CLASSIC NUDITY

A common way for an art gallery to make a splash is to put on a "subject exhibition." These range from stunt shows which purists deplore (e.g., "Great Rivers in Art" or "Paintings of Pigs") to loftier surveyals of important art forms. In the lofty class this week Manhattan's rich M. Knoedler & Co. presented "Classics of the Nude"--31 pictures from Pollaiuolo to Picasso. This was a good idea. The linear play and complex modeling of the human body, the textures, transparencies and color subtleties of the skin, have made nude painting what Bernard Berenson called "the most absorbing problem of classic art." To do the subject justice an exhibition would have to include several items not visible at Knoedler's. Among them: 1) a nude by Giorgione, Titian's great Venetian contemporary; 2) an example of the mighty figure painting of Michelangelo; 3) one of Rubens' rubicund exaltations of Flemish flesh; 4) more significant examples of choice modern work, both in the old tradition and in the new.

But the show had both splendors and curiosities. One Renaissance painting shown for the first time in the U. S. was Tintoretto's Lucretia and Tarquinius (see cut), lent indefinitely by one of Paris' apprehensive art collectors. One of the few first-rate Tintorettos to be seen outside Europe, the picture interested students for its Michelangelesque distortions (as in Tarquinius' leg), its hint of El Greco pattern in the nervous, lightning-like highlights on the strewn drapery, and such tricky details as the falling cushion and pearls, one of which is caught symbolically in Lucretia's shift.

For sensuous space, serenity and golden sublimation, visitors could look on Titian's Lady at the Mirror. Across the room Veronese's Venus at her Toilet turned her opulent, cool and massive back. A pig-eyed, swollen-bellied little courtesan appeared in Lucas Cranach's delicately painted Nymph Reposing. From the 17th Century came a dusky Landscape with Nymphs and Satyrs by France's great Nicolas Poussin. How nude painting became stage prettiness and erotic folderol in 18th-and early 19th-Century France was almost too amply demonstrated in pictures by Watteau, Boucher, Baudouin, Girodet and Prud'hon.

In the 19th Century good painters generally quit regarding the female body as necessarily a subject for boudoir decoration, went hell-bent in two directions: moony romanticism and substantial realism. Several minor pictures illustrated the first; Gustave Courbet's Midday Dream (see cut) exemplified both. Courbet was a law student whose paintings of such big, authentically voluptuous women struck Parisians of the 1850s as "vulgar."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.