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I, on the other hand, do play favorites. I like abstract and semi-abstract chromacentric pieces by people like Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock and Kevin Appel, and I like a lot of the Victorians. (Whistler would represent the overlap, I imagine.) I especially like it when the Victorians are tackling classical subjects, as they were wont to do — and as they do quite often in Exposed: the Victorian Nude, an exhibit currently playing the Brooklyn Museum, its only North American stop before heading off to Japan. Last month a business trip took me into New York and I took the opportunity to check it out. And while I'd never bought the companion book to a museum show before, this one had enough cool pieces that I snatched one up lickety-split.
In general, I tend to find myth to be either absolutely fascinating or, much more often, the equivalent of a handful of Halcion tablets. What I like about it in the former case — and in that case, we're pretty much always talking about the Greeks — is the way it interestingly encodes the interplay of ideas. Neal Stephenson's riff in Cryptonomicon on Ares vs. Athena and the application of technology to warfare, for instance — nifty stuff. (And the entirety of Roberto Calasso's The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony is like this.) Note that this is not simple allegory — what makes myth interesting is that the players are complicated, so unlike one-note entities like Eris (Discord) and Hypnos (Sleep), Artemis represents a specific type of virginity (which can be interestingly contrasted with those represented by Athena and Hestia) and is goddess of the hunt (and by extension athletics of all sorts) and makes up half of a twin pair with Apollo and thus gets wrapped up in all his attributes and on and on and on.
What makes this interesting when we get into the realm of pictorial art is the process of enfleshening these palimpsests. You pick your subject, and now you've got this locus of a hundred overlapping ideas that you have to paint or sculpt an actual human to represent. Selecting a a gesture, a facial expression... and, for that matter, an actual face. One of the things I like best about Age of Bronze, Eric Shanower's sequential-art retelling of the the Trojan War, is that he obviously put a lot of thought into the specificity of each character. Compare this to the modern-day mythology of superhero comics, in which a lot of artists put all the burden of specificity onto the costumes. (George Perez is a rare exception, coming up with a unique face for each Avenger. And naturally, developing a unique look for the characters in Academy X was crucial, especially given that they mostly dress alike.)
Of course, this sort of exploration was only a small part of the reason for the explosion of interest in classical subjects in the Victorian period. It's not that 19th-century Britain spontaneously went wild for ancient Greece; rather, the cultural climate reached a point where artists could once again begin to work with the human form as a subject within certain strictures, and as nudity was accepted in works that survived from antiquity, setting one's work in the same period gave the Victorian artist the ability to paint or sculpt the nude without (as much) censure. Thus you wind up with, among the serious interpretations of Pygmalion and the like, fabricated myths or mythological names tacked onto arbitrary subjects in order to provide the artists with an excuse.
This may all seem very quaint, but note that it's in 21st-century America and not 19th-century Britain that the attorney general has deemed it necessary to put a drape over a statue of Justice. The old clichés about draping the piano legs and such were actually not Victorian practice, but Victorian jokes about the puritanical mores of the American midwest. Victoria herself bought several nudes a year. All told, in comparing Victorian Britain and contemporary Middle America, it seems to me that it's not so much that one is more scandalized than the other, but that they're differently scandalized. For instance, there's a piece by Anna Lea Merritt about which the commentator remarks that a nude painted by a woman would normally have met with condemnation, but as the subject was a child she met with no disapproval whatsoever; for a modern American artist hoping to stave off criticism for using naked subjects, concentrating on children would probably not be the best strategy. On the other hand, Victorian critics did object to specificity and distinctiveness in art of this type, willing to endorse an unclothed ideal types (The Athlete, The Nymph) but still skittish about similarly undressed figures that looked as though they might be specific people, even if that specific person is fictional.
Anyway, onto the actual book. It's got 186 major entries and 36 supplementary figures, so they certainly didn't skimp on the art. It covers media from painting to sculpture to drawing to photography, and genres from classicism to academic figure study to pornography. The text accompanying each entry is at least interesting enough not to skip. But I doubt I'd have been motivated to buy the book based on these attributes alone. They're nice, but what makes all the difference is even a handful of highlights. Better to have five stunning pieces and 181 enh ones than to have 186 pieces that are somewhere in between. And there are plenty of highlights in this book, particularly in the window after artists dropped the conventional bow mouths and double chins of the pre-1870 period but before they switched to painting in supposedly expressionistic thick brown smears, after 1900. I hardly have the time or inclination to ramble about every noteworthy picture in the collection, but here are a few:
In the actual exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, these two figures were presented together, even though they're by different artists and not intended as a matched set. The male figure, by Frederic Leighton (who also sculpted a really cute piece called Needless Alarms, depicting a girl being surprised by a toad) is a thoroughly unsubtle rendering of a masculine ideal, and was wildly popular. Apparently in Britain at this time there was a fairly substantial movement to encourage physical fitness, and this image, titled An Athlete Wresting with a Python (I did say unsubtle), fit with the tenor of the times. The female figure, Dryope Fascinated by Apollo in the Form of a Serpent by Pen Browning (son of the poets), is by contrast much more ambiguous, more dance than struggle, and despite its classical title has hard-to-miss Edenic overtones. It's an interesting image — and one rejected by the Royal Academy.
Why? Here's another pairing that sheds some light on the subject. The piece on the left, by Herbert Draper, is called The Gates of Dawn. It's the sort of image, along with similar ones of Hypatia and Lady Godiva and others scattered throughout the volume, that got a pass because the subjects, while naked or partly so, were "clothed in strength," or virtue, or innocence, or some sort of ideational armor. Here Aurora has a commanding presence more akin to Leighton's Athlete than to Browning's Dryope. But the similarly-hued painting on the right, Love and Life, was massively controversial, because the figure of Life is both naked and vulnerable and that was seen as an intolerable combination. The slender limbs, the frail posture, the importuning gaze, all suggested a body that wasn't necessary inviolable, and that was too much for many viewers of the time to handle.
Nowadays we have somewhat different hangups, which is one of the many reasons I was astounded by what to me is the unquestionable star of the show and the book, Annie Swynnerton's Cupid and Psyche (you know, the one you were looking at instead of reading the first several paragraphs of this page). The primary reason I was gobsmacked was that it's freaking beautiful: Psyche and Cupid are, in the myths, paragons of beauty, a Venus and Adonis for the younger set, and Swynnerton absolutely nails both of them. They are both superlatively beautiful and look like specific people (the latter fact making them "vulgar" and "coarse" to at least one critic). As colored paint on canvas it works nearly as well; metallic purple-blue is an odd choice for feathered angel wings, but when you see it in the gallery there's no denying that it works, a harmonious complement to the gorgeous flesh tones. But back to the content. Other artists applied Psyche's name to their works seemingly at random; Swynnerton actually illustrates Psyche's story, in which a key plot point was that she was forbidden to look at Cupid. Also key to the story was that Psyche and Cupid were young adolescent newlyweds who spent their nights as newlyweds are wont to do. So you end up with a picture that's really sexy and the kids in it look like they're in eighth grade and nowadays Annie Swynnerton would have the FBI knocking down her door. It's gloriously subversive, like one of those treacly paintings of smooching cherubs or the "Love Is..." cartoon in the Los Angeles Times classifieds shot up with a powerful dose of teenage hormones. Giuliani would have a stroke.
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