Today I would like to talk about a specific aspect of art history, i.e. how many people in the history of art have had their portraits done while they WEREN'T WEARING ANY CLOTHES!
I was noticing this recently when my husband and I took one of our sons on a little swing through Philadelphia. While we were there, the three of us visited the Rodin museum, as well as the Philadelphia Museum of Fine Arts (which is where Rocky used to work out on the stairs before he turned into Sylvester Stallone).
Anyway, with my teenage son at my side - probably because of my teenage son at my side - I started noticing just how many nudes there were at both museums. Nudes here. Nudes there. Nudes, nudes, everywhere.
Most of the nudes in the Museum of Fine Art were oil paintings of big, highly rosy women who were engaged in a variety of ordinary daily Renaissance activities, such as playing Marco Polo in a woodland pool with a couple of centaurs or skipping through a meadow with other big, highly rosy nude women.
There were plenty of nudes in the Rodin Museum, too, starting with the statue of The Thinker out front. There were so many nudes in the Rodin Museum, if fact, that before long you, the Art Lover, started feeling a little overdressed, just like I did that time in high school when I (like a dork) went to a THREE DOG NIGHT concert wearing a snappy little checked pantsuit while everyone else was wearing T-shirts and jeans.
If I were not the sophisticated Art Lover that I am, I might have made some bonehead, ignoramus comment about all the nudity I saw bursting out before me at these museums. I might have asked how a thing like this had happened. Under no circumstances would I have ever made an appointment with a painter like Peter Paul Reubens, for instance, then forget to put some clothes on before showing up for my first sitting.
Fortunately, I didn't have to say anything this stupid in front of my husband and son, because I know all about nudity in art, thanks very much to my seventh-grade art teacher.
Back when I was in the seventh-grade, reliable information about certain subjects such as nudity was tough to come by. You couldn't just sit down in front of your television and inhale a couple of episodes of MELROSE PLACE. Instead you had to go to slumber parties where you might possibly discuss such things as nudity, as well as the fate of all those who did not believe in the story of Reggie's Grave in the Mapleton Cemetery. Also, you had to go to the library and check out JOY IN THE MORNING which your friend told you had a good "scene" in it, as well as nonchalantly peruse back issues of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC.
That's why our art teacher's yearly lecture always created such a stir. In fact, hearing his lecture entitled "The Difference Between Nude and Naked" was a recognized Rite of Passage for the kids who went to my junior high school. We could all hardly wait to hear it.
Here, for your information, is an actual transcript of my notes taken during the lecture.
Nude is beautiful.
Naked is sleazy.
Nude is Goya, Titian, Reubens, and Manet.
Naked, in spite of what he thinks, is Hugh Hefner.
Nude is human beings at their best.
Naked is human beings at their worst.
Nude makes us stand in awe of God's creations.
Naked makes us giggle and snort like a classroom full of immature little seventh-graders listening to a lecture on the difference between nude and naked.
We all kept on giggling and snorting, of course, just like my sons do whenever they have to sit through another maturation program in the library of their elementary school. Nude. Naked. Whatever.
There was no difference at all as far as we were concerned.
Surely my art teacher knew we would all respond that way. After all, he had been teaching seventh-graders for centuries. He kept on trying, though. You had to give the guy credit for that.
After all these years that's the thing that I remember the most. And I remember it with respect.