The Artist, the Studio & the Model: 19th Century to Lucian Freud. 8

Exposed or Overexposed: The English Model from Walter Sickert to Lucien Freud.

“When I became more painted against than painting, I decided to be as Sistine as hell. I climbed up the walls; I rolled on the floor; I hung from the beams; I held chairs over my head. The students were furious. Gradually I became aware that I was not posing for the pupils; I was working for the teachers.” Quentin Crisp.¹

In order to “work for the teachers” Crisp – of “naked civil servant” fame- had to submerge his identity; his individualism could not be accommodated within an academic situation. Crisp’s complaint lays bare- no pun intended- the frustrations a working model had to endure when posing for art students. This tension is partly what underscores the distinction – made by Walter Sickert (above) (1860-1942)- between “nude” and “naked.” The nude, recalling the subtitle of the most famous book ever written on the subject- Kenneth Clark’s The Nude- was “a study in ideal form,” but how could that idealisation fit into the realism movement in England where there was a marked turn against the nude in favour of the naked.² In 1910 Walter Sickert had lashed out at art schools in an article³ condemning schools for teaching students how to paint “abstracted ‘nudes’ rather than real naked figures in actual situations,” (Vaughan). Sickert’s intervention can be seen as spearheading a reaction against the academic nude; it would result in scores of British painters from Spencer through the Euston Road School (e.g. Coldstream, Passmore) and on to Hockney and Freud. Perhaps the most anti-nude approach to the model was Spencer (1891-1959) - another Slade prodigy- whose figurative art stood for a kind of domesticated “aesthetic modernism” rather the avant-garde of cubism abroad. Rejecting professional models, Spencer chose people he was intimate with like Patricia Preece painting her with a frankness that was completely at odds with the school system and which may have owned something- as Vaughn suggests, to the German Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement in Germany.⁴

1Postle and Vaughan, The Artist’s Model, 52-53.

2According to William Vaughan, Clark used this distinction- without acknowledging Sickert- in The Nude, “Overexposed: The Model in British Figurative Art” in Model and supermodel, 105-121, 120, n. 9.

3The article “The Naked and the Nude” appeared in The New Age, 21^st July, 1910, rept in A Free House O. Sitwell (ed).

4Vaughan, “Overexposed,” 110.