EXTRACT:
13: photography by Marc Atkins

‘Illustrated’ with original text by Bill Drummond (KLF), Stella Duffy, Maggie Estep, Jenny Fabian, Mick Farren, Miles Gibson, Lauren Henderson, Maxim Jakubowski, Toby Litt, Julian Rathbone, Nicholas Royle, James Sallis and Neil Belton

The Nude by by Bill Drummond
‘The English language, with its elaborate generosity, distinguishes between the naked and the nude. To be naked is to be deprived of clothes and implies some of the embarrassment which most of us feel in that condition. The word nude, on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtones. The vague image it conjures is not of a body huddled and defenceless, but one balanced, prosperous and confident: the body re-formed.’
It’s 11.23 on a fine autumn morning. I’m sitting in the restaurant of our National Gallery, sipping the first cup of coffee of the day. My fellow coffee drinkers are ladies of a certain age and social standing who may, when not sipping coffee and conversing with friends whom they haven’t seen for such a long time, aspire to appreciate the finer arts. As for me, today has been set aside for my annual inspection of the national collection.
In this morning’s post was a black-and-white photograph of a young woman in a state of almost complete undress. As well as the picture was an invitation from a publisher to write several hundred words in response to this photo. If minimalism was my bent, I could distil a few hundred words down to just three and proclaim ‘I’d shag her’, but minimalism has never been my poison and I don’t think that my distillation would satisfy the senders of the invitation.
Recently, I’ve been rereading Kenneth Clark’s seminal text, The Nude, first published in May 1956; the same month that Elvis entered the hit parade with his first smash, Heartbreak Hotel. It seems May 1956 witnessed a seismic shift in our shared cultural heritage. So roll over Apollo and tell Dionysus the news. The quote overleaf is the opening lines from this book. In it, Clark tries to make a case for the nude, not just being a subject of art, but a form of art in its own right. And not just any form of art but the highest one. In my mind, he fails to make this case, especially in relation to the female form.
So, although I may struggle to expand my three-word distillation back to a few hundred words, receiving this picture and the accompanying invitation has prompted me to spend this coffee break exploring, then putting into words, some of my reactions to Kenneth Clark’s The Nude.
I will start by stating my credentials as someone whose opinion should be heeded:
I know more about the history of western art than is healthy for a modern man.
I have spent more time in the life class, drawing the naked female form, than probably any other art student in the past 20 years.
I have been driven to create what might be termed art all my life, but even taking into account all that technique learnt in the life-drawing class, I’ve never seen a female arse or pair of tits that have inspired me to celebrate them in my sketch pad. My mind tends to stray elsewhere!
Now I will make my highly prejudiced case for the female nude being, for the male artist, about the most boring subject you could choose for the focus of artistic expression and creative exploration. Undoubtedly, I’m in the minority, as the evidence makes clear that mankind has been drawn, from when we first thought artistic expression worth a light, to celebrate those beguiling curves and heavenly orbs of the female form in whatever the medium in vogue.
Now, in my intense study of nearly every sodding Eve with her apple, or Venus with or without her half shell and that bunch of young harpies we know as the Three Graces, I’ve learnt nothing, felt less, and my life has not been improved one jot. Botticelli, Raphael and Titian wasted their undoubted talents every time their urge to paint turned to the fairer sex. Rubens should have pulled himself together and told his models to save their embarrassment and get their clothes back on, and that’s taking into account that I like fat women as sex objects. When it comes to Ingres, I have to admit there is usually a vibe to his nude pictures that gets to me. Especially that Baigneuse one. That is a great painting, but to be almost honest it’s the games he is playing with the drapery, bed linen and her headscarf, and not the ample flesh on display, that arouses my appreciation.
With my finger on the fast-forward, I’m now halfway through the nineteenth century. Manet’s Olympia is not only racist; it is a shite painting. And, as for Renoir’s nudes, nobody in their right mind would want to have these mindless, lumpen lassies hanging in their front rooms. Renoir’s paintings of Parisian street scenes were brilliant; they still tingle with life almost 130 years after he did them. Not so his nudes.
Yes, I like Bonnard’s use of colours and Modigliani’s way with a line and maybe, just maybe, if it wasn’t for the nakedness of their sitters, they might not have worked so well. But this is an exception to my self-decreed universal rule. So, having moved firmly into the twentieth century, I may as well deal with Picasso. I just don’t get it. Whether he is trying to tell us how crap the Spanish Civil War was, or what gorgeous naked babes the maids of Avignon are, in my eyes he fails. But then, I think his whole oeuvre is probably the most overrated thing in the history of art. Modernism was going to happen just fine even if he hadn’t done his dreary cubist paintings.
As a footnote, and not to let our own dear nation’s attempts at creativity off the hook, I would like to mention Henry Moore and his lumps of reclining rock. I wager in 100 years’ time nobody will give a fuck for them.
And do I have a rationale for my prejudices? Well, I think so. With none of these depictions of femininity do you learn anything about what they, as individuals, think, feel, long for or lust after. If you were from outer space and were presented with the vast canon that is the female nude, what could you learn about the lot of womankind? Those that are paintings literally start off as blank canvases, and end up as symbolic blank canvases for the male artist to jizz (symbolic or not) all over.
And if you come back at me with ‘but that was never either the artist’s brief or agenda to depict what these naked ladies were thinking, so forget about all that ‘what’s going on in their heads, stuff?’, I will come at it from another angle. Other than Eve with her apple and that sorry tale about the fate that is about to befall mankind, nothing else is going on in any of these works of art; just women standing, sitting or lying about doing sod all. No tension, no revelation, no great moral tale. In fact, no art.
Other than in Ancient Greece, the male nude does not command anywhere near the same amount of space as his female counterpart does within the context of the history of western art. But to my eyes and mind, it seems to make far more sense as subject matter.
The idealised muscular male form is used, time and time again, to express all the tensions and struggles of creation, life, death and the hereafter. Many of the pivotal moments of myth can be brought into the visual with the protagonist’s portrayal in almost naked form. If Jesus Christ had been crucified fully clothed and depicted as such, I doubt that Christianity would have had the impact that it has. Christ’s suffering is made all the more apparent if we can see his every muscle straining with his own pain and in turn the pain of all us sinners, doubters and non-believers.
Of course, there are exceptions where the depiction of the male nude totally fails. Michelangelo may have been a talented craftsman but any time he turns to the male nude, we are left with nothing more than his taste for the camply homoerotic. If Michelangelo had been a twentieth-century boy, I think Tom of Finland would have beaten him hands down for the pink pound.
None of the prejudices that I have allowed to leak from my pen have dealt with the camera. That’s because I know fuck all about photography, let alone the place the nude has found within its discipline. Well, that’s aside from what I’ve learnt from the pile of magazines I keep stacked under my side of the bed.
‘So, tell me Bill, Asian Babes circa ’98 or those classic mid-1970s Mayfairs?’

‘Afraid not, back copies of the New Statesman and Art Monthly.’
As for Kenneth Clark, this is the closing paragraph in his book:
‘Thus modern art shows even more explicitly than the art of the past that the nude does not simply represent the body, but relates it, by analogy, to all structures that have become part of our imaginative experience. The Greeks related it to their geometry. Twentieth-century man, with his vastly extended experience of physical life, and his more elaborate patterns of mathematical symbols, must have at the back of his mind analogies of far greater complexity. But he has not abandoned the effort to express them visibly as part of himself. The Greeks perfected the nude in order that man might feel like a god, and in a sense this is still its function, for although we no longer suppose that God is like a beautiful man, we still feel close to divinity in those flashes of self-identification when, through our own bodies, we seem to be aware of a universal order.’

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