Titian and Manet's reclining figures
Discuss the aforementioned statement in relation to the ways in which selected artists have represented the human figure.
From the Renaissance masters of Titian and Manet to the contemporary provocateurs’ of Kehinde Wiley and Julie Rrap, artists across time have maintained an artistic fascination with depicting the human form as an amalgamation of meanings and socio-economic change for audience engagement. Artistic depictions of the body have been reshaped and reinterpreted to reveal growth and embrace within cultures that can be almost as alluring as the subjects themselves. Artists have always used the human figure to convey meanings about their world and the body is no exception as seen through the works of Manet’s Olympia (1865), Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538), Kehinde Wiley’s Femme piquee par un sepent (2008) and Julie Rrap ‘s After Manet (2002). As artists seek to simultaneously convey and push the existing values of their society the societal aspects of authority, gender dynamics and relationships are often symbolically commented upon within their works.
The nude as a Visual Arts genre has at times generated strong criticism from its audience, but most telling is John Berger’s seminal account of nudity vs. nakedness in ‘Ways of Seeing’. Berenger states, ‘to be naked is without disguise as you are within your natural skin and as you are’, while in art nudity is placed on display as its own ‘form of dress’. Recontextualisation of the nude comments on the pre-existing role of women in society: not to be oneself but rather an object for the viewing pleasure of others. Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538) was most likely a ‘marriage painting’ to celebrate the 1534 wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino. This ‘Venus’ is awake in her boudoir, gazing at us as we gaze at her. Shameless. Seemingly available for pleasure, yet Venus’ hand is placed in a traditional pose of modesty. To reinforce her femininity she is adorned with jewelry, her status being indicated by both the evident grandeur of her home and the presence of her maids in the background. Titian conforms to the wide artistic tradition of symbolism to inscribe rich meanings within the work. For instance, Titian has placed a small dog at the foot of the bed to symbolize both fidelity and act as a visual link between Venus and her maids, a rose to act as a symbol of beauty and associate with matrimony and a marriage chest alongside the maids to signify a domestic setting and ‘possession’ by her husband. As David Rosen explains, the picture is profoundly sensual: ‘the dialectic of seeing and touching lies at the heart of Titian’s pictorial art’. The realistic rendering of the body creates an atmosphere of intimacy, a timeless symbol of ideal female beauty. The way this image is interpreted thus depends on the viewer's attitudes, experiences and expectations.
Titian represents the themes of Renaissance with originality through a dark, erotic mood and a fresh sense of beauty, establishing the reclining nude as a convention for the representation of females in Western art. This work acts as a commentary upon social constructions of marriage, gender and power as seen through the works aforementioned copious epithalamic symbolism (wedding caisson, myrtle bush and faithful dog). Titian’s depiction of the reclining Venus as a symbol of love — the unattainable goddess — hence poses a clear representation of the body as a commentary on gender and social relations during the 16th century while also pushing the boundaries of erotic art representation to the general public.
During the Renaissance period, a rich language of symbols and signs were interweaved in art to allow meanings within the subjects of works such as Olympia to comment most particularly on themes authority and gender. Manet’s Olympia (1863) was exhibited at great scandal in the official Paris salon of 1865 as Manet’s model, Victorine Meurend, was hired to aid in Manet’s creation of an imagined prostitute. It makes sense that Manet did not paint his unconventional choice of subject in a conventional manner, as this would have undermined his statement of social order. Brushstrokes are put on display, not hidden amongst the composition and colours are used in flattened swatches of colour and light rather than in a rounded and realistic manner. Light is manipulated differently in both works. Titan diffuses light through his painting, emphasizing the subjects’ skin and figure, while the harshly lit scene of Manet’s work leaves nothing to the imagination.
Olympia ties to the statement that the body may act as a sign or symbol when an artist chooses to depict it a certain way. For instance, Manet plays with the language of signs and symbols strictly followed by Titian during his career and 16th century work. Instead of Titians dog (a symbol of fidelity in Renaissance artmaking) Manet incorporates a black cat (a crude symbol later known to represent promiscuity). As T.J Clark mused, “the painting insists on its own materiality” and indeed, Manet’s additional layers of symbolism beyond the mere physicality of the work allows for an exotic and rich representation of subject. Some of these visual codes include the black servant (a comment on submission and servitude), the florist bouquet (wealth but also a sign for the transience of life), the velvet ribbon (historical sign of prostitution) and orchid around Victorine’s neck. This work clearly re-contextualises the Venus of Urbino (1538) while simultaneously inverting its meaning as a commentary of body and social order.
Autonomy in a sensual display was a notion rarely explored by artists prior to Manet, and yet his conceptual decision to depict an imagined Parisian prostitute was a step beyond Titian’s own experimentalism. There is a clear appropriation of allegory engraved into the body of Victorine, and beyond this the forms of Olympia and Victorine crudely challenge the old styles of modesty and allusion. Olympia’s gaze neither offers nor takes; this refusal of expression makes the statement that she may be possessed but never owned. While dealing with the same values, there is a clear disjunction to the expression of Venus, who is owned but her stance and aura of confidence leads us to believe she is not possessed easily. Who holds the power in these settings? The body forces audiences to question how much belongs to the subject, the artist, the world and themselves. Rather than an ‘object for sale’ as history has often portrayed the body within art, Manet holds the body up as a controlled subject available only under her the subjects own guidelines, hence the hand placed strategically on the thigh – only intended to obtain ‘payment’ for work – juxtaposes the modesty implied by Venus’ hand between her thighs. The 300 years separating the works (16th - 19th century) act as a commentary on the changing regard of the female form; all it symbolizes and cultivates within society and art realms. The body has and will always remain an evolving sign and symbol that pays tribute to ‘changes in the way that power, gender and social relationships are understood’ by global society.
“Appropriation is to use something with the idea that people will identify the ‘static’ between its former social presence and the way you’re presenting it now”, and the material practice of 21st century artist Kehinde Wiley epitomizes this notion in his challenges of black culture to be raised to the dignity of high art in ways that history has never properly acknowledged before. He is a brilliant renaissance technician with hip-hop subject matter who lifts his subjects from the streets of NYC and renders them in a visual language of classic European/Renaissance portraiture. Femme piquee par un sepent (2008) is an oil canvas work that harnesses irony, humour and parody in depicting the body as a challenger of race/gender, and inverting roles between idealised female form and grand narratives/cannons of artmaking. The work radicalizes the form used in Auguste Clesinger’s 1846 sculpture of a female nude by replacing the female figure with a reclining African American man in a hoodie and jeans. This same atmosphere of anxiety is transferred to ideas of criminality and racism in American culture while a coy expression compares to the inverted exoticism common of historical female nudes. Beyond media sterotypes, The Virgin Martyr St. Cecilia (2008) oil on canvas based on Stefano Maderno’s 17th century sculpture presents an equally typical African American in the same powerless and submissive position as white martyred female, or a modern victim of tactless violence. The work challenges gender constructions through enchanting colours and cherry blossom repetitive patterning that is both eye catching and ties to ‘conceptual realism’. Juxtaposition of such vibrant contemporary street wear with delicately feminine background makes a social and artistic statement.
Wiley blends perspectives to create a new perspective on national identity. His use of human form in art indeed ‘pays changes to the way that power, gender and social relationships [have been previously] understood’ through the argument of who was painted and ‘who was painted out’. Wiley’s provision of art history thorough the figures of a people originally repressed makes a powerful commentary on issues of gender, power and race.
African photographer Seydou Keïta’s portraits present sitters with air of dignity and, using this as an influence, Wiley equally reincorporates this dignity he believes is missing in traditional representations of black people by European artists. Contemporary art stretches beyond utopian or allegorical presentations of the body to present audiences and artists alike with continual questioning of authority, gender-based ideals and who is in charge of writing history through artmaking. Modern inventions like Photoshop and photography have gained recent relevance in their ability to capture a moment and reveal a blunt truth where traditional methods were often appropriations. But even now, photography can be manipulated to produce certain sentiments. The figure has been the main subject in art throughout the ages, whether to represent a deity, glorify humanity, to explain relationships and/or produce a response to the changing world around us all and this is no more blatantly explored through the work of 21st century American artist Julie Rrap.
Julie Rrap’s career over the past 25 years can be viewed as a collection of avant-garde phases and associations with notions of feminism, performance, photo-media, installation and digital manipulation. Her exhibitions are acted out under the premises of irony, subversion and transgression but as she often states; ‘it is not so much that my work lacks expression, but that the form of this expression is more veiled or indirect’. After Manet (2002) from the ‘Fleshed Our’ series appropriates images from art history, by exploring the body and the shifting representations of women in art and media. The exhibition appropriated and subverted the aforementioned famous works of Manet and Titian through sculpture (impressions of the included works human work as a bronze ‘negative’) and painting (viewer becomes the ‘flesh’ absent from the painting as a fragmented piece of history). Transposing the figures to negative bronze casts of works such as Manet’s famous Olympia, leaves audiences with large life-size photo backdrops – a politics of representation at play in which the viewer’s participation forms a crucial part of the subversive process.
In interfering with history there is a liberation of historical works into a contemporary context that allows for ‘changes in the way that power, gender and social relationships are understood’ by global society. All the works chosen in Fleshed Out were controversial in their own time but without the presence of a subject, power balances of the works as a reflection of wider social spheres is disrupted to a state of nonexistence. Without central figures, the meaning and composition of the historical nudes and alike become inexplicable; the negative space of the casts of those same figures reduces the heroic tradition of bronze sculpture to a ‘pre-stage’ in the casting process in a contemporary way that few had ever represented the human form in art – through a powerful absence.
Titian, through his 1538 work ‘Venus’ was able to create a new iconography for the goddess of love that carried through into Modernism and was eventually challenged during the postmodern period. His soft blending of brushstrokes, both free and vibrant, brings to life an intensely provocative yet unobtainable figure - a face of individuality but a gaze that acts a sign of preexisting devotion. Manet, through a rough painting style and intentionally awkward composition, reinforces to the viewer an allusion and misinterpretation of reality. Manet isn’t trying to harness a perfect allusion of the human form, but remind audiences that our interest in looking at nudes is sexually orientated; he rips away the façade of what academy nudes once represented. Olympia reinforces some conventions that exist around art of the viewer being aware and acknowledging the work critically, but steps beyond this is creating an honest balance of application, mundane subject matter and basic materiality that seeks to redefine beauty standards for the modern world. Titian and Manet both presented women to be desired by their audiences. The difference lays in the notion that ‘Venus’ conforms to roles of ownership and possession which compromises her sense of self, while ‘Olympia’ seeks a contradictory role as a symbol of sexual proclivity but also a sense of freedom through her body’s representation.
Wiley’s portrayal of masculinity is filtered through poses of power and spirituality. As an artist depicting the human body as a symbol, he applies the visual vocabulary and conventions of glorification, history, wealth, power to subject matter drawn from the urban fabric in which he is entrenched. The poses of his figures appear to derive as much from contemporary hip–hop culture as from Renaissance paintings, hence, utilises the body as a symbol of appropriation to inscribe with social relational meanings. Since her 1982 show, Disclosures: A Photographic Construct, featuring black and white photos of her, nude and in provocative states of undress; self-portraiture has been central to Julie Rrap’s art practice. Many of her contemporaries, particularly women, used self-portraiture in the 90’s to explore issues of identity, gender and the (male) gaze. The difference with Rrap is that she embraces proactive empowerment and the female body free of societal constructs.
Recontextualised nudes are continually depicted by successors in art historical and contemporary settings to represent ideas of world and social relations to audiences in a relatable and often poignant manner. The voyeuristic preoccupation of ‘peering’ into another’s perspective to gain glimpses of context by audiences and artists alike supports the notion of the human body acting as a sign to inscribe with underlying changes in the ways power, gender and social relationships are understood.
The nude as a Visual Arts genre has at times generated strong criticism from its audience, but most telling is John Berger’s seminal account of nudity vs. nakedness in ‘Ways of Seeing’. Berenger states, ‘to be naked is without disguise as you are within your natural skin and as you are’, while in art nudity is placed on display as its own ‘form of dress’. Recontextualisation of the nude comments on the pre-existing role of women in society: not to be oneself but rather an object for the viewing pleasure of others. Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538) was most likely a ‘marriage painting’ to celebrate the 1534 wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino. This ‘Venus’ is awake in her boudoir, gazing at us as we gaze at her. Shameless. Seemingly available for pleasure, yet Venus’ hand is placed in a traditional pose of modesty. To reinforce her femininity she is adorned with jewelry, her status being indicated by both the evident grandeur of her home and the presence of her maids in the background. Titian conforms to the wide artistic tradition of symbolism to inscribe rich meanings within the work. For instance, Titian has placed a small dog at the foot of the bed to symbolize both fidelity and act as a visual link between Venus and her maids, a rose to act as a symbol of beauty and associate with matrimony and a marriage chest alongside the maids to signify a domestic setting and ‘possession’ by her husband. As David Rosen explains, the picture is profoundly sensual: ‘the dialectic of seeing and touching lies at the heart of Titian’s pictorial art’. The realistic rendering of the body creates an atmosphere of intimacy, a timeless symbol of ideal female beauty. The way this image is interpreted thus depends on the viewer's attitudes, experiences and expectations.
Titian represents the themes of Renaissance with originality through a dark, erotic mood and a fresh sense of beauty, establishing the reclining nude as a convention for the representation of females in Western art. This work acts as a commentary upon social constructions of marriage, gender and power as seen through the works aforementioned copious epithalamic symbolism (wedding caisson, myrtle bush and faithful dog). Titian’s depiction of the reclining Venus as a symbol of love — the unattainable goddess — hence poses a clear representation of the body as a commentary on gender and social relations during the 16th century while also pushing the boundaries of erotic art representation to the general public.
During the Renaissance period, a rich language of symbols and signs were interweaved in art to allow meanings within the subjects of works such as Olympia to comment most particularly on themes authority and gender. Manet’s Olympia (1863) was exhibited at great scandal in the official Paris salon of 1865 as Manet’s model, Victorine Meurend, was hired to aid in Manet’s creation of an imagined prostitute. It makes sense that Manet did not paint his unconventional choice of subject in a conventional manner, as this would have undermined his statement of social order. Brushstrokes are put on display, not hidden amongst the composition and colours are used in flattened swatches of colour and light rather than in a rounded and realistic manner. Light is manipulated differently in both works. Titan diffuses light through his painting, emphasizing the subjects’ skin and figure, while the harshly lit scene of Manet’s work leaves nothing to the imagination.
Olympia ties to the statement that the body may act as a sign or symbol when an artist chooses to depict it a certain way. For instance, Manet plays with the language of signs and symbols strictly followed by Titian during his career and 16th century work. Instead of Titians dog (a symbol of fidelity in Renaissance artmaking) Manet incorporates a black cat (a crude symbol later known to represent promiscuity). As T.J Clark mused, “the painting insists on its own materiality” and indeed, Manet’s additional layers of symbolism beyond the mere physicality of the work allows for an exotic and rich representation of subject. Some of these visual codes include the black servant (a comment on submission and servitude), the florist bouquet (wealth but also a sign for the transience of life), the velvet ribbon (historical sign of prostitution) and orchid around Victorine’s neck. This work clearly re-contextualises the Venus of Urbino (1538) while simultaneously inverting its meaning as a commentary of body and social order.
Autonomy in a sensual display was a notion rarely explored by artists prior to Manet, and yet his conceptual decision to depict an imagined Parisian prostitute was a step beyond Titian’s own experimentalism. There is a clear appropriation of allegory engraved into the body of Victorine, and beyond this the forms of Olympia and Victorine crudely challenge the old styles of modesty and allusion. Olympia’s gaze neither offers nor takes; this refusal of expression makes the statement that she may be possessed but never owned. While dealing with the same values, there is a clear disjunction to the expression of Venus, who is owned but her stance and aura of confidence leads us to believe she is not possessed easily. Who holds the power in these settings? The body forces audiences to question how much belongs to the subject, the artist, the world and themselves. Rather than an ‘object for sale’ as history has often portrayed the body within art, Manet holds the body up as a controlled subject available only under her the subjects own guidelines, hence the hand placed strategically on the thigh – only intended to obtain ‘payment’ for work – juxtaposes the modesty implied by Venus’ hand between her thighs. The 300 years separating the works (16th - 19th century) act as a commentary on the changing regard of the female form; all it symbolizes and cultivates within society and art realms. The body has and will always remain an evolving sign and symbol that pays tribute to ‘changes in the way that power, gender and social relationships are understood’ by global society.
“Appropriation is to use something with the idea that people will identify the ‘static’ between its former social presence and the way you’re presenting it now”, and the material practice of 21st century artist Kehinde Wiley epitomizes this notion in his challenges of black culture to be raised to the dignity of high art in ways that history has never properly acknowledged before. He is a brilliant renaissance technician with hip-hop subject matter who lifts his subjects from the streets of NYC and renders them in a visual language of classic European/Renaissance portraiture. Femme piquee par un sepent (2008) is an oil canvas work that harnesses irony, humour and parody in depicting the body as a challenger of race/gender, and inverting roles between idealised female form and grand narratives/cannons of artmaking. The work radicalizes the form used in Auguste Clesinger’s 1846 sculpture of a female nude by replacing the female figure with a reclining African American man in a hoodie and jeans. This same atmosphere of anxiety is transferred to ideas of criminality and racism in American culture while a coy expression compares to the inverted exoticism common of historical female nudes. Beyond media sterotypes, The Virgin Martyr St. Cecilia (2008) oil on canvas based on Stefano Maderno’s 17th century sculpture presents an equally typical African American in the same powerless and submissive position as white martyred female, or a modern victim of tactless violence. The work challenges gender constructions through enchanting colours and cherry blossom repetitive patterning that is both eye catching and ties to ‘conceptual realism’. Juxtaposition of such vibrant contemporary street wear with delicately feminine background makes a social and artistic statement.
Wiley blends perspectives to create a new perspective on national identity. His use of human form in art indeed ‘pays changes to the way that power, gender and social relationships [have been previously] understood’ through the argument of who was painted and ‘who was painted out’. Wiley’s provision of art history thorough the figures of a people originally repressed makes a powerful commentary on issues of gender, power and race.
African photographer Seydou Keïta’s portraits present sitters with air of dignity and, using this as an influence, Wiley equally reincorporates this dignity he believes is missing in traditional representations of black people by European artists. Contemporary art stretches beyond utopian or allegorical presentations of the body to present audiences and artists alike with continual questioning of authority, gender-based ideals and who is in charge of writing history through artmaking. Modern inventions like Photoshop and photography have gained recent relevance in their ability to capture a moment and reveal a blunt truth where traditional methods were often appropriations. But even now, photography can be manipulated to produce certain sentiments. The figure has been the main subject in art throughout the ages, whether to represent a deity, glorify humanity, to explain relationships and/or produce a response to the changing world around us all and this is no more blatantly explored through the work of 21st century American artist Julie Rrap.
Julie Rrap’s career over the past 25 years can be viewed as a collection of avant-garde phases and associations with notions of feminism, performance, photo-media, installation and digital manipulation. Her exhibitions are acted out under the premises of irony, subversion and transgression but as she often states; ‘it is not so much that my work lacks expression, but that the form of this expression is more veiled or indirect’. After Manet (2002) from the ‘Fleshed Our’ series appropriates images from art history, by exploring the body and the shifting representations of women in art and media. The exhibition appropriated and subverted the aforementioned famous works of Manet and Titian through sculpture (impressions of the included works human work as a bronze ‘negative’) and painting (viewer becomes the ‘flesh’ absent from the painting as a fragmented piece of history). Transposing the figures to negative bronze casts of works such as Manet’s famous Olympia, leaves audiences with large life-size photo backdrops – a politics of representation at play in which the viewer’s participation forms a crucial part of the subversive process.
In interfering with history there is a liberation of historical works into a contemporary context that allows for ‘changes in the way that power, gender and social relationships are understood’ by global society. All the works chosen in Fleshed Out were controversial in their own time but without the presence of a subject, power balances of the works as a reflection of wider social spheres is disrupted to a state of nonexistence. Without central figures, the meaning and composition of the historical nudes and alike become inexplicable; the negative space of the casts of those same figures reduces the heroic tradition of bronze sculpture to a ‘pre-stage’ in the casting process in a contemporary way that few had ever represented the human form in art – through a powerful absence.
Titian, through his 1538 work ‘Venus’ was able to create a new iconography for the goddess of love that carried through into Modernism and was eventually challenged during the postmodern period. His soft blending of brushstrokes, both free and vibrant, brings to life an intensely provocative yet unobtainable figure - a face of individuality but a gaze that acts a sign of preexisting devotion. Manet, through a rough painting style and intentionally awkward composition, reinforces to the viewer an allusion and misinterpretation of reality. Manet isn’t trying to harness a perfect allusion of the human form, but remind audiences that our interest in looking at nudes is sexually orientated; he rips away the façade of what academy nudes once represented. Olympia reinforces some conventions that exist around art of the viewer being aware and acknowledging the work critically, but steps beyond this is creating an honest balance of application, mundane subject matter and basic materiality that seeks to redefine beauty standards for the modern world. Titian and Manet both presented women to be desired by their audiences. The difference lays in the notion that ‘Venus’ conforms to roles of ownership and possession which compromises her sense of self, while ‘Olympia’ seeks a contradictory role as a symbol of sexual proclivity but also a sense of freedom through her body’s representation.
Wiley’s portrayal of masculinity is filtered through poses of power and spirituality. As an artist depicting the human body as a symbol, he applies the visual vocabulary and conventions of glorification, history, wealth, power to subject matter drawn from the urban fabric in which he is entrenched. The poses of his figures appear to derive as much from contemporary hip–hop culture as from Renaissance paintings, hence, utilises the body as a symbol of appropriation to inscribe with social relational meanings. Since her 1982 show, Disclosures: A Photographic Construct, featuring black and white photos of her, nude and in provocative states of undress; self-portraiture has been central to Julie Rrap’s art practice. Many of her contemporaries, particularly women, used self-portraiture in the 90’s to explore issues of identity, gender and the (male) gaze. The difference with Rrap is that she embraces proactive empowerment and the female body free of societal constructs.
Recontextualised nudes are continually depicted by successors in art historical and contemporary settings to represent ideas of world and social relations to audiences in a relatable and often poignant manner. The voyeuristic preoccupation of ‘peering’ into another’s perspective to gain glimpses of context by audiences and artists alike supports the notion of the human body acting as a sign to inscribe with underlying changes in the ways power, gender and social relationships are understood.