Word: nudes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...paint the mural, involving a total of 120-odd figures, Johns Hopkins commissioned Painter Leon Kroll, 71, famed as "dean of U.S. nude-painters," who labored 2½ years on the task. Unquestioned hit of the series, and for Muralist Kroll ("I like women better than men") a labor of love, are the Baltimore belles. To record them, Kroll started with nude models (see cut), then borrowed or bought authentic turn-of-the-century gowns, used photographs and Baltimorites' recollections to recapture the exact features and coloring of the originals...
Kroll frankly admits that "the nude studies might have shocked the ladies if they had been alive" (only one of them is: handsome, octogenarian Mrs. De Courcy Wright Thorn of Baltimore), but he points out, "That way I could capture the movement of the body better, the fall of the legs and breasts." For Kroll, who holds that "the human body is the most beautiful thing in the world," painting clothes on the nudes was the reluctant, if necessary, next step. The finished painting shows half an instep, no ankle. The result turned the bacchanal into a proper tea party...
Remembering the World War II rape of Budapest by Red army soldiers, Hungarian women obliged to go out seeking food for their families disguised themselves as old hags. On one street in Pest lay the nude, violated body of a pregnant woman. The Soviet commander brought in a field gendarmerie called "R troops." The R men set up house guards, block inspectors and kangaroo courts empowered to execute within 24 hours any Hungarian found guilty of "murder, arson, looting," or concealing arms. The orders were signed by a Major General Grubennyik...
...beyond mere pamphleteering and caricature. The talent Gainsborough showed for catching the majesty of England's landscape became Britain's prime contribution to painting in the hands of his successors: John Constable, who lavished the same care on cloud formations that Italian Renaissance masters gave the nude, and Joseph Mallord William Turner, who analyzed the tricks of light and atmosphere to produce a new, revolutionary art a whole generation ahead of the French impressionists...
Even Esquire has paid the ultimate compliment by shedding some of its latter-day respectability. But Esquire still cannot keep abreast. In its August number Playboy printed four pictures of Cinebabe Anita Ekberg in the nude, taking the edge off Esquire's September portfolio of Ekberg with a few clothes...