In a small sleepy southern city some five or six decades ago a dedicated group of painters, retired art professors and sincere amateurs, sought a place where they could present their work, mostly to each other. They lived in an area of cultural aridity with only three water-holes of common interest and conversation -- tobacco, basketball, and horses. Best place they could find to exhibit was a doctor’s waiting room, since he was also a painter, a most inconvenient marriage of convenience for both parties. Then one day the little art league got lucky and was gifted with a derelict hulk of a mansion on the parks and recreation’s endangered list.
Even in new digs, it was still a sleepy organization with one modestly paid director and every other officer a volunteer. Openings were dutifully manned by the cookies and punch committee but lightly attended otherwise. Then one year the chairman of the gallery committee declared she wanted to do a ‘nude show,’ right there in traditionalist horse, tobacco, and basketball country, at the edge of the blue-nosed south. Well, why not?
The nude is the perfect theme for an art exhibit. Everyone knows the subject super well having bodies themselves, having grown up and lived in families, and of course there’s the internet. Unlike some snow bedecked mountain crag the television painter just imagines with a flick of his wrist, everybody knows where everything goes on a nude. Along with everyone’s direct experience, the nude is also the most depicted image in the history of art and so becomes the most revealing of the times, of the artists and of their audiences.
First of all no clothes means no indicators of historical period or social status and no embellishment with satin and pearls, just a basic human the way we’ve looked for the last hundred millennia. In that way the nude becomes an universal image, a ‘magic’ two-way mirror in which artist and audience see each other. For example, some people automatically associate the nude with sexuality but that mostly reveals the repression they’ve been taking for granted all along, and seeing the actual artwork would reveal broader and deeper thoughts to consider.
Back to the story. For the first few years the ‘nude show’ was the only opening of the year to draw an outside audience and more people showed up every year -- parking on the grass. Artists applied from all over the country, some from overseas, and the quality of the art was varied and interesting. From the notoriety and response to this one exhibit the art league began to grow and blossom with paid staff and progressive exhibits, in time becoming a non-profit refuge for people with art degrees and, frankly, no profession to go to. As a result of this increasingly academic bias, the nude show began to change. Year by year it was becoming more ‘contemporary.’
No longer paintings of humans without clothes, each year the notion of the nude became more and more abstracted and pathologically demented. Body parts were grafted onto kitchen utensils, generative parts specifically were grotesquely parodied, and with implied and explicit sex acts sprinkled throughout the overall aspect was seriously disturbed. I don’t know why the show was finally abandoned, but as part of their recently announced ‘reorganization’ the art league is bringing it back. In this time of transition, consider the lesson of your own living parable, oh art league, and go back to the beginning.
Turns out what people like is painting. They didn’t attend those early nude shows to see nakedness. They came to see what painters had to say about other people, about themselves, about life -- and mostly to see how good they were, all there side by side so it’s easy to tell. These days there’s a more general interest in art and the nude show had its part in that, plowing the earth and sowing the seed. This time around it might find reward. A new audience is ready to come to openings if exhibits feature area artists in themed exhibits -- interiors, landscapes, people, etc., exhibits that would help to educate and entice a public ready to be interested in art and local artists, a worthy mission.
With price tags up next to each piece, a modest non-profit percentage of art sold could be retained to help supplement operating expenses as grants and subsidies shrink away. Replay the same record, your own history, from the beginning again to hear a different song this time.
