Page 46 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 46/146
So, the ‘aesthetic nude’ addressed the connoisseur as well as those with more lubricious tastes. These two ‘markets’ were then of course, mostly all male, and remember that the connoisseur - the art lover, the artists themselves (mostly men) - also had sexual feelings. And for the previous half-century in England at least, the subject of sex was not polite, let alone any hint of female or male nudity - except in the context of the arts. Paris was different, and wealthy men could easily subvert Victorian morals, and travel to Paris - where the new photographic ‘dirty postcards’ of erotic nudes were becoming widely available. Bayard’s The Nude Aesthetic was published into this market in 1904. In many ways it illustrates the lengths - and the absurdities - men will go to in order to excuse their voyeuristc tastes - to create portrayals of ‘nudes’ rather than ‘naked’ women - thus the ‘aesthetic nude’. The same logic applies, I’m sure, to Muybridge’s commercially suc- cessful books containing stop-motion images of naked women (see Muybridge: Dancer (Fancy) from Animal Locomotion 1887). On the other hand there were many artists who welcomed both these books as ‘reference’ or drawing aids. In the commercial world of photographic-postcards, Leopold Emile Reutlinger had already proved that postcards showing beautiful women (actors, dancers, performers, singers etc) was attracting a potentially very large market (see Reutlinger: Art Nouveau Postcards 1890). This marketplace had been somewhat catered to by a large number of ‘art’-photographers - some early pictorialists, some talented amateur photographers - like Louis Jan-Baptiste Igout for example, who specialised in producing sheets of multiple-prints - studies of male and female nudes; Jean-Louis Durieu, Antoine Claudet, Thomas Eakins (etc) from the 1850s on (not on postcards of course but as daguerreotypes, albumen and collodion prints). As the new means of reproduction - photography, cartes-des-visite, cabinet cards, then halftone reprographics, then postcards - became possible, so they were exploited by serious artists AND salacious entrepreneurial pornographers - the reason why Walter Sickert was driven to write his paper condemning the highly artificial ‘academic’ nudes (like those of Frederic, Lord Leighton, Lawrence Alma Tadema, and their many photographic derivatives). Some pictorialist photographers (like Anne Brigman: Soul of the Twisted Pine 1905; Frank Eugene: Nude 1908, Ger- trude Kasebier: Evelyn Nesbit 1902) managed to pull-off successful fusions of the nude in their photographic interpretations, and there was a parallel commercial market for nude and semi- nude woman as WW1 drew masses of men abroad, away from the normal constraints of family and girl-friends. So Bayard’s timely book is a wonderful, often hilarious, extremely kitsch remind- er of this ’naked or nude’ tautology.
Leopold Emile Reutlinger: Art Nouveau postcards from c.1890.
These early examples of what came to be known 50 years later as ‘graphic design’ show how suc- cessfully the enterprising and entrepreneurial photographer Reutlinger took over his father’s stu- dio in 1890 and established a highly lucrative postcard business, focussed upon portraits of fa- mous actresses, models, singers