Word: nudes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...necessity and depth of this "pure form" in the art of the nude is clearly underlined. Perhaps the central theme of the work is an insistence that the nude is one of the most austere problems of design. The bulk of his analysis argues the continuity of this almost abstract design in the nude throughout Western art. He finds echoes of the design of the influencial classical works--Knidian Aphrodite, Laocoon, Apollo Belvedere, et al.--repeated and reworked, reasserting themselves after generations or even centuries. The most striking example of this that he gives is a comparison of a nude...
Discussing the distinction between "naked" and "nude," he insists that the nude must be an idealization, and that this ideal beauty is a tangible vision though varying from culture to culture, that the nude is "a means of affirming the belief in ultimate perfection...
...nude, then, need not only hymn what a marvelous work is man, but also how pathetic. The emotions that shape the internal world in which every man lives are perhaps most tellingly portrayed in art in terms of the human body. By one's very close to it, one cannot think otherwise. "Our continuous effort to keep ourselves balanced upright on our legs affects every judgment on design. The disposition of areas in the torso is related to our most vivid experiences, so that abstract shapes, the square and the circle, seem to us male and female, and that...
...accident then that we view our goods anthropomorphically, or that the removed, austere, vengeful Apollo, and the terrible tragic grandeur of Christ Crucified both find their expression in the nude form. The nude has the strength of both immediacy and severe truth--man as he really is. And as in tragedy, this essential humanness makes him essentially divine, the sort of marvelous synthesis of the flesh and spirit that gave rise to the Palatine Anthology anecdote about Praxiteles' Aphrodite," Aphrodite said, "Where did Praxiteles see me naked...
This "truth" of the nude is reenforced by the knowledge that human beauty is transitory. The Greeks felt that the human figure in its prime is the highest subject of art, but not, one suspects, from the unbalanced optimism about the powers of man for which they are often given credit, but from a sense of tragedy of the mortal before the immortal and of the fleetingness of youth and happiness...