Art And Life

My perusal of art exhibition catalogues continues apace.  Delacroix joins the scene but I must say that I do not like his stuff as much as Manet, Degas, and Ingres.  But I am a naif, and need the outline of the figure to feel secure whereas Delacroix, it seems, builds his images solidly from the color out.  I see that Monet does this to perfection and somehow I never noticed that his en plein air painting achieves solids by the juxtaposition of lights and shadow.  I have learned something in this journey through my art catalogues.  Manet's painting of the two clothed males sitting in the grass with a naked model whose clothes she has removed lie nearby while another female nude in the background bathes in a pool, the so-called Dejeuner sur l'herbe, is fascinating for being so modern in its disregard of the outdoors in which it is supposedly lodged, rather featuring a group of people entirely artificially grouped in a fake outdoors--it is entirely real in a completely unreal way.  It clearly looks ahead to our own times.  For some reason it struck me more forcibly this time around the fundamental incongruity of the juxtaposition of clothed men and naked women, sort of a muslim scene in reverse where women are wrapped up and not to be seen and men's corporal outline is available to the eye.  And I thought of the whole of western art, and the ancient Greek attitude toward male nudity, and frontal nudity at that, particularly in their statuary, and the emergence of female nudity in statuary later on, and Christianity's devaluing the male nude, and then the glory of Michelangelo's David, the assertive penis of that great statue, and in these catalogues I have been viewing how much more frequently a male nude is captured from the buttocks. The female breast is everywhere, the male's rear end is the complement.  Fast forward to our sojourns in the spa in Wiesbaden where males and females use the locker rooms and pools equally and nudity is unashamed.  It is great to see males proud of their apparatus of manhood.  One day a group of teenagers had arrived in the pool we were in and immersed themselves in a group laughing and chatting as they soaked boys and girls, and later they rose from the water to leave, the girls with their high tight breasts bobbing along, the boys with their penis and testicles forefront and waving.  Glorious sexual freedom!