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Canberra Today 24°/26° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Feast of nudity? Spring show at the Portrait Gallery

THERE’s no shortage of jokes doing the rounds at the National Portrait Gallery that the NPG is, in its spring exhibition, baring its all, but there’s a degree of inaccuracy in the jokes, as media found when director of the Gallery, Angus Trumble, introduced us to the new exhibition whose full title is “Bare: Degrees of undress”.

Stephen and Russell Page 1993 by Robert Rosen Collection: National Portrait Gallery, Gift of Robert Rosen 2012
Stephen and Russell Page 1993
by Robert Rosen
Collection: National Portrait Gallery, Gift of Robert Rosen 2012

Over 90 portraits are on show, with personalities including Dame Edna Everage, Sir Les Patterson the Page brothers Stephen and Russell and Germaine Greer on show.

The exhibition, curated by Penelope Grist, is not so much a feast of nudity as a discussion around the tension between clothes of the human body and the varying degrees of deshabille as it impacts on human behaviour.

npg title

In 2015 it might not be particularly shocking for art lovers to be confronted by images of the naked body, but the tradition of nakedness equating to shame, Trumble explained, goes right back to the Bible, in which the payoff for Adam and Eve after thrown out from the Garden of Eden was clothing. And, Trumble noted, as recently as 1953, Sir Kenneth Clark’s Mellon lecture on nudity and art was not advertised because it was deemed to contain indecency.

But a lot has changed in that time, not just in the arts community but it seems in the sporting world and around 100 portraits pertaining to the question of undress were uncovered in the NPG collection by an intern from Sydney University. These form the basis of the new exhibition, with exception of a portrait by Lucien Freud

Take the small 1950s photograph taken of writer and arts philanthropist Barbara Blackman when she was an artist model. “You are no ordinary undressed damsel. You are a statue in flesh and bone, our landscape in anatomical form, a still life in living state,” she wrote of the experience.

Simon Tedeschi portrait by Cherry Hood -  exhaustion, vulnerability and confidence
Simon Tedeschi portrait by Cherry Hood – exhaustion, vulnerability and confidence

A huge portrait of the late theatre artist and writer Michael Boddy, completely naked, by his wife Janet Dawson, may unnerve some, but the much larger Archibald prize-winning portrait of pianist Simon Tedeschi’s upper body and head by Cherry Hood is more confronting, revealing a mix of exhaustion, vulnerability and confidence, writ large.

Then there’s the ambiguous fully nude portrait of gambler and MONA founder David Walsh by photographer Andres Serrano hung alongside a partially dressed but more revealing image of footballer Harry Kewell.

Grist, who has been working on the show for about two years, described it as a complex installation, one based on the themes and patterns that emerged from an analysis of the gallery’s collection of deshabille art. It particularly interested Grist that the bulk of the underdressed and semi-dressed portraits were of sports blokes with their shirts off or creative artists. The symbolic implications of liberation and physical prowess were evident.

“Bareness is not as extreme as nakedness and not as refined as nudity,” Grist said, “Bareness emphasises something about a subject’s identity as well as reflecting society. The decision to uncover part, or all, of the body in a portrait is at least as significant as a choice of clothing.”

In the midst of this exploration of a universally interesting subject, there is a bit of fun too in the form of the ‘The Bare Game’, which helps you find your personal nude alter-ego from art history. You can play it online at http://portrait.gov.au/ exhibitions/bare-2015

While “CityNews” social writer Lyn Mills found her spiritual match in Botticelli, this writer scored a more extreme soulmate in Austrian painter Egon Schiele.

“Bare” at the National Portrait Gallery, open to the public from August 14 until November 15 and entry is free.

 

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Helen Musa

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