[Lecture] DG Forum Meeting of Value (1)

After retirement, I have taken part in several meetings not of an academic nature but for just friendship.

The majority of them are the extension of long-time relationships from the old school days to the same workplace, each.

It's quite surprising that such intimate relationship is easilly and quickly restored even though we were departed each other for a long time. I experienced such feeling at a meeting of high school classmates in October 2022.

 

A few days ago, I came across the same feeling at another meeting of the same high school classmates called "DG Forum". I guess it was largely because of the similar mental structure based on Christianity in the puberty period.

One of my friends, Dr. Chan-Gyeong Park, who taught material engineering at a prestigious college of technology and engineering for life, gave us the lecture on "Nude in Western Art."

He  started with the picture in the primitive age, "The Venus of Willendorf" (pictured above).

 

Dr. Park explained that nude is a form of visual art that focuses on the unclothed human figure - not a mere naked body but a vividly and beautifully restructured body shape - which is described in an artistic manner.

(누드란 벌거벗은 남자나 여자의 나체가 아닌 아름답게 재구성된 몸매를 작품 속에서 예술적으로 표현한 것을 말한다.)

 

In the Middle Age when the Christian norm restricted the straightforward description of nude, the painters evaded such restrictions by depicting:

* Figures in the Greek-Roman Myths or in the Bible;

* A kind of muse or imaginary characters; or

* Exotic women in the harem of Sultan (called 'Odalisque') based on Orientalism.

 

However, in the advent of Renaissance, the said religious restrictions gave way to humanistic view of real beauties.

See Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus" (Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus (1484) 172.5 x 278.5cm. Uffizi Gallery).

 

* Participants attending the lecture meeting.

In the 18th and 19th century, the Western Art found liberty, romance and real emotions out of the mundane world disguised so far by faith and hypocracy.

This brand-new trend spread out and culminated in the French Revolution in 1789. As described by Delacroix, Goddess of Liberty is leading the people with her breast exposed (see below). It's the symbol of freedom never experienced before.

Accordingly, imagination and immitation followed in various ways. 

 

* Eugene Delacroix, Liberty leading the People (1831). 260x325  Louvre

* Tiziano Becellio, Pastoral Concert (1509). 105x136  Louvre

* Edouard Manet, Luncheon on the Grass (1863). 208x264 Orsay Museum

To avoid the criticism or criminal accusation on account of obscenity, painters were willing to depict the other side of odalisque inside the harem in Islamic countries. 

Delacroix's painting  "Women in Algiers" caused Picasso to draw the same name picture in cubism.

Surprisingly enough, Picasso's "Les femmes d'Alger, Version O" was sold at the highest price of 179.4 million dollars at New York Christie's in 2015. See a related cinema, "The Best Offer" (2013).

 

* Eugene Delacroix, Women of Algiers in their Apartment (1834). 180x230  Louvre

* Paul Cezanne, Large Bathers (1906). Philadelphia Museum.