Transcript from an ABC Artworks broadcast:


 http://www.abc.net.au/rn/artworks/stories/2008/2300009.htm

Julie Copeland: Hi, Julie Copeland with you and this is the second in our series Changing the Way We See, in which we're looking at how the 20th century's favourite and influential art books and essays have shaped our understanding of the visual arts.

Last week James Elkins took us through EH Gombrich's best-selling The Story of Art, and today another art historian, Frances Borzello, is talking to me about Kenneth Clark's classic study, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form.

Based on six lectures he gave in 1953 at the National Gallery in Washington, Sir Kenneth has organised his book on the nude in sculpture and painting thematically, rather than as a straight chronology from classic times to the present. And you'll hear more about that later. You'll recall Kenneth Clark's famous BBC TV series, Civilization, and apart from having lots of pictures, one reason his book of the nude was enjoyed by artists and art lovers alike, is that he communicated his love of these art works with great style and warmth. Despite it being a product of the conservative 50s, Frances Borzello reckons Clark's book still holds some gems for anyone who likes to argue over the nude in art.

So before we hear from Frances, herself the author of several books on the nude and, in particular, the female nude, let's begin with Clark's definition of 'nude' as distinct from 'naked'. A dichotomy, he writes, created by the west in the 18th century.

[reading from The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form by Kenneth Clark] The English language, with its elaborate generosity, distinguishes between the naked and the nude. To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. The word 'nude' on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. ... In fact, the word was forced into our vocabulary by critics of the early 18th century to persuade the artless islanders that, in countries where painting and sculpture were practiced and valued ... the naked human body was the central subject of art.

Then Kenneth Clark's introduction goes on to claim the nude 'is an art form invented by the Greeks in the fifth century BC, just as opera is an artform invented in seventeenth-century Italy. So that,' he says, 'the nude is not the subject of art but a form of art,' and he adds, 'in all its conventions and styles in western painting and sculpture.'

So, Frances Borzello, was Sir Kenneth the first to take on the nude as a form of art, not just a genre?

Frances Borzello: It's a very good question. In his introduction to the first edition in 1956, he says that it wasn't a subject that had been dealt with very much. The only two books he cites as before his are German and they're in German, they're not translated into English, and one of them he's rather dismissive of because, he says, it's a Marxist analysis, and Kenneth Clark was not a Marxist in the way he looked at art. I think the strength of the book is that it is the first serious book about the nude in English.

Julie Copeland: Now, he was a very establishment figure really, wasn't he, Sir Kenneth? And I wonder how that coloured his view of art, given that he came from that background and that kind of public school education that he would have had, how that formed his ideas and opinions?

Frances Borzello: I think, again, that's a terrific point...I think he was a wealthy man himself, he went to Oxford, he read history but was very interested in art. By the time he was leaving Oxford in his very early 20s, he was introduced to Bernard Berenson in Florence. Berenson ended up advising dealers on the authenticity of their artworks. At the beginning, when Kenneth Clark met him, he was really a connoisseur. He knew so much about Florentine art, Northern Italian art, and a very young Clark goes to his house one evening when he's in his early 20s and he doesn't think that Berenson notices him, and at the end of the evening Berenson says, 'Would you like to revise my collection of Florentine drawing?'

So Kenneth Clark, at this very young age, spends two years nose to nose with these drawings. And you know, most art historians today, they don't get near paintings, not really. Kenneth Clark was handling them. He was that kind of art historian. I mean, England, at the time he gets interested in art, doesn't have much of an art historical tradition, and it wasn't until the great German Jews fled Nazi Germany and, thank God, some of them arrive in London and they start the Warburg Institute. Their scholarship feeds into English art history, and Kenneth Clark is affected by that, he knows about it. Their kind of scholarship is very pure, it is all about the influences of this on that, and that's the kind of work he does. The whole of the male nude is about that, it's about tracing these Greek prototypes through to the present day.

[reading from The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form by Kenneth Clark] What is the nude? It is an art form invented by the Greeks in the 5th century, just as opera is an artform invented in seventeenthth-century Italy. ... The nude is not the subject of art but a form of art. Since the Greeks of the fourth century, no man has felt so certain of the god-like character of the male body as Michelangelo. There is a ripple of ribs and muscles and beneath it, scarcely perceptible, the groundswell of some distant storm that distinguishes the David's torso from those of the most vigorous antiques. However, we have the entire figure, and long before our eye can take in the torso, it had been caught by the head on its strained, defiant neck, the enormous hands, and the potential movement of the pose, which force him far outside the sphere of Apollo. This overgrown boy is both more vehement and less secure. He is a hero, rather than a god.

One of the reviews that I read-I was really interested to find out some of the reviews-was in The New Statesman in 1956 by Benedict Nicholson, who's a very well respected writer, and he just said, 'Kenneth Clark is a Mediterraneanist.' You know, that's his world, and it's so interesting to read his chapter called 'The Alternative Tradition', and that has some wonderful, wonderful writing in it. Can I tell you something that he writes about the medieval—just to continue that—'The body changed its status. It ceased to be the mirror of divine perfection and became an object of humiliation and shame.' And the way he introduces that chapter, I remembered it...when I read it I thought, oh, that's where I got this from. 'Roots and bulbs pulled up into the light give us for a moment a feeling of shame.' And that is what he says the Gothic nude bodies, you know, in last judgements are like, roots and bulbs.

Julie Copeland: It's a great image.

Frances Borzello: I just think that's so brilliant. He just is a lovely writer.

Julie Copeland: I suppose what you're saying is that he certainly made us see particular works in a particular way, and that many of his ideas weren't new, in fact they were probably the end of a fine tradition. The idea, for example, that the north did have this...what he calls the 'alternative convention', you know, the Gothic northern naked body, which he poses opposite that archaic classical ideal of beauty, and that he quotes artists like Durer, the German artist. He says, 'Durer approached the nude with a mixture of curiosity and horror.'

Frances Borzello: He does. I'm not quite sure how he knows all this, but anyway it's true. But then you see, Kenneth Clark is endearing because when he gets to Cranach's nudes, those wonderful ladies who are just sexy and slender and Gothic with their little apple high breasts...

Julie Copeland: And very evil, cat-like faces.

Frances Borzello: Absolutely. And then they're dressed up. I mean, they've got big hats on. There's one in the national gallery here, a lady in a great big hat and a necklace, and, God, she's sexy. And he's very sensitive to that, so she may be alternative and Gothic and all of those things, but he can see that she is really lovely. And I do find that very endearing about him. He's very human in the way he sees painting, he's just a connoisseur. He's looked at lots of paintings, handled lots of work, and he can give us things because of the way he sees.

Julie Copeland: Rather than a chronological survey, in his book Clark decided to approach the nude around themes. First, the male nude-or Apollo-from the Greek kouros of 600BC, then through the vases, sculptures, reliefs and paintings from all periods, he moves on to two types of the female nude, namely, Venus I, the celestial or heavenly female form, and Venus II, the woman of earthly form. Then, rather dramatically, he addresses the artistic emotions—Energy, Ecstasy and Pathos—here in the form of Michelangelo's last sculptures of the Madonna and dead Christ.

[reading from The Nude: A Study on Ideal Form by Kenneth Clark] Has Michelangelo finally achieved the aim that had haunted him since the Sistine ceiling and before, to grasp physical beauty so firmly that he may carry it with him to the realm of the spirit? Not entirely, for he has been forced to awaken from that dream of antiquity in all its strengths and radiance, which had been the first inspiration of his art. His last three Pietas, those carvings on which he worked in secrecy and self-imposed loneliness, almost to the day of his death, showed that in the end the ideal of physical beauty had to be abandoned. In the Rondanini Pietas, in the humility of his last years, Michelangelo has pared away everything that can suggest the pride of the body, until he has reached the huddled roots of a Gothic wood carving. He has even eliminated the torso. For we can deduce from a drawing that the right arm, which now stands in strange isolation, was once attached to the body, and this sacrifice of form, which for over 60 years had been the means of his most intimate communications, gives to this shattered truck an incomparable pathos.

Frances Borzello: I think sometimes when Kenneth Clark thinks someone's wonderful, like Michelangelo (how could you not?) he tries to fit him in all the categories, and some of the things by Michelangelo could either go into Pathos or into Energy or into the Apollo chapter. I think it's one of those problems of trying to impose order on a subject, and he's very generous also in letting new images into his cannon. It may start with the Greeks, but then somewhere in the book he says that Giorgione and his Dresden Venus, the Venus pudica, of her lying horizontally, is as important as the Cnidian Venus of four hundred-and-whatever out of Greece. But he's also amazingly perceptive. He writes in his autobiography-because I wanted to see what he wrote about this book, and he's terribly proud of it, and he said that after he'd written about Rubens-he was staying in a hotel by the sea and he had to go for a walk. He was obviously so thrilled with what he had written. And I read it and I thought, well, it's rather wonderful. There's one bit-he says that Rubens-and I mean it seems on the surface, what could be less Greek than Rubens' ladies?

Julie Copeland: Except, yes, Rubens, of course, is the exception, isn't he, to this northern stress and anxiety about the naked body, because nobody celebrated or painted the naked flesh better than Rubens: those weighty Baroque nudes of Rubens', as some critic unkindly said, 'these women who look badly in need of exercise,' but they are gorgeous, luscious and, you would think, southern nudes, this celebration of the flesh.

Frances Borzello: The thing is, I had never thought of them as being particularly classical, but he refers you back to the classical prototypes, and they are classical, except they're classical with sort of wobbly bits on them. The poses are classical. And he says two very interesting things; one, he says that Rubens gave birth to a whole new race, a new type of women, and he thinks that's due to the fact that he put a very unidealised head on the women, that they're really very real, that they're often the features of his young wife, which I thought was interesting. I don't know if that's true but it's interesting to think about. And the other thing he said, which I really did think was brilliant, was that he explains early on how the Greeks did cloth waving around you to suggest movement, particularly with women dancers, and how...

Julie Copeland: This in the section on Ecstasy where he's got all those naked female dancers...

Frances Borzello: That's right, and then he says that Rubens uses sort of lines in the flesh and wobbles, ripples, to suggest movement, and I was very taken by that because, I thought, that's quite a generous view of flesh. I must say, you mentioned it earlier, Kenneth Clark liked ladies.

Julie Copeland: Well, no wonder he had to go for a walk after rereading that passage on Rubens' nudes.

Frances Borzello: Absolutely right.

[reading from The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form by Kenneth Clark] Rubens did for the female nude what Michelangelo had done for the male. He realised so fully its expressive possibilities that, for the next century, all those that were not slaves of academism, inherited his vision of the body as pearly and plump. Round the Venuses or Dianas of the Fontainebleau School hangs a smell of stylish erotism, impossible, like all smells, to describe, but strong as ambergris or musk. One reason is that a trace of Gothicism, with all that it implies of seductive guesswork, persists in their proportions. Up to the time of le Moyne or even Houdon, the bodies of French goddesses retain the small breasts, long tapering limbs, and slightly accented stomachs of the sixteenth century. To this tradition of quasi-Gothic elegance certain painters of the dix-huitieme, Watteau above all, added Rubens' feeling for the colour and texture of skin. No other painter has had a more sensitive eye for texture than Watteau, and the rarity of his nudes may even reflect a kind of shyness born of too tremulous desire which the spectacle of the living surface aroused in him. Perhaps the very unfrigid statues in his parks are telling us that he could only contain his excitement when the body was supposed to be of stone.

Julie Copeland: And I wonder what you think, Frances, of Titian's natural Venuses? Because, again, in his book, Kenneth Clark divides the Venus figure, Aphrodite, the fleshy goddess, into the natural Venus and then this more idealised goddess figure. But Titian's...he was the other master of flesh painting I suppose...they're very natural fleshy Venuses.

Frances Borzello: That's right. I have to say that I'm not totally convinced by his division of the Venus into 'celestial' and I think it's called 'natural'. He does it because one of the Greek writers-or maybe it was Pliny Roman, I can't remember-that has come down to us, says that you could divide Venus into 'celestial' and 'vulgar', and so he's determined to do this, but he seems to be using the same statue of Venus at the head of both kinds. I'm not totally convinced by that, but yes he does put Titian's nudes into that real life category, you know, that blood is pulsing through them, and he implies that these are much more sexual.

Julie Copeland: Well, Kenneth Clark's book on the nude is, of course, subtitled A Study in Ideal Form, and not only did male artists make the nude conform to the ideas of the day—if you look at examples he poses, say, a classic Greek Venus with a Gothic figure of Eve, very different kind of nudes—but they also conformed with the architecture and the styles of the day. I mean, they were constantly reshaped, the female nudes, to fit...the Medieval looking nude shape, very different, say, from this classic Greek ideal form.

Frances Borzello: What is interesting about Kenneth Clark is the things he doesn't talk about. He kind of accepts that the nude form changes if it's a female form, more than the male form, but he doesn't ever talk about why that might be. And that was to come later...

Julie Copeland: What do you think that...

Frances Borzello: Well, I think this is the afterlife of the book, and I think that...the book comes out in 1956 and it does have lots of editions. It even has a Pelican edition that was a less expensive edition and a bit bigger that lots of people owned. In 1972, John Berger did a TV program, and the book came out, a paperback, called Ways of Seeing, which was immensely influential, and chapter three of Ways of Seeingtalks about the nude, and he comes right out and he says that very famous thing, that male nudes just show men at their best, and the male painters just paint themselves at their best, but the female nude is always a fantasy, a production, of male desire, she's something different and she changes. And I think that Kenneth Clark has had a bit of a misfortune in that his book didn't reign for very long, and I also think that when art history started to become a discipline in universities in the 70s, when it started to grow a little bit, that's the time of feminism, of Marxism, of all the new radical ideas, and Kenneth Clark's book, although it was on all our reading lists, it was easy to laugh at it, it was easy to say he was a man of the past, he was a connoisseur, he hadn't dealt with any of the interesting issues.

Julie Copeland: He certainly didn't change the way we see in the way John Berger did.

Frances Borzello: That's right, except, as I say...thank you very much for asking me to do this because I think that what he said was absolutely necessary and is there for us to never lose sight of the fact that there were these Greek prototypes behind everything, and that was how people learned to be artists. And he looked at paintings. You could say he questioned paintings harder than many art historians do today, because very often what we do today is we have a grid of ideas and we place that over the art and the art has to give up to us what we're asking it. We're asking it about relationships between men and women and stuff like that, that he didn't bother with.

[reading from The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form by Kenneth Clark] Prehistoric images of women are of two kinds; the bulging statuettes from Palaeolithic caves which emphasise the female attributes until they are little more than symbols of fertility, and the marble dolls of the Cyclades in which an already unruly human body has undergone a geometrical discipline. Following Plato's example, we might call them the 'vegetable' and the 'crystalline' Aphrodite. These two basic conceptions never quite disappear, but since art involves the application of laws, the distinction between the two Aphrodites grows very slight, and even then when most unlike one another, they partake of each other's characters. Botticelli's Venus, born of the crystalline seas of thought and its eternity, has a piercing strain of sensuality. Rubens' Venus, a cornucopia of vegetable abundance, still aspires to the idea. Plato made his two goddesses mother and daughter. The Renaissance philosophers, more perceptively, recognised that they were twins.

Julie Copeland: Kenneth Clark is best known, of course, to all of us because of his TV series, Civilization, which wasn't so much just about art but was the first and still a fantastically entertaining and vivid description of western civilization. Civilization was wonderful and the first TV series that actually looked at art and tied it into some sort of historical and social context of what was happening at the time.

Frances Borzello: Absolutely, but you only had to show a clip from that in an art school in the 70s and everyone would get the giggles because he was pronouncing, you see, and that wasn't what you did then. But, you know, he was a wonderful lecturer. He began to lecture after he resigned the directorship of the National Gallery, he began to lecture and write in earnest in the second half of the 40s. He wrote a book, again like The Nude, it was the only book on landscape that really takes the whole thing and has a go at organising it. It's called Landscape Into Art which is a terrific title, and he wrote that book as a result of a series of lectures he gave, and he said that that was a very hard book to write because the lectures were almost colloquial (although one can't imagine him being actually colloquial) but the lectures were colloquial and he had to turn them into a book. When he wrote The Nude, he sat down to write The Nudeas a book, and then he gave the lectures on The Nude afterwards, but, yes, he did lots of lecturing and writing, and he wrote a book on Piero della Francesca as well.

Julie Copeland: So it sounds like Kenneth Clark's writings on art are not being taught much in art schools today.

Frances Borzello: Yes. What happens is that once the book is out there, everyone sort of admires it for a bit, and then you get the spread of art history in the 70s, you get the radicals, the new ideas...I mean, I edited a book with someone called Al Rees called The New Art History in the 80s, which was essays about all the new approaches to art history, and the one kind of approach you didn't have was the Kenneth Clark approach, the connoisseur approach. I'm quite ashamed of that now I've done this program. See? You're never too old to get educated and rethink. So that what you find is that with the new young radicals in the 70s and 80s, the books start appearing on the nude, and of course there is always a reference (or two or ten) to Kenneth Clark, but only to argue with him, you know, that somehow he's too simple and that he didn't think about the relationship between-the fact that all the artists were men and the models were women, and what did that do to the way the thing looked-and all of that stuff. So he lives on. And the other thing is, if you look in something like the Dictionary of National Biography or evenGrove's Dictionary of Art and Artists, that 30-something volume, magisterial work that came out in the 90s...

Julie Copeland: Oh yes, written by 1760 art historians, or something.

Frances Borzello: That's right. Well, people are not sure what to say about him. They know he was an establishment figure; he was the director of the National Gallery, for God's sake! He did the Queen's catalogue of Da Vinci. He did tons of things. But they say, 'We're not quite sure where to put him,' and people are slightly uneasy about him, and I think it's merely that he's out of fashion perhaps now, and that the time will come when he's reassessed.

Julie Copeland: Because he's still a great read. I'd think we'd have to say, Frances Borzello, that Kenneth Clark is still a great read, and anyone who can enjoy looking at art as much as he does and help us understand it is still worth reading. Thanks for speaking to me about Kenneth Clark's The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form.

Frances Borzello: Thank you very much.

Julie Copeland: In London, English art historian and writer Frances Borzello, today reviewing Kenneth Clark's classic study of the nude in art, which is based on a series of lectures he gave in 1953 in Washington. And The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form was first published by Princeton in 1956, and I reckon you can still find it in most good bookstores or libraries today.

I last talked to Frances Borzello about her history of women artists, while she's now busy writing in the introduction to the Reclining Nude, a study of paintings of naked women from the 16th century through to the end of the 20th.

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