Renek Gaszewski [Blog]

Nude models are coming to MOSI.
No, Tampa’s Museum of Science and Industry isn’t turning into a gentleman’s club. But Tuesday, the kid-friendly venue’s Body Worlds and the Story of the Heart exhibit will host nude models. They’ll replicate the poses of the exhibit’s preserved, skinless human figures. MOSI invites artists to draw, paint or sculpt the subject, but gawkers need not inquire.
“It’s not anything that’s vulgar; it’s just something that’s artistic,” said Sarah Lajevardi, marketing manager for Body Worlds. “Even though this is a children’s museum, we still talk about the body,” she said, citing MOSI’s Amazing You exhibit. Sketch Night will begin at 7 p.m., two hours after the museum closes.
This is the MOSI’s second Sketch Night; the first was May 19. At that event, one male and one female model held each pose for about 40 minutes, replicating the archer, the torch bearer, the kneeling lady, the gymnast on the beam and more.
“It was quite challenging,” Lajevardi said. “They’ll kind of have to shake it out here and there and maybe take a five-minute break.”
Sixty artists attended the first Sketch Night. Their feedback? The event was a rare opportunity to observe the human form outside of an art studio. They just wish it had lasted longer. So this time organizers will extend Sketch Night from two hours to three, with a minimum of four models — at least one of each gender.
Douglas Land, who teaches drawing workshops throughout Tampa Bay, had time for seven or eight studies during the first Sketch Night.
“From an educational standpoint, it’s really a good opportunity because normally we would just have illustrations in a book or maybe a plastic model that you can refer to for the muscles bones, anatomy and that,” said Land, 55, of St. Petersburg. He keeps the sketches in his home studio and may use them for reference in one of his classes. Land considers the first Sketch Night a success, and he plans to return Tuesday. “It was well attended, and it was very professional — good lighting, and I think the extra hour will be nice.”
Was he weirded out by seeing models disrobe at a children’s museum?
“Not really,” Land said. “I think that that’s part of what they do. They have educational exhibits. Some may not be as good for young children.”
Similar events have been held at other museums that hosted Body Worlds. The exhibit closes at MOSI June 28 and then heads to Buffalo.

In their hundreds, they line up to take off their clothes - all in the name of art.
In the latest of a series of what one might call “strip-art” ventures, about 500 volunteers undressed on a cold and wet Sunday for an installation by New York-born artist Spencer Tunick.
A mostly young crowd posed on escalators at London’s Selfridges department store as well as in various parts of the store before the shop opened to the public.
Earlier this month, 160 volunteers took part in a “nude happening” run by the same artist to launch London’s Saatchi Gallery.
Tunick has held similar naked installations at outdoor venues in Montreal, Canada, and Sao Paolo, Brazil - attracting thousands of participants.
And the clearly willing participation of several hundred Britons in his UK installations is just one example of a trend that is putting paid to the image of the famous British, erm, stiff upper lip - despite the country’s off-putting weather.
Of course, the idea of stripping naked for art is hardly new, as many an art class life model can testify.
But mass nudity has become quite the fashion.
In February, 240 volunteers aged five to 95 agreed to be wrapped in cling film to allow plaster casts to be made of their bodies for an exhibition by sculptor Antony Gormley.
Their figures will form Gormley’s latest exhibition, Domain Field, which opens at the Baltic Arts Centre in Gateshead in May.
One of the volunteers, Paul O’Neill, said he was surprised at how normal the experience felt.
He said: “I had my doubts about whether I could go through with it but there was a definite moment of no return.
“Once I had passed it I had a wonderful - if slightly surreal - afternoon.”
Fellow volunteer Davie Hay said: “I found the experience very interesting, humorous, humbling, calming and something that I’m proud to have taken part in.”
Peter Wilson said he wanted the opportunity to take part in a large art project.
“I was hooked to the idea straight away and applied instantly,” he said.
“The casting itself was unusual, but a thoroughly relaxing and enjoyable experience.”
Tunick is becoming famous around the world for his series of installations photographing nude crowds in urban landscapes.
Bodies are composed into sculptural shapes and bizarre formations to feature on buildings, streets and cityscapes.
Mike Grenville, 53, who took part in the Saatchi event, said it had been a relaxed and positive experience.
He said: “It was just curiosity. I was interested to see how Tunick handled it and what people were there.
“We’re all basically the same in different shapes and sizes. Once you have taken all your clothes off, it’s a very friendly and communal feeling.”
But Ivan Massow, the former chairman of London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, said Tunick’s Selfridges installation upset him because it was “so transient, it disappears, it is pure idea“.
He posed for two naked portraits because he wanted “to prove that concept or conceptual thought could meet canvas, something tangible”, he said.
The Selfridges event was a departure for Tunick, as he swapped the open air for the interior of the store.
He told the BBC: “Usually people do it outdoors because there is an amount of tension and vulnerability in the body that comes up against the concrete world.
“That tension creates a desire to be nude in a public place outside.
“I’m just happy that people wanted to engage in indoor space.”

The Paris art world was understandably disturbed by the arrival of photography 150 or so years ago. It saw the new technology as a threat to every portraitist, perhaps even to every painter. It also derided the new image as machine made and bereft of human sensibility. In 1862 a group of French painters signed a manifesto formally rejecting ”any assimilation of photography with art.” The octogenarian Ingres was among them.
Yet while sniffing at photography in public, a good many painters and sculptors — though certainly not Ingres — were soon making use of it in the privacy of their studios. And not only because photographs of models were cheaper than live models. Photography also captured light and shadow in a surprising way. It even enabled painters to stage ”tableaux vivants” before they turned to their canvases.
It was with the naked human figure, however, that photography proved most helpful to artists, giving them a new tool for anatomical research and enabling them to freeze bodies in uncomfortable, or embarrassing, positions that no model could tolerate for more than a few minutes. A few photographers grabbed the chance of selling off some of these images as erotica.
Appropriately, then, an unusual exhibition here about photography’s early relationship with painting, drawing and sculpture focuses on the nude. ”The Art of the Nude in the 19th Century: The Photographer and His Model,” which comprises some 350 photographs, drawings, lithographs, paintings and sculptures, is at the new French National Library through Jan. 18.
Paris is the right place for such a show, because artists first learned of the new technology here in 1839 when a Frenchman, Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre, invented what became known as the daguerreotype, a primitive photograph created on a plate inside a camera. Often hand colored, the tiny image resembled a highly realistic miniature.
Barely a decade later, however, photography using a negative and light-sensitive paper brought about a revolution, enabling photographs to be enlarged and endlessly reproduced. From the early 1850’s, photographers began opening studios, family portraits became the fad, and artists promptly took note. A handful of photographers were quick to recognize the artistic potential of nude photography. Taking their inspiration from Greek and Roman sculptures and Renaissance paintings and drawings, they recreated familiar figures, gestures or scenes in a disturbingly realistic — albeit black-and-white — form.
Gaudenzio Marconi’s photograph of a naked man echoing Michelangelo’s ”Creation of Adam” was among the first. But others in the show stand out, among them Marconi’s picture of a naked model in the position of Mantegna’s ”Dead Christ.”
Soon there were photographs galore of men and women posing as Venus, Diana, Hercules, Samson, Mary Magdalene, Moses and the crucified Jesus (yes, including naked female models hanging somewhat bemused from wooden crosses).
Louis Igout was more experimental, photographing a naked man and a naked woman separately in 16 different poses: the man’s positions vaguely resemble those of a late 20th-century bodybuilder, the woman’s are more coy but fall short of being erotic. They were sold to art students attending the Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts.
The women posing for what were known euphemistically as ”etudes d’apres nature” were generally rounder than today’s fashion magazine stereotypes, suggesting that the artist’s ideal woman had changed little since Rubens. In contrast, Greek statues remained the role model for men in these ”etudes.”
Artists Embrace A New Technology
As French officialdom debated whether photographs were appropriate for use in art schools, prominent artists> were discovering their value. Gustave Courbet, a leader of the School of Realism, was among them, working with Julien Vallou de Villeneuve, whose ”Nude Study” of 1853 is mirrored in the painter’s ”Bathers” of the same year.
Many experts presume, but have been unable to prove, that Courbet also used a photograph as the model for ”L’Origine du Monde,” his infamous painting of an unidentified woman’s genitalia. Causing an immense scandal for its realism when it was first presented in public in 1866, the painting was then long kept from public view, only going on permanent display at the Musee d’Orsay in 1995.

For the latest overview of British naughtiness, you may once again go to (where else?) the Brooklyn Museum of Art for ”Exposed: The Victorian Nude,” which has even more naked women without their pubic hair than the last Vanessa Beecroft show at the Gagosian Gallery.
The exhibition comes from Tate Britain in London, where it was, naturally, a smash. For the British, the show was ostensibly an excuse to meditate on how their Victorian great-great-grandparents were not really prudes after all. For Brooklyn, the pretext, I suppose, is to provide an American public with some historical perspective on civic propriety and censorship, ”Sensation” being the unspoken context.
But who needs an excuse for a little harmless peeping? That’s what you might think, although everyone has always had one, starting with the artists. Those naked young maidens, shackled to a rock or draped over the oars of a ship (the boatmen bravely stare straight ahead) or riding horses or just standing there with an anaconda wrapped around their bodies were Andromeda, the Sirens, Godiva and Harmonia. The archetype was the streamlined Greek statue, male or female.
Far from being allergic to sex, the Victorians were obviously besotted with it. Distinctions between erotic and pornographic (the word was evidently coined then) and between art and obscenity were cheerfully debated, the paintings, sculptures, drawings and photographs here proving how vigorously artists threw themselves into the discussion. You don’t need to be Michel Foucault and write a book about the history of sexuality to recognize that ”the Victorians, in being so actively concerned to describe, analyze and repress sexuality, were involved in a massive acceleration of sexual discourse,” as Martin Myrone, a Tate curator, puts it in the catalog.
Or as D. H. Lawrence said, ”The real masturbation of Englishmen began only in the 19th century.”
The show, organized by Alison Smith of the Tate, is a hoot, full of Freudian chestnuts and good old filth dressed up as cultural elevation, the hypocrisy providing easy amusement for a modern audience that ought to be a little careful about condescending to the Victorians while ogling their nudes. There is a straight line from Harmonia and Andromeda to the works of Tracy Emin, Sarah Lucas and Ms. Beecroft, and I am referring not just to the shared fixation on naked pudenda but also to the more or less flimsy artistic rationales and the inevitable tut-tutting of moralizers, all of which makes fodder for cheeky art critics and other marginal exploiters of the flesh.
At the Tate, I noticed that a section of the show was called ”Sensation! The Nude in High Art,” although Brooklyn has timorously excised ”Sensation” from the section’s title. This part of the show is devoted to mildly deranged pictures like ”Faithful Unto Death” by Herbert Schmalz (I’m not making that name up), wherein half a dozen or so naked damsels, loosely bound to herms, await lions in the Circus Maximus. The bondage allows for a variety of striking poses: stock postures of courage, hope and prayer, which are nevertheless aptly lascivious.
John William Waterhouse, along the same lines, paints St. Eulalia, a 12-year-old Christian martyr. She was done in by iron hooks and torches to the breasts, but Waterhouse tactfully avoids the hooks and burns and changes Eulalia into a half-naked, supine young woman with ample auburn hair spread around her, the hair standing in for her blood and offsetting a blanket of virgin snow. Very tasteful and uplifting.
Fortunately, the show does not stint on genuine porn. In the 1890’s, short films were made by British companies and French ones like Pathé Frères, which were distributed in Britain. (The British assumed the French films, like the French, were more risqué.) A few brief clips of these, enticingly segregated to a side gallery in Brooklyn, set off by a peekaboo black curtain, show a nude model posing before a painter and a slightly confused, heavyset woman glumly removing layer upon layer of scarves, corsets, stockings, pantaloons and petticoats, and ending up in a baggy chemise, staring blankly at the camera, before the 45-second film suddenly stops dead.
Erotic these snippets are not, but then, perhaps it’s just that the excitement caused by seeing a naked or almost naked body tends to peter out when you see so many of them at a time. One Carthaginian concubine begins to look like another Nubian slave. Or rather, one Lawrence Alma-Tadema of Victorian-looking young women with apple-flushed cheeks incongruously soaking in an ancient Roman plunge bath seems like another William Blake Richmond of Victorian-looking men and women together in an antique gymnasium, except, perhaps, for the homoeroticism of the latter, a leitmotif elsewhere, too. The depilated ideal of all these improbable figures, male and female, is epitomized by a work like Frederic Leighton’s ”Psyche,” a kind of highfalutin striptease in which smooth paint approximates polished marble. Fetishistic is the operative word for the painterly touch, I think.
The obsession with smooth, youthful, unspoiled flesh has its inevitable offshoot in pictures of children, like William Stott’s ”Wild Flower,” of a naked girl with a downcast expression on a white fur carpet, a few fallen rose petals beside her, intimating innocence lost. There are several of these vaguely alarming pictures in the show. Henry Scott Tuke’s ”August Blue,” of naked boys in a boat, is one of the most benign. It fixates on gilded masculinity, the work’s public message of wholesome athleticism — young swimmers adrift in Impressionist sunshine — crudely disguising the homoerotic vibration.
There are various photographs, too. (Photographs, artistic and otherwise, make up a catchy part of the show.) These include a few by Edward Linley Sambourne, an illustrator and photographer, who apparently liked to take surreptitious snapshots of Kensington schoolgirls with a detective camera disguised as a pair of binoculars. The Sambourne photographs here were shot at the Camera Club in London.
They show a coltish young model, the play of shadow made by the light cast on her body against the plain backdrop barely qualifying the images as art.
The most beautiful photograph is Lewis Carroll’s of Evelyn Hatch as Titian’s ”Venus,” the print delicately highlighted with color. Like all of Carroll’s photographs of young girls, it was taken with the consent of, and for, the girl’s family. Carroll destroyed his own negatives and prints or left instructions for this to be done. Pictures of naked girls were mainstream fare in Victorian England, which meant that Victorians saw them very differently from the way we do, although not so differently that Carroll felt entirely at ease with what he had done. ”The real distinction between sin and innocence,” he wrote, obviously defensively, was whether the viewer felt ‘’sinful feelings or not.” Pedophilia is in the eye of the beholder, you might say, a reflection of Victorian culture’s surprisingly fluid sexual standards.
So much for Kenneth Clark’s dismissal of the era as ”the great frost of Victorian prudery.” Perfume and underwear advertisers today have nothing on the feisty Victorians. The show ends with works by Walter Sickert and Gwen John, artists at the turn of the last century who dispensed with the kinky fantasies of antigravitational breasts and painted what they saw: a naked woman in a dingy bedroom awkwardly bending over to wash her hair, her head cut off from our view; a scrawny, round-shouldered woman whose breasts and arms hang limp as she poses before a dull gray wall for a painter who clearly did not like her.
”It is a pretty little face but she is dreadful,” John wrote about her model, Fanella Lovell, which is exactly the feeling we get.
A gulf, not in time but in temperament, separates artists like John and Sickert from Victorians like Leighton and Alma-Tadema. It is a reminder of just how radical modernism was. From Alma-Tadema to Ms. Beecroft and cold cream commercials. From John and Sickert to Lucian Freud, who could never be confused with Herbert Schmalz.
”Exposed: The Victorian Nude” remains at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park, (718) 638-5000, through Jan. 5.
Photos: In a Roman bath: ”A Favourite Custom” (1909), by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, from ”Exposed: The Victorian Nude” at the Brooklyn Museum. (Tate Britain)(pg. E29); ”An Athlete Wrestling a Python,” Frederic Leighton’s 1877 sculpture, is part of ”Exposed: The Victorian Nude,” an exhibition that was organized by Tate Britain in London and is now at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Below left, ”August Blue” (1893-4), a painting by Henry Scott Tuke that pays tribute to youthful flesh. (Photographs from Tate Britain)(pg. E34)

Cate Blanchett has defended an artist whose portraits of nude children have sparked a censorship row in Australia.
Police shut down photographer Bill Henson’s exhibition, seized images and are also considering charging him.
His work, featuring naked 13-year-olds, was condemned by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd as “revolting”.
But in an open letter, Blanchett and 42 other leading arts figures said the action risked damaging Australia’s cultural reputation.
‘Social freedom’
“The potential prosecution of one of our most respected artists is no way to build a creative Australia and does untold damage to our cultural reputation,” the letter said, addressed to Australia’s environment minister and the premier of New South Wales state.
“We should remember that an important index of social freedom, in earlier times or in repressive regimes elsewhere in the world, is how artists and art are treated by the state.
“We wish to make absolutely clear that none of us endorses, in any way, the abuse of children,” they said.
“Henson’s work has nothing to do with child pornography and, according to the judgment of some of the most respected curators and critics in the world, it is certainly art.”
The exhibition at the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney was shut down by police before it could even open last week after some people complained about photographs of naked 12 and 13-year-old boys and girls.
Police seized 20 photographs from the gallery, most of them of a 13-year-old girl.
They said were seeking to interview the subjects of the photos and their parents and were still investigating whether the photographs violate obscenity laws.
‘Innocence‘
Prime Minister Rudd has stood by his criticism saying: “I gave my reaction, I stand by that reaction and I don’t apologise for it and I won’t be changing it.”
“I am passionate about children having innocence in their childhood,” he said.
Australian child advocacy group Bravehearts labelled the photographs as child pornography and exploitation and have called for Henson and the gallery to be prosecuted.
Two other galleries in New South Wales state have since removed works by Henson from their walls.
Henson, 52, has not spoken publicly since the controversy erupted.