The Tuileries: Why Are All the Women Naked? (#767)
I was walking through the Tuileries Garden in Paris when something caught my attention.
There seemed to be naked women everywhere.
Not real women, I hasten to add.
Statues.
One reclined beside a path.
Another stood serenely among the trees.
Another stretched languorously in the sun.
Some were bronze, some stone.
Some had names.
Some represented goddesses, nymphs, seasons, rivers, abstract concepts, or apparently nothing more complicated than the female form.
But there were a lot of them.
After a while, I found myself asking a rather unsophisticated question:
Why are all the women naked?
It turns out to be a surprisingly interesting question.
A Garden Full of Art
The Jardin des Tuileries is much more than a garden.
It is also an enormous open-air museum.
Sculpture has been part of the Tuileries for centuries.
Kings decorated royal gardens with statues inspired by Greece and Rome.
After the Revolution, the garden became public, but the tradition continued.
Successive governments added works reflecting changing tastes in French art.
Today, walking from the Louvre toward the Place de la Concorde means walking through several centuries of French sculpture.
But there is a particular reason for the extraordinary concentration of female nudes near the Louvre and the Jardin du Carrousel.
His name was Aristide Maillol.
Maillol and His Women
Maillol, who lived from 1861 to 1944, was one of the great French sculptors of the early twentieth century.
And he returned again and again to one subject:
The female form.
His women are distinctive.
They are not delicate fashion models.
They are substantial women - rounded, powerful, grounded and remarkably still.
They sit, stand, crouch and recline.
There is something almost architectural about them.
And, overwhelmingly, they are naked.
In the 1960s, France's Minister of Cultural Affairs, André Malraux, worked with Maillol's longtime model, collaborator and muse, Dina Vierny, to bring a major collection of Maillol's sculptures into the gardens beside the Louvre.
Vierny donated eighteen works to the French state, creating what amounts to an outdoor Maillol museum.
Suddenly the abundance of naked women begins to make more sense.
But only partly.
Because Maillol didn't invent the naked woman in European art.
He inherited her.
Naked or Nude?
Western art developed a remarkably useful distinction between being naked and being a nude.
A naked person simply isn't wearing clothes.
A nude, on the other hand, is Art.
And that distinction allowed European artists to do something rather clever.
A respectable woman in eighteenth or nineteenth century Paris was expected to conform to elaborate rules of dress and public behavior.
Exposing her body in public would have been scandalous.
But remove the clothes from a marble woman, call her Venus, and put her in a garden?
Art.
Call her Diana?
Art.
Apparently almost any abstract concept could be represented by a naked woman.
Nature could be naked.
Beauty obviously had to be naked.
There was an extraordinary amount of nudity hiding behind mythology.
The Classical Excuse
The explanation begins with ancient Greece and Rome.
Greek artists had elevated the human body into an artistic ideal.
Roman artists inherited that tradition.
Renaissance Europe rediscovered it, and later European academies turned the classical nude into one of the foundations of artistic education.
Artists were expected to understand anatomy.
Drawing the nude figure became an essential part of their training.
But there was another important factor.
For most of this history, the people controlling the system were men.
The artists were overwhelmingly men.
The professors were men.
The juries deciding which works would be exhibited were men.
The patrons buying the art were largely men.
The government officials commissioning monuments were men.
And the people deciding what constituted respectable Art were men.
Perhaps it is not entirely surprising, therefore, that the idealized female body became one of Western art's favorite subjects.
Look at the Men
There are naked and semi-naked men in classical sculpture too.
But look at what they are doing.
They fight.
They wrestle.
They hunt.
They throw things.
They kill monsters.
They struggle.
They die heroically.
The women, by contrast, are very often simply being.
They are beauty.
They are nature.
They are fertility.
They are peace.
They are night.
They are water.
The male body frequently represents action.
The female body frequently represents beauty or an idea.
There are countless exceptions, of course.
But once I began looking for that distinction, it became difficult not to see it.
The Male Gaze in Bronze
Today we have another term available to us:
The male gaze.
The phrase was coined much later than most of these sculptures, but it offers a useful way of looking at them.
Who is doing the looking?
Who is being looked at?
Who decided how the female body should be represented?
That doesn't mean Maillol's sculptures should simply be dismissed as sexist relics.
They are magnificent works of sculpture, and his women possess a physical strength and monumentality that can be very different from the passive eroticism found elsewhere in European art.
Nor should we make the opposite mistake of judging every historical artwork solely by twenty-first-century standards.
But we can ask questions.
In fact, perhaps that is one of the pleasures of encountering old art.
We can admire it and question it at the same time.
Then Put Them All in a Garden
Inside the Louvre, the convention isn't quite so obvious.
You see one nude in one gallery.
Another appears several rooms later.
Another is upstairs.
Paintings and sculptures are separated by periods, schools and artists.
Outside, the effect is different.
Put dozens of sculptures among the hedges and gravel paths of the Tuileries and Jardin du Carrousel, and suddenly several centuries of artistic convention become visible all at once.
There she is again.
Another naked woman.
And another.
The repetition itself begins to tell a story.
These sculptures reveal not simply what Europeans considered beautiful, but also who had the power to define beauty.
They tell us about academies, patrons, governments, mythology and changing attitudes toward the human body.
They also reveal one of art history's most successful linguistic transformations.
A woman without clothes was naked.
A woman without clothes who happened to be Venus was culture.
Walking Through the Tuileries
And perhaps that is why I enjoy walking through places like the Tuileries.
You don't need to know the history before you arrive.
Sometimes the best questions begin with simply noticing something.
Why is that statue here?
Who put it here?
What is it supposed to represent?
Why did people once find this beautiful?
Would we make the same artistic choices today?
And occasionally:
Why are all these women naked?
The answer turns out to involve ancient Greece, Renaissance ideas about beauty, French academic tradition, mythology, government patronage, Aristide Maillol, Dina Vierny, and several centuries during which powerful men largely determined what deserved to be called:
Art.
I continued walking.
Another bronze woman appeared between the trees.
Naked, naturally.
I looked at her rather differently this time.
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