Page 44 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 44/146
By 1910, when the English artist and influential art-teacher Walter Sickert wrote his panegyric ‘The Naked and the Nude‘, the nude female figure had become a ubiquitous component of Western cul- ture. The late 19th century reprographic technologies of letterpress half-tone, photo-gravure and Woodburytypes – all improved in the new century – guaranteed that the Nude was everywhere – in adverts, on postcards, in art and photographic exhibitions. This was a remarkable development considering that public morality was still conditioned by over 60 years of Victorianism (the Queen- Empress died in 1901). I want to look at just one aspect of this emergence of the nude in popular culture – its justification or validation as ‘high culture’ by the appropriation of the tropes and themes of classical mythology. Bayard’s timely book on the Nude (Le Nu Esthetique -The Nude Aesthetic), 1904) is interesting in several ways – as a reductio-ad-absurdam on the ubiquity of the nude and a record of the absurd excursions into the ‘woman as goddess’ theme – a theme that permeated the decorative arts well into the 1930s (all those art nouveau and art deco nude figur- ines) – an excursion into graphic design, and as a document that flirts on the edge of art and erot- ica – an example of intellectual, ‘respectable’ pornography. https://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/le-nu-