The Artist, the Studio & the Model: 19th Century to Lucian Freud. 6

The English Nude Model & the Avant-Garde.

“When I worked on the picture [A Studio in Montparnasse] and put in the nude, I was thinking only of the design. But then I always forget the interpretation the average member of the public puts on a nude.” Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson.

As Martin Postle notes, Nevinson’s comments on the nude and design are contradicted by this scene of a sensuous nude within a realistic Parisian bohemian interior which has more in common with Matisse and Bonnard rather than Cubism or Vorticism; that notwithstanding, Nevinson’s words do alert one to the problem of how the nude and abstract design fit together. Not that the cubist figure begins in the modern age! If one were to write a book on abstraction and the human figure, one would have to start in the 17^th century with the “cubist” drawings of the Italian artist Luca Cambiaso (1527-1585) which bear some similarity to some of the modern compositions by renegade artists at the Slade, though this is probably pure coincidence.¹ With the growth of interest in modern art spearheaded by Roger Fry and others, Slade professors like Tonks felt their authority threatened by these young Turks of the brush and pen. And in fact a significant number of Tonk’s students like Christopher Nevinson (1889-1946) and David Bomberg (1890-1957) abandoned their Slade teaching and drew and painted the human figure in completely radical ways as in Bomberg’s Vision of Ezekiel (above) whose “abstraction is related to the artist’s sympathy for Cubism.”² Nevinson was influenced by Futurism and Bomberg by cubism; both were never forgiven by Tonks for this apostasy. Another artist influenced by Bomberg at the Slade was William Roberts (1895-1980) who would ultimately join the Vorticist group comprising avant-garde intellectuals like Wyndham-Lewis and Ezra Pound. Robert’s drawing and resulting painting for the Return of Ulysses shows the modern, abstract approach towards representing the human figure, as far away from Tonk’s antique ideal as one can get. The model for these daring compositions would have been cubism which brings us to Picasso and the studio in Europe.

1Frances Gage, “Giulio Mancini and Artist- Amateur Relations in Seventeenth-Century Roman Academies in The Accademia Sessions: The Accademia di San Luca in Rome, c. 1590-1635, Peter M. Lukehart (ed), (National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2009), 247-286, 284 n. 104. Mancini called this proto-cubist style of Cambiaso “sculptural disegno” which “conceives of this depth, and leaving aside these highlights and shadows, goes on explicating it [depth] either with its measurements or with those squares, proportionate to the quantity and depth, which many use- this is the familiar mode of drawing for Andrea [Luca] Cambiaso- or in truth, in place of disegno, the making of models which serve just as drawings serve paintings.”

2Dominika Buchowska, “Vorticism Denied: Wyndham Lewis and the English Cubists” in Wyndham Lewis and the Cultures of Modernity, Andrzej Gasoirek, Alice Reeve-Tucker and Nathan Waddel (eds), (Ashgate, 2011), 37-57,