19th century AD

Art in America, March, 1994 by Linda Nochlin

In his two versions of the Poseuses, the large one in the Barnes Collection (1886-88), the smaller one in the Berggruen Collection (1888), Georges Seurat problematizes one of the central themes of later 19th-century painting, the female nude.(1) Although at first glance the paintings may appear to be fairly conventional, deploying as they do the traditional topos of the model in the studio, visual analysis and historical contextualization reveal that these are slyly subversive works, calling into question both the epistemological and the social status of the subject. As such, one might say that Seurat's Poseuses constitute a critical politics of the representation of the female body in the late 19th century.

The conventions of the "body politics" to which Seurat responded are both familiar and persistent. A highly praised film of two years ago by the French director Jacques Rivette regaled the audience for four hours with the spectacle of an aging painter attempting to reignite his flickering genius by working on a life-capping masterpiece under the inspiration of a beautiful model-muse [see A.iA., Jan. '92]. Although the film, La Belle Noiseuse, is based specifically on Balzac's early 19th-century novella Le Chefd'oeuvre inconnu, the motif of the artist who must prove himself through the masterful representation of the naked body of a woman--or women--is understood to be a timeless and universal signifier of genius's highest challenge. That the female nude is the major subject for artistic creation is taken for granted in this film--by the director, his cast and presumably his audience--as being as valid today as in Balzac's time. The artist, the naked model and the audience sweat it out to the sound of Michel Piccoli's scratching pen and scraping brush until the masterpiece is achieved. That the artist must be male and of a certain age and the model in question must be a beautiful young woman is of course integral to the accepted myth of creativity in the visual arts. It is the cornerstone of a conventional body politics.

Yet if we examine the history of the nude in art, we find that the female subject did not always occupy such a central position in artistic creation. From the time of Michelangelo's David in the Renaissance, down through the early 19th century in the work of David and his school, it was mastery of the male nude that constituted the most serious challenge to the aspiring artist.(2) Indeed, the subjects for the crucial Prix de Rome invariably involved the representation of the heroic male nude, and the single-figure composition contest--that of the so-called Academic was always based on the male, not the female, model. Heroism, sublimation, knowledge of anatomy and antique exemplars were the issues at stake rather than overt sensuality and the embodiment of desire.(3) It was not until later in the century, with the rise of the art market and the dealer system and the fall in importance of history painting itself that the female nude came to take the dominating position which it has occupied ever since--to the extent that when someone says "this is a show of nudes," it is understood to be naked women that are at issue, unless otherwise specified. Body politics, then, can be understood on one level as being a politics of gender, specific to a certain period and certain practices in the history of art, rather than being a universal given of the creative act. Accordingly, Seurat's decision to make a major painting featuring the female nude and, above all, his choices about how to represent this subject inscribe a politics of the body rather than a purely esthetic position.4

Seurat has positioned the models in his painting in such a way that they bear a problematic, even parodic, relation to the elevated nudes of tradition or of the recent past: that vast array of naked Susannahs, Dianas, Three Graces or Baigneuses that had seemed to constitute a self-justifying category of elevated physical and spiritual beauty. While it is certainly true that Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe and Olympia (both 1863) gave a salutary jolt to the notion of the nude as timeless and elevated, even these revolutionary works did so in terms of a justifying subject matter: the nude in nature in the former case, the naked prostitute in the latter. By contrast, Seurat's models, despite their overt reference to traditional prototypes, are represented as nothing but the models they are, here posing as models off duty. These are, in Seurat's terms, simply contemporary, rather unidealized bodies for whom the state of nature is anything but natural, as attested by their abandoned chemises, hats and umbrellas, which form an important part of the composition.

How, in the Poseuses, does Seurat problematize the female nude? First of all, he refuses to represent the subject as a natural and timeless one. In so doing he rejects the traditional politics of the body as represented by, for example, Renoir's Grandes Baigneuses, an equally ambitious and large-scale composition of exactly the same date as the Poseuses, and like it featuring three female nudes. In Renoir's painting the connection between woman and nature, particularly the naked female and the ahistoric, bucolic landscape, is foregrounded by composition and setting: the female nude, conceived of as part of nature, is, at the same time, a natural topic for the artist.