunningham Sharon (with pelvis) (1986) oil on linen 76 x 56 in.

With measurement – the pencil held at arm’s length or the caliper – as with every other aspect of painting or sculpture, if you look uncomprehendingly at nature to provide answers to the questions you pose you will not find them. The process of transcribing and presenting multi-dimensional experience onto a flat surface or into a block of stone, plaster or bronze is man-made and has no counterpart in nature.  

        What Sargent did not have in his painting vocabulary was the complete abandonment to visually observed color-value developed by Charles Hawthorne (1872-1930) and taught by Edwin Dickinson (1891-1978) to all of us who studied with him.

                                                                     Charles Hawthorne The Italian Girl (1910) 20 x 16 in.

                                 Edwin Walter Dickinson Sheldrake Winter (1929) 29.9 x 25 in.

Within this training, what continues to be the subject of discovery and exploration for me is the fact that observed color-spots will create tangible sensations of three-dimensional form and space. The reason for this, I believe, is not difficult to discern. Our eyes are extraordinarily sensitive in discriminating among the differences in tone, both far away and close up.

Looking out over a valley several miles away we can tell the difference in greens between a stand of pine and a stand of hemlock, a stand of white ash and a stand of maple. In nature the color-spots which the artist will abstract, appear to lie in space. They are waiting to be seen, their relationships to be abstracted and, as color-spots, placed on the flat surface of the canvas. Through these observed color-values space is described and we are drawn into that space. 

                                            Francis Cunningham Limestone Farm, Sheffield  (1973) 32 x 50 in.

              On the other side of the coin, close up, the perceived color-spots appear to lie on three-dimensional forms. Onto the flat surface of the canvas the artist abstracts the relationship of these color notes, duplicating in painting the information the eye needs to perceive three-dimensional form. 

                                                               Francis Cunningham (work in progress March 2010)
Like black magic, these perceived color-spot relationships on the canvas communicate sensations of sculptural form. Bernard Berenson referred to such ideated sensations of form as tactile values, considering them along with movement and space composition, to be at the forefront of qualities essential to the figure arts.

We have today a tool for creating sensations of form and space that has hitherto only been hinted at in Western painting. To be sure, working with the changing light of out-of-doors makes the painting process more complex in landscape than in the studio, but not impossible. 

Sheridan Lord Landscape, Autumn (1974) 40 x 70 in. The Parrish Art Museum, Bequest of Joseph Fox

Compare distant space in a contemporary painting with how space is achieved in the Mona Lisa, in which it is suggested by conventional means – darker and clearer in the foreground, atmospherically more blue-gray and lighter as the distance recedes. Space is not continuous – there are in Renaissance art, zones of space – foreground, middle ground, background. 

                            Raphael, Alba Madonna, oil on panel transferred to canvas, c. 1510 (National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.)
You are looking through a window. From the Venetian painters through the 19^th century, with occasional passages of what might be called color-spot painting in the precursor plein-air painters including Corot and the Impressionists, the means for creating sensations of space have been primarily conceptual and a matter of convention – perspective, scale, overlapping planes, contrasting masses of tone – not observed color-value. Observation, with the Impressionists, passed through the prism of a particular way of representing the effects of light, as conventional in its own way as is the perspectival space of the Renaissance. 

                                          Francis Cunningham Chime Knife and Barking Spud (1970) oil on linen 28 x 44 in.
 Let us not forget that space is a property of nature which we all experience and which is there to be dealt with, deep or shallow. With still life the actual depth of space may be no more than two feet.

Francis Cunningham Highwood (1985) 50 x 86 in. Private Collection.

      I have discovered empirically that one can read space in a color-spot landscape or still life at a greater distance from the painting than in European paintings of the past. I have been a hundred yards from a large landscape canvas, still able to comprehend its space, whereas at this distance a painting in earlier techniques would read as a piece of colored cloth.

Francis Cunningham Moment  (1989 and 2004) oil on linen 108 x 78 in.

      With the nude it is the same. One can be at a distance of one hundred feet and more and the forms of the life-sized nude will read like sculpture. At this distance the sculptural qualities of an actual human being would not be apparent for they are dependent on perceptible halftones which in nature are confused or lost at such a distance. In the nature, the figure would appear to the eye as blobs of color, as in an Impressionist painting. What is the significance of this? We may be reminded that the distance from floor to ceiling in the Sistine Chapel is 65 feet and that to make his figures intelligible, Michelangelo had to enlarge them in scale, using Florentine methods of coloration then current in order to make his shapes discernable.

There are occasionally passages of what constitutes color-spot observation in Velasquez and Eakins, but as with the plein-air landscapists these are incidents within a conventionalized whole. With Velasquez, granted the acuity and detachment of his observation, the conventions he uses are those of Baroque painting. 

                                                            Velazquez Luis de Gongora y Argote (1622)
                                                                        
With Eakins one may say much the same; his conventions are those of Gérôme’s studio.

Any and all of these assertions should be tested empirically, as I have done with my own life-sized nudes, landscape and still life, and to a lesser extent with those of others. Specifically, I have placed my work alongside several American 19^th century landscape paintings as well as portraits by Chester Harding, examining viewing distances with regards to the intelligibility of form and space. But most convincingly, in a lifetime of teaching I have watched the values of form and space emerge from the color-spot paintings of beginners. 

                                              Francis Cunningham Karen (1972-73) oil on linen 60 x 26 in. Private Collection.
Next Part 3 of 3

Further Thoughts on the Nude: The Relationship of the Contemporary to the Classical (Part 1/3)

Francis Cunningham
December 28, 2006

 

             Lysippos The Athlete Scraping (Apoxyomenos) after the original late 4BC in the Vatican Museum

I am a classicist, that is to say a lover of the classical nude. But I have on occasion argued against the classical nude in order to free the model as subject – the “daily” nude, specific, naked and individual – so that I might discover the classical nude within the daily. How have I done this? By accepting the how-high-for-how-wide of the individual person’s proportions, the particularity of the arcs and angles that constitute his or her body’s shapes, and the particular color-value relationships that describe these shapes.

 

                                             Francis Cunningham Patrick (1973-75), oil on linen, 80 x 44 in.

What appears on my canvas is not the result of copying nature. It is the product of a painterly process of decision-making, one that abstracts from the visual appearance of the figure and coordinates this information with the actual proportional relationships of the anatomical parts of the model’s body.
What our eyes see and what is actually there are not at all the same. Your eye may tell you that the hand coming toward you is larger than the head behind it – the camera gives proof – but your mind knows that the hand is smaller, and by how much.
The model in front of you may be lit by more than a single light source, perhaps by as many as four or five, but if you want the body’s forms to read as three-dimensional you will select a single light source and you will then light the geometrical form-concepts that mass the model’s anatomical parts by means of this single light source. All of this is knowledge, conceptual and generalized information which the artist brings to bear on the appearance of the particular model. What we “see” is a combination of seeing and knowing.
In taking up the nude today, what is the difference between now and what was done in the past? The short answer is a world. The disappearance of the classical world view has opened up for us a new world of possibilities in terms of the ways in which a human being moves and the meaning of gestures, and also in the means for creating three-dimensional form and space.

 

                                  Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres La Grande Odalisque (1814), 35 x 64 in.

Classical art from antiquity through the 19th century was concerned primarily with ideal or idealized proportions, rhythms, pictorial organization and also with generalized color. The figures work as art, but how many classical or classicized figures do you know that can actually take a pose other than the one in which they are positioned? You may ask why would anyone want a painted or sculpted figure to be in any other position than the one they are in? Why should a painted or sculpted figure be anatomically functional and able to move about, change positions and take other poses? The answer to this is that in accepting the model as a functioning human being rather than just a painted or sculpted depiction, a whole new set of possibilities for understanding the human being, physically, mentally and spiritually, opens up – possibilities that were closed to the classical outlook.

 

                           Francis Cunningham Regina Reclining (2003-05), oil on linen, 32 x 65 in.

                               Francis Cunningham Genay Sundra Reclining (1997-99), oil on linen, 40 x 72 in.

How many depictions in classical painting and sculpture are other than theatrical, operatic statements of the “mad, sad, glad” of human emotions, as the chorographer Alwin Nikolais called them? Piero della Francesca’s silence is no less ideal in its effect – a theater of the ineloquent.

 

Piero della Francesca St. John the Evangelist (1454-1469), tempera on poplar panel, 52 3/4 x 24 1/2 in. The Frick Collection.

 As an experiment, take Raphael’s Entombment and examine it for probability and expenditure of effort in relationship to the movement and gestures required by the action.

 

                       Raphael The Entombment (1507), oil on panel, 184 × 176 cm. Galleria Borghese, Rome.

Take each pose for yourself. You will not be able to. [I have had students prove this to themselves.] With this exercise in hand, examine the Sistine Ceiling and the Last Judgment of Michelangelo, the figures in Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus and Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa, with its Michelangeloesque poses in a carefully composed pyramid.

 

Michelangelo The Sistine Ceiling; Cumaean Sibyl (detail).

  

         Michelangelo The Last Judgment; St. Bartholomew (detail).

Delacroix Death of Sardanapalus (1827); detail.

 Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa; detail.

It’s not an accident that beginning with Praxiteles’ Aphrodite in the 4th century, classical antiquity developed only seven basic poses with minor variants for the goddess of love. Can we today imagine confining the expression of love to seven poses?

 

Praxiteles Aphrodite

  

                                Francis Cunningham Regina (2005-2006), oil on linen 80 x 36 in.

The classical mindset from antiquity through the 19th century limited the possibilities of the nude to a small number of gestures and poses – these poses constitute the classical nude, as Kenneth Clark has described them in The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form.

Continues in part 2/3