Art and the Nekkid Body

I just heard Cardinal Arinze's latest podcast on modesty. One point that the rather irritating interviewer kept going back to was on the morality of artists drawing from the nude. The cardinal was taking the position that it is at the very least dangerous to the soul for an artist to draw nude models.

The objections that the interviewer kept throwing up were primarily straw men: arguments of art for the sake of art, that there is so much of this in culture that it can't possibly be wrong, etc. Insofar as the ordinary person's understanding of looking at the nude goes, the Cardinal quite properly pointed out that morality trumps art and that morality trumps culture.

Fine. What both the interviewer and the Cardinal miss, however, is that a serious artist drawing from life tends to distance himself from the prurience that is assumed in spending hours with a nude model. I have spent many hours drawing and painting nude models, and based on my own experience and from talking to many other artists on the matter, one tends to take a fairly clinical and anatomical view of the body.

Now, one could argue that this rather cold and objective view is no way to treat the human body, and that would be entirely correct, IF the drawing was the ends of itself. What both men, knowing little of art, miss is that it is nearly impossible to correctly draw (and therefore paint) the human body without spending considerable time studying it undraped. In fact, to really get it right, you have to take the skin off and study muscle groups and bones as well.

Outside of drawing a person in armor, the knowledge of bone and flesh masses is essential, and a careful study of the masters will show that folds of clothing, belts, etc., are generally used to mark various bones, muscles and fascia.

In medicine it would be considered pure quackery to suggest that doctors not study anatomy on nude models (or carefully rendered drawings of nude models), and it is the same in art. The serious artist's training must involve hours of studying the human form without the shielding of cloth (now, I am entirely comfortable with requiring that genetalia be covered, so long as the structure of the pelvic girdle can still be seen).

Whether or not these nude studies should be exhibited in final paintings is a different question. Certainly there are historical subjects (Adam and Eve, for instance) that require this treatment, as we find in the Sistine Chapel (not generally held as an example of modernist degeneracy). However, in my own work, I will not put a nude figure in a final painting because the whole ballgame is different, and this sort of thing too easily crosses the line between an admiration of beautiful forms into a temptation to lust. I used to do it, but have not for some time, precisely for the objections the Cardinal has outlined.

But, if we are to have any sort of renewal of figure painting, and we must (so I write, even as I am working on an ambitious cycle of highly abstracted paintings), artists must constantly work from the nude. Art is as important as medicine, in fact, probably moreso, and we must demand that our artists go through a training that is suitably rigorous.

Now, certainly there are artists who will find the sort of detached view difficult, and simply cannot get beyond the fact that a purty nekkid girl is in front of them. There are probably med students with similar problems, and it behooves them, as it behooves the aforementioned theoretical artist, to avoid this sort of thing, even if it means abandoning the profession.