19th century AD

In his sum of two units versions of the Poseuses, the large single in the Barnes Collection (1886-88) the smaller single in the Berggruen Collection (1888) Georges Seurat problematizes single 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 design in the studio, visual analysis and historical contextualization reveal that these are insidiously subversive works, calling into question the two the epistemological and the social status of the make subordinate As such, one might say that Seurat's Poseuses constitute a critical politics of the representation of the female material part in the late 19th century

The conventions of the "body politics" to which Seurat rejoined are both familiar and persistent. A highly praised film of sum of two units 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 the agency of working on a life-capping masterpiece below the inspiration of a beautiful model-muse [see A.iA., Jan. '92] Although the film, La Belle Noiseuse, is based specifically upon Balzac's early 19th-century novella Le Chefd'oeuvre inconnu, the motif of the artist who must evince himself through the masterful representation of the naked material substance of a woman--or women--is understood to be a timeless and universal signifier of genius's highest challenge. That the female in a state of nature 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 type and the audience sweat it on the outside to the sound of Michel Piccoli's scratching write and scraping brush until the masterpiece is achieved. That the artist must be male and of a certain age and the prototype 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 material substance politics.

Yet if we examine the history of the undressed in art, we find that the female bring under rule did not always occupy similar a central position in artistic creation. From the time of Michelangelo's David in the Renaissance, down [i]or[/i] part of to the other the early 19th century in the work of David and his institute it was mastery of the male denuded that constituted the most serious challenge to the aspiring artist.(2) Indeed, the make submissives for the crucial Prix de Rome invariably involved the representation of the heroic male naked and the single-figure composition contest--that of the so-called Academic was always based upon the male, not the female, type Heroism, sublimation, knowledge of anatomy and antique exemplars were the issues at stake rather than notorious sensuality and the embodiment of desire.(3) It was not until later in the hundred with the rise of the art market and the dealer combination of parts to form a whole and the fall in importance of history painting itself that the female denuded came to take the dominating position which it has occupied at any time since--to the extent that when someone says "this is a present to view of nudes," it is understood to be naked women that are at issue, unles otherwise specified. material substance politics, then, can be understood upon one level as being a politics of sex 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 unclothed and, above all, his choices about by what means to represent this subject inscribe a politics of the material substance rather than a purely esthetic position.4

Seurat has positioned the prototypes in his painting in similar a way that they bear a problematic, level parodic, relation to the elevated bares of tradition or of the new past: that vast array of naked Susannahs, Dianas, Three Graces or Baigneuses that had present the appearanceed to constitute a self-justifying category of elevated physical and spiritual beauty. While it is certainly real that Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe and Olympia (both 1863) gave a salutary be shaken to the notion of the uncovered as timeless and elevated, level these revolutionary works did in the way that in terms of a justifying make submissive matter: the nude in nature in the former case, the naked prostitute in the latter. through contrast, Seurat's models, despite their patent reference to traditional prototypes, are exhibited as nothing but the designs they are, here posing as designs off duty. These are, in Seurat's metes simply contemporary, rather unidealized bodies for whom the state of nature is anything on the contrary natural, as attested by their abandoned chemises, hats and umbrellas, which form an important part of the composition.

by what mode in the Poseuses, does Seurat problematize the female nude? First of all, he refuses to show the subject as a natural and timeless individual In so doing he set asides the traditional politics of the material substance 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 nakeds In Renoir's painting the connection between woman and nature, particularly the naked female and the ahistoric, bucolic landscape, is foregrounded by means of composition and setting: the female exposed conceived of as part of nature, is, at the same time, a natural topic for the artist.