A last word on art, nudity and such

The response to my last post was surprising. According to statcounter, few readers showed up -- yet the piece received a large number of comments. Lesson: More people care about politics than about art, but those who DO care are vocal.

Sorry about the pop-ups on the Serpieri site; my computer has a good pop-up blocker. I still say the guy's a genius -- his line is so alive, you almost feel that his figures are moving. That's a quality I'm trying to capture in my own work.

He is the only artist I know who has applied that level of craftsmanship and talent to (arguably) pornographic material. I refuse to believe that he traces photographs (as some have suggested), if only because no real woman looks like that -- or could maintain that look for all the years that Serpeiri has been working.

As for the comparison to Leonardo -- first, keep in mind that I went through a "Leonardo" phase as a youth, obsessively copying his drawings, even reaching the point where I instinctively made "left-handed" hatch marks despite being right-handed. He was an unparalleled genius, yes -- but not without shortcomings. For one thing, his attempts at foreshortening were awkward. (The same could be said of every other artist before Caravaggio.)

Admittedly, I've always had a subversive fondness for the lowbrow as well as the highbrow. In a History of Drawing class at UCLA, when the professor insisted on showing Pollaiuolo's "Battle of Ten Nudes" for the umpteenth time, he did not appreciate the comparison I made between Pollaiuolo and Neal Adams. (Adams is on the short list of really top-rank comic book artists. At least Adams would have indicated the light direction -- and his linework would have been more economical.)

Some background on Serpieri: One story (which may or may not be true) holds that, many years ago, while visiting the beach, he saw a goddess-like woman arise nude from the sea -- a Dante-sees-Beatrice moment seared forever in his memory. Ever since, he has tried to recapture that transcendent vision -- a perfectly valid motive for creating art. (And yes, he can draw lots of stuff other than women.)

In the earlier post, I should have clarified my stance on the erotic in art. I maintain (as have generations of artists before our current era of neo-Puritanism) that the nude is not necessarily erotic. Robert Graham's work isn't much of a turn on, although it IS quite beautiful. (On the other hand, I thought Graham's wife Angelica Houston was rather alluring as Morticia. Maybe he should drape those "decapitated" torsos in black evening gowns.)

But eroticism is, of course, a perfectly legitimate motive for creating art. One of my all-time favorite paintings is a portrait of a woman; the painting hangs in the National Gallery. The work has been ascribed to David, although we will never know for sure: The work first showed up in the 1930s, and has no provenance. It sure looks like a David. Whoever did it obviously wanted to make love to the girl -- indeed, painting her was his way of making love to her. This is a factor invisible to those who see the work reproduced in books, but it is quite apparent when you see the work in the paint.

I'm going to go back to politics now, since I don't want to lose all of my readers.