Слике страница
PDF
ePub
[blocks in formation]

At any rate, in decadent and corrupted stages of civilization, the popular conception of human beauty has been of something misformed, grotesque, and grotesquely costumed. Among the moderns we have only to refer to France in the period before the revolution, and among the ancients whether in India, in Egypt, in Asia Minor or in Greece and Rome, or in the far away civilizations of prehistoric America, periods of social decadence have always been accompanied by accentuation of ornate, grotesque and complicated costume, disfiguring and masking the human form in the age's art.

It is as though we humans conceived of truth in the form of a beautiful, perfect woman or youth, and once having forgotten the outlines of such a form, we seem to forget the nature and existence of truth.

So, if the moralists, by generations of vicious ancestry, have forgotten to take joy in the beautiful nude in art, they should awaken to its beneficient social effect.

Arthur Ruhl, in his charming book, describing a trip through Russia in the winter of 1915-1916, before the curse of war and its resulting political chaos had destroyed the normal ways of Russian life, tells of a characteristic adventure at Kiev-a swim in the Dneiper.

He says: "Kiev is on the bluffs of the west bank. The east shore of the river consists of low sand-flats, an ideal bathing place, and people rowed across from Kiev, walked up the sand a bit, and went into the river au naturel, like small boys in the old swimming hole."

Ruhl was at first somewhat disconcerted by the sight of heavy handsome men and women splashing in the water with their children "like happy walruses." But the impersonal attitude of these men and women and children to the others and to themselves soon penetrated and he found somewhat to his surprise, he tells us, that the human animal, once all men lay aside clothes, is no more naked or exposed than any other animal. Immodesty is a thing of custom.

Yet it is immodest to do what

[blocks in formation]

So, again, we of today, the children and grandchildren of the silly '60's, and heirs to all their vices and miscalculations, have much deliverance to be thankful for.

For instance, there was the fad for barefoot dancing. It has freed us forever from a lascivious attitude toward all dancing. No one of our grandmothers could have stood up in a skirt to her ankles and have done any sort of a solo dance, with the slightest of kicks, without losing her character.

Queerly, in spite of all this false modesty, all the dancing of that period tended toward lasciviousness. Where now is the skirt dance with its one revealing kick to the ceiling that was supposed to be so exciting and wicked? Where now are the pink tights and the wasp waists of the Amazon chorus of old?

After all it was not what these poor ladies of the stage, who no doubt were only trying to earn an honest living, did that made them seem evil. It was the thought behind the eyes of the audience that watched them.

Nowadays, a dancer who is a real dancer, can come out clad in a piece of chiffon the size of a pocket handkerchief, and because she has no tights to mask and hamper, give us the opportunity of joy in beautiful movement which we can accept and appreciate to its full-because there is evil neither in what she does, nor in what we think.

But in the beginning our fathers thought much evil of the barefoot dancers-until the barefoot dancers shocked it out of their systems. Now there is such a dancer on every vaudeville program, and they can do little but bore us, unless they have real and exceptional art in their dancing.

To a certain extent the "curse" has

[graphic][subsumed][subsumed]
[graphic][subsumed][subsumed]
[graphic][merged small][merged small]

been taken off the nude for us, because we are beginning to realize it was in our own eyes, -a sort of shadow of the clothes with which the form was wont to be covered.

When the grinning Chicago crowds blocked traffic to stare at "September Morn," it was not because the picture had any great value as a painting, nor merely because the lady therein was uncovered by any garment. Rather it was because of a certain feeling that the lady should have been dressed-that she had a regular modern costume back on the shore somewhere which she would soon run back and shiver into. The crowd had a sense of peering into a scene forbidden-and that is just what the artist intended, and the reason that "September Morn," as a painting, is not a work of art, but a vicious trick in the name of art, which every lover of the nude resents. Yet this picture in the end worked its good. It became famous and popular on penny postcards, and the ordinary public learned that they might look upon a nude picture without being stricken by a bolt from the blue. They finally got used to it, and there was the blessing-they immediately lost interest in it, and in any other nude that appealed merely because it was unclothed. After that a nude would have to be clothed in the artist's intellectuality and conception of beauty, before they could again be interested.

The first nude figure by an American artist to be exhibited in America, was the "Greek Slave," by Hiram Powers. A picturesque incident was the securing by Powers of a round-robin signed by several prominent Philadelphia ministers of the gospel, that the "Greek Slave" was "pure" and wouldn't hurt the public by being gazed at. There is no doubt about the figure being innocuous. Poor Powers in his determination to thoroughly sterilize his work from any bad associations had to destroy all trace of personality or beauty. It is a woodeny, stupid thing enough, that "Greek Slave." It missed being a real work of art by exactly the opposite method to that taken in case of the painting just mentioned, but we must, nevertheless, be grateful

to Powers. He did his best. The main desideratum was to get the American people to gaze at a nude, as a rightful and good thing to do. He accomplished that. He overcame the tabu, and started a movement to destroy a fetish.

But Powers' and most sculptors and painters reach only the "exclusive and cultured" stratas of our society. Their work in correcting and making sane our ideas of some of the most vital things in life, do not penetrate very far.

(Of course the sculptors and painters have no idea-at least, many of them have not, that they are doing anything of the sort. Very few artists are moralists. They create the beautiful as they see it, and their social use is incidental.)

But the art of photographing the nude has reached so high a point in America, and especially on the Pacific Coast, that it promises to do great "missionary work." These reproductions are as good as "originals". they have the advantage, really of being originals, and the prices are not too high to place them out of reach of the general public.

The personalities and temperaments of the artists who have taken this art upon the coast have been most fortunate. Such artists as Emma B. Freeman and Jesse Banfield have succeeded in steering safely between the two evils that beset the path of every student or portrayer of the nude. Without making their studies so innocuous as to be meaningless and lacking in personality, they have nevertheless succeeded in avoiding any lewd suggestiveness in subject or treatment.

True enough, Banfield is a believer in glamourie. He invests his plates with an atmospheric softness and illusion. His figures seem almost shadows-spirits of the wood, that will fade into the background and disappear should we rub our eyes too briskly. He is a veritable poet of the place.

Miss Freeman's plates show a more realistic, and perhaps intellectual treatment of the relation of the human nude to nature in its primitive forms. She loves to catch her dryads in the deep woods, and she gives them a certain solidity, as of the warm brown earth.

« ПретходнаНастави »