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The nude. . . is just as frequent and necessary today as it was in the life of the ancients. . . but there is a new element -- modern beauty.
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. . .the poetry of nudity has mounted to Olympus.
"The Salon of 1852"
They’re beyond desire, and beyond Graham’s desire, however desirable they obviously are, if only for their youth -- and they’re always young, and Graham’s eye always grows young when it looks at them, their intercourse consummated in ageless art. They are not sexually exhibitionistic, but always self-contained however boldly naked. Even when they vigorously exercise, with a spirited intensity that seems an end in itself, they remain peculiarly detached from their own nakedness, and indifferent to the male glance that tries to keep up with their movement, their seemingly inexhaustible energy. Graham’s hand seems to model them as swiftly as they move, but they always seem to escape his touch, much the way Daphne escaped Apollo’s grasp, her body abandoning human form to rejoin nature, indicating that she was pure instinct all along -- driven by forces greater than herself, natural forces that lend her their greatness and power, that she embodies in the majestic integrity of her beauty.
For four decades Graham has dedicated himself to the female nude, often rendering the same nude several times, as though to capture every facet of the female body. It’s an impressive oeuvre, an endless display of female presence in drawings and engravings, and especially in sculptures -- a remarkable contribution to the discourse of the nude, more subtly, to the discourse of the lived body, the articulation of it in all its inarticulate immediacy. Graham does not merely represent the nude, he presents the body in all its "hereness," as Max Scheler put it, making our "inner consciousness" of "lived bodiliness" manifest through the female body. Why is it a better symbol of lived bodiliness than the male body? Because unconsciously the female body is felt to be more inwardly -- and thus mysteriously -- alive than the male body. Its curvature evokes the élan vital in a way the male body never can.
Except, of course, in the hands of a Michelangelo, where the male body sometimes twists in convulsive vitality, as in The Dying Slave and The Bound Slave (both 1513-16), a grotesque distortion of the flowing curves of the female body, suggesting that Michelangelo had no feeling for it -- no inner consciousness of it as a living body, only outer consciousness of it as a misshapen object. German has two words for "body," the inorganic Körper and the organic Leib, and for Michelangelo the female body was a Körper rather than a Leib, as it was for Graham. As has been much noted, Michelangelo’s female nudes tend to be male nudes with breasts, as in the female Day on the tomb of Guiliano de’ Medici (1519-34). This acknowledges, however unwittingly, the fact that the female body is experienced, unconsciously, as more life-giving -- and thus light-bringing, as Day is -- than the male body, which Michelangelo uses to symbolize Night in the same monument. Nonetheless, as in the Slave sculptures, the convulsive twisting of Day’s female body, suggesting that it’s somehow disjointed and absurd, mocks the movement of its curves, confirming not only that Michelangelo has no feeling for it but that he regards it as peculiarly "unnatural" -- a freak of nature compared to the heroic male body.
The difference between the dynamics of Michelangelo’s twisting yet passive nudes and Graham’s hyperactive nudes -- the late ones in contrast to the motionless earlier ones -- bespeaks the difference between a negative and positive view of woman as well as between Körper and Leib. Michelangelo is insensitive and unresponsive to her body, while Graham is perhaps over-sensitive and over-responsive. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that Michelangelo was homosexual and Graham was heterosexual, but it has more to do Graham’s appreciation and acceptance, however unconsciously, of woman’s nature-given ability to give birth, that is, her innate, body-based creativity. Michelangelo resists this truth, probably because he believes that artistic creativity is superior to natural creativity -- divine and rare rather than the profane and commonplace -- and unique to man, confirming his superiority to woman.
His rendering of God’s creation of Adam -- the first human being -- on the Sistine ceiling suggests as much. And suggests that art speaks to and is made for man, not woman, a secondary creation, and with that a second-rate human being. Adam is God’s best work of art, suggesting that making art means breathing life into the beautiful male body. Clearly the "divine" Michelangelo identifies with God, and takes an active, impregnating role -- what else is God’s finger about? -- in response to Adam’s passive body, which is not only much more beautiful than Eve’s body but seems more alive. She’s a necessary evil, not the embodiment of artistic goodness.
In sharp contrast, Graham’s art speaks to and is made for woman; it is a tribute to her body and person. Michelangelo pays homage to the male body and person; for him, to be male is to be more authentically human than to be female. And more creative, especially because the male artist creates with his mind -- Michelangelo’s hand was an instrument of his mind, a point made by the fact that God the Father and his son Adam have their eyes open, directing their hands (their eyes meet before their hands will) -- not his body, as the female artist, that is, the mother does. She produces the infant -- not exactly a masterpiece -- in the unconscious of her body, as it were, while the father produces the work of art in his consciousness, envisioning it with his mind’s eye -- the creative eye of God the Father that fashioned the masterpiece of Adam’s mature body. The infant fresh out of the mother’s womb is an unfinished work of human art, which the artist finishes and perfects, which is what good fathering does.
Also, the male "mind artist" can make art that will live forever -- great, mature art -- while the female "body artist" produces human beings who are not only in a raw, immature state, but whose bodies have built-in obsolescence: they are all too human because they will die. From Michelangelo’s point of view they are poor examples of works of art, indicating the shortcomings of nature, that is, the inadequacy and limits of natural creativity. Art finishes what nature began, bringing it to a new and permanent state of ripeness -- the proverbial "ripeness [that] is all" -- suggesting that art is in effect a "second nature," more particularly, a new masculine paradise to compensate for the expulsion from the paradise of woman’s womb that is birth.
I am arguing that Graham rejects the male figure because it does not and by nature cannot adequately embody and express the creative spirit of life as convincingly as the female body. Michelangelo has the opposite point of view, in part because he thinks the female body is a less successful creation than the male body. That is, God did a better job with the male body -- which is after all the first and primary body (which is why Michelangelo is attracted to it) -- than the female body. It is a second-rate body, a botched afterthought to the male body, and ugly compared to its beauty. But Michelangelo is missing the point of the female body: without its capacity to give birth -- which makes it the site of primary creativity -- there is no life, in nature and in art.
In short, Graham is drawn to the female body not because he finds it sexually exciting but out of deep respect for its inner creativity. He is not a prurient voyeur getting his scopophiliac kicks, but a connoisseur of woman’s glorious, subtly made body, contemplating it in recognition of its sacredness by reason of its generative power. He possesses woman artistically rather than sexually, for only by artistically identifying with her can he become as vitally creative as she is by nature, and thus keep his own creativity vital, and with that make art that will be fresh, alive, high-spirited, and young forever -- as his female models seem to be. Graham is not another Pygmalion, busily sculpting an outwardly beautiful woman worthy of his love, but obsessed with woman’s inner perfection: the inherent creativity of her body. The capacity to give birth is natural to woman, and to give birth to art the male artist must become a woman in spirit, which is why she is the muse that traditionally inspires the male artist’s creativity -- his own dissociated or split-off female and creative side that becomes an integral part of him again when he makes art under her spell. Graham wants to become one with the female muse to unite with his better self, as it were, and to assure himself that he will be perpetually creative.
Michelangelo has a certain point: art can never exist "naturally." It is never spontaneously given by nature, however "artistic" nature seems. However spontaneously or "naturally" art seems to be made there is always something "artificial" about it. But art becomes completely convincing when it seems uncannily attuned to nature -- in harmony with nature, like the best mimetic art, and in recognition that nature is the mother of life, including living art -- so that it seems "second nature." Graham is not a naïve empiricist, observing and describing woman’s body as though its appearance was a seductive end in itself -- however meticulously he seems to (even when he elides its details) -- but a subtle essentialist: for him woman is the essence of life in deceptively empirical form -- deceptive because however matter-of-factly physical her body is mysteriously creative, indeed, the vehicle of the seemingly miraculous fecundity of nature. Just as nature renews and repeats itself, so Graham renews and repeats the female body, each as young and vital as a fresh spring.
More particularly, his model’s inner consciousness of her body and his inner consciousness of it artistically converge, which is why his sculptures seem to be abstract for all their apparent realism. Graham’s female figures have separate identities, as their faces make very clear -- most of his sculptures are portrait nudes rather than anonymous nudes -- but they are aspects of the same female archetype, what Jung called the female principle that exists in the collective or universal unconscious. It is this archetypal quality that gives them an aura of abstract perfection, ensuring their important place in art history, and confirming their profound humanity, and their permanent hold on the male psyche.
Moving restlessly from nude to nude, Graham seems in Sisyphean pursuit of the ideal woman. But unlike Apelles, who knew she was a fantasy and myth, but found bits and pieces of ideal beauty in the body parts of real woman, putting them together in a construction of the ideal -- the mirage of perfectly beautiful love goddess -- Graham remains ruthlessly realistic, declaring "I’m trying to make exactly what I see in front of me."(2) Impressed by Graham’s attention to realistic detail, Augustin Arteaga declared that Graham had "the anatomical obsession of a gynecologist."(3)
Paradoxically, his gynecological realism makes the female body more mystifying than it would be if it were vapidly glamorous. Every descriptive detail becomes an emotional nuance, giving her flesh a peculiarly spiritual flavor. Since Rodin, anatomical accuracy and psychological authenticity have become separated, a tendency that some scholars think begins with Matisse’s "serpentine" sculptures of the female nude, which sacrifice physical description to expressive fervor. As Albert Elsen writes, Matisse was not interested in "anatomical information,"(4) but in "express[ing] his feelings,"(5) as Matisse himself said -- his feelings, it should be emphasized, not the nude’s feelings, suggesting his emotional domination of his model, who only existed for his creative purposes rather than in and for herself, as Graham’s nudes do. He respects and conveys their feelings, however much their bodies serve his creativity.
In retrospect, the distance from Matisse’s figurative expressionism to Pollock’s abstract expressionism seems short: in the all-over paintings the expression of feeling no longer depends on the model. There are no human figures in them, only feeling for its own intense sake. If the figure exists, it is buried under an avalanche of expressive gestures, forming a realm unto themselves. Pollock may have begun with the figure, as he said -- an anonymous, genderless, schematic figure, it should be noted -- but he negates it at once, as though asserting his independence, even if such a negation is paradoxically a self-negation, that is, implies his "difficult," negative feelings about himself as well as human relationships, which have their own "difficulty." Pollock doesn’t need an Other, as Rodin and Matisse did -- certainly no female nude (apart from the painting of his naked mother, her grotesquely shaped body dominating the surrounding little men, titled Woman [ca. 1939], Pollock never painted one) -- to catalyze his feelings. He is self-stimulating, as it were, as though the sheer expression of raw feeling could generate the strong self he rarely had, as his lifelong mental illness implies. His feelings pour out, in response to each other, rather than to a figure, thus losing their anchorage in external fact. In Rodin and to a lesser extent in Matisse feelings were tied to human facts -- above all the unmistakable fact of the body -- but in Pollock they appear as autonomous expressions. The expression of feeling is an abstract end in itself rather than associated with the figure, as though feeling had nothing to do with life only art.
In stark contrast, Graham reintegrates what became separated in the course of modern art: the expression of feeling and the reality of the body. Observation and expression -- descriptive clarity and assertive passion -- have never been as esthetically opposed as modernism insisted they were. Graham reconciles them, restoring credibility to realistic description with no sacrifice of expressive purpose. He is a master of "post-modern" mimesis, subtly equilibrating the demands of "inner necessity" and objectivity -- the personal and the public -- in a figurative art that is as cognitively precise as it is emotionally insinuating.
Graham is indebted to the long history of the discourse of the nude, as he acknowledges. He has studied the classical proportions of the Renaissance Venus as well as the voluminous Venus of Willendorf -- the transcendentally realistic nude as well as the prehistoric fertility goddess. Acutely aware of the ratio of the parts to the whole of the body, and of the distribution of mass in its different parts, he in effect re-invents the traditional nude, but gives it a modern twist by rendering its materiality with a scientifically detached realism -- clinical realism.
Just as important and unusual, he conveys his model’s "inner necessity" -- her emotional individuality, as it were -- rather than using her body to communicate his own urgent feelings, in effect exploiting her body for his own emotional purposes. Graham does not project his feelings into her flesh, giving them the form of her body, as 20th century figurative expressionists did, nor does he project them into the flesh of the painterly medium, as 20th century abstract expressionists did, externalizing their urgent necessity as ironically pure art. In a sense, Graham uses sculpture to extricate the female body from the quagmire of the artist’s contradictory feelings, implicit in the so-called push and pull of pure painterly painting -- a pushing and pulling of the model into a two-dimensional morass, finally dissolving her into an atmospheric energy. Objectified three-dimensionally -- viewed as an object in its own right, not as a subjective accessory -- the female model cannot be reduced to an unconscious male fantasy -- abused and used by male desire -- which allows her to show her personal feelings. And above all her character, able to withstand the "advances" of the male eye, which gives her an unusual dignity, despite her exposure to the invasive male eye.
Numerous artists have "created into" the female nude, to use D.W. Winnicott’s felicitous term, a creative "intercourse" that results in beauty. This is true for both modern and traditional artists -- for Maillol and Matisse as well as Titian and Rubens. Graham Beal writes: "Though distinct, recognizable individuals, the women depicted [by Graham] are invariably transformed -- through the bronze medium and reduced scale -- into generic beings: types of beauty."(8) Our age has repeatedly been characterized as one of disbelief,(9) which includes disbelief in beauty. Our society adulates hard vulgar glamour not sublime soft beauty. Graham is a believer. He may have worked in Los Angeles, the center of the Hollywood exploitation and desecration of American life, but the young Virgin Mary, her chaste body innocently naked under her sweeping robe, standing open-armed and welcoming above the Great Doors (installed in 2002) that Graham created for the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles -- the city’s first new cathedral in almost a half century -- is the epitome of the gentle tenderness and sacred beauty that Hollywood’s emotionally ugly fake beauties lack. Their cheaply profane bodies are a mockery of the female principle Graham’s Virgin Mary embodies. Graham’s more conspicuously physical nudes may seem less spiritually important at first glance, but as their elevated position indicates, they also initiate us into a higher realm of feeling, trust, and belief.
This is true despite the ultra-realistic -- gynecologically accurate, as Arteaga said -- rendering of their genitals, suggesting a familiar male split in consciousness of the female body: she’s a lower sexual being whose body one lusts for and a higher spiritual being whose soul one loves. She’s either a "bad woman" because one projects one’s "bad wishes" into her, or a "good woman" because one projects one’s "good wishes" into her. Freud noted that it was emotionally difficult for a man to reconcile the opposites -- to experience the same woman as an object of all-consuming desire and of reverence. Graham venerates woman, but strips the veil of modesty from her genitals, as though to confirm that she is a bad woman -- sexually assertive, brazenly forward. But he is as brazen: he views the female genital without flinching, that is, without experiencing castration anxiety, while confirming that the female body is flawed, that is, lacks a penis. He lifts the taboo against the female genital, exposing it as ruthlessly as Courbet does in The Origin of the World (1866), as Becky, Lying Down (1993) and Lauren 4-21-96 (1996) show. There are many other works in which the female genital is the flagrant center of attention, provocatively drawing our eye to it, even into it, for it seems hypnotically open rather than hermetically closed, a lavish hole rather than a subtle slit. The labia are meticulously detailed, as though they were seductive blemishes, and the female genital becomes dramatically evident when seen in contrast to the perfect, self-contained body to which it belongs.
The female genital is truthfully rendered -- true to nature. How can woman be truthful and beautiful at once, as Graham shows she is? This goes against the modern grain. Barnett Newman said "the impulse of modern art was [the] desire to destroy beauty," more particularly, "to discard Renaissance notions of beauty."(10) "Modern art is abstract, intellectual. . . . Modernism. . . taught that art is an expression of thought, of important truths, not of a sentimental and artificial ‘beauty’."(11) So much for the beautiful female body, whatever the important truth of its genital. Whatever happened to Keats’s "beauty is truth and truth is beauty and that’s all you need to know?" Clearly modernism doesn’t have the whole truth about beauty, and doesn’t understand the beauty of truth -- of very visceral truth. Modernism begins with Courbet’s realism, which involved "the pursuit of ugliness,"(12) suggesting that Newman’s paintings, for some the climax of modern painting, are absolutely ugly.
Graham breaks away from this whole line of thinking, affirming beauty, to the extent of finding it in the seemingly ugliest part of the female body, at least to the male anxious about it. He does so by re-uniting what Courbet separated: the female genital from the female body. He does something more subtle: he subsumes the female genital in a beautiful female body -- classically beautiful however empirically the case -- so that it becomes endowed with beauty, an attribute of beauty, the proverbially "something strange in the proportions of beauty" that brings it to life, and, more subtly, gives it projective power and animates it. The female genital is the essence of the female body, and Graham further essentializes it by describing it in raw detail, paradoxically giving it esthetic immediacy, so that the female genital is not only experienced as embedded in the female body but as the bizarre essence of female beauty -- an existentialization of beauty, as it were, bringing it down from the abstract heights where it was a pure and remote truth, a seemingly artificial idea rather than a perversely eloquent fact of life, not unlike the seductively intimidating penis pictured by Robert Mapplethorpe in The Man in the Polyester Suit (1986). In 1846, twenty years before Courbet’s blatant female genital, Baudelaire remarked that genuine beauty is a dialectic of "the eternal and. . . the transitory -- of the absolute and of the particular."(13) Courbet’s female genital is transitory and particular, and so is Graham’s, but Graham’s female body is absolute and eternal, which is why its genital is, finally, enduringly significant rather than simply momentarily shocking, and more scenic than obscene, like, for that matter, Mapplethorpe’s grand male genital.
But there is in fact a Rodinesque streak in Graham -- the elemental Rodin of the Balzac (1898), "the first conspicuous sculptural portrait in modern times in which creative expression took precedence over verisimilitude."(19) Graham oscillates, with relaxed versatility, between Maillol-type classical and Rodin-type expressionist sculptures -- exquisitely beautiful and primordially dynamic figures, with the female genital an expressionistic tidbit in the classically beautiful figures and classical containment bringing the expressionistic figures under esthetic control. If both style and power are necessary to make art -- power under the control of style, style enlivened by power -- then Graham has them both, however much the balance sometimes seems to tilt more to the one rather than the other, making for a certain inconclusiveness that is decidedly modern.
More crucially, he shows his modernism in moving "beyond totality towards a state of fragmentation,"(20) as Rodin and numerous modernists have, even as each fragment of the figure bespeaks the totality of the figure and becomes a totality in itself, as in Graham’s 1990 series of body fragments. In the remarkably visceral fragments made at the beginning of the New Millennium, as though to show that it is still possible to make the body new -- or at least show that while it has had a bad fall from grace in modernism and broken into irreconcilable parts, it can be put back together without denying that it is broken forever (and that its pieces have become puzzling, and no longer seamlessly fit together, suggesting that some have been lost) -- Graham daringly unites manically expressive body parts in a precariously balanced whole that remains uncannily classical. These figure-fragments seem simultaneously self-created and self-destructive -- almost catastrophically formless yet oddly well-formed. The classically whole figures and fragmentary modernist figures -- classically finished figures and figures in interminable process -- are the poles of Graham’s creativity, paradoxically synthesizing in his later expressionistic classicism.
As with Houdon, the nude’s pose is telling -- a sort of visual mot juste -- especially the placement of the arms and hands. It makes her beauty dynamic, a "stationary vibration"(22) rather than a static harmony. Stephanie and Spy (1980-81) suggests that Graham views his nudes as a stable of race horses, finely groomed and ready to run, under the control of the artist jockey -- Graham -- who masterfully trains and rides them. Graham is a connoisseur of fillies, female bodies in their youthful prime. It may be a patriarchal attitude, but it’s also an appreciative, adoring one, for he has no wish to tamper with the female nude, but rather keep her in fighting trim, as it were. The remarkable series of works devoted to the bodies of Elisa, Jennifer, and Lauren (all 1996), show how capable and fit she is. They stretch to the athletic limit -- several are dancers -- with no loss of composure and elegance. They may seem Dionysian maenads, but they have complete command of their movement, even at its most intense. Graham’s female nudes are erotic masterpieces, but they also show the body ego at its most confident.
Working "from a living model, Graham takes [two] series of photographs, one set being straight-on views of the standing figure from different angles," the other "reference shots" showing "the model going through various mechanical actions."(23) I would say they are organic rather than mechanical; machines aren’t as limber as Graham’s athletic nudes. (They’re certainly not mechanical fucking machines -- sexual mannequins -- like those of Duchamp, Picabia and Max Ernst in their Dadaist phases.) But the point is that they’re "’stop-motion’ figures" integrating action and presence -- using "action" photography to heighten female presence. "The best part of beauty cannot [be] expressed," as the philosopher Francis Bacon said, but put into motion, whether subtle or vigorous, beautifully becomes powerfully expressive.
Graham’s late expressionistic nudes are not only in dramatic motion, but have a certain "Baroque agitation"(24) -- and exuberance. As I’ve suggested, they show Graham’s creativity at its most forceful and unrestrained. It is an art historical cliché that an artist tends to repeat himself as he ages and his creative powers have waned or exhausted themselves, or because he is content to rest on the laurels of past successes. But a genuinely creative artist recovers his originality by casting all caution to the winds, making works that reach beyond the self-imposed and cultural limits of his earlier works, refusing to conform to himself or to the expectations of others. By this standard Graham is a truly original artist: his late style expressionism is a triumph of his creativity over the model in which it was initially invested -- the model in which it first came into its own. The model remains, more acrobatic and sometimes more stridently present than ever, but she is now an occasion for a tour de force display of Graham’s creativity rather than its goal.
Not only has Graham broken the inhibiting mold of his own history, moving beyond his total mastery of the nude motif, but he has molded her body to reveal his complete mastery of his medium as well as her movement. No longer conforming to himself or dependent on the model, he has become radically nonconformist and creatively independent -- even more than when he dissented from the abstraction that become de rigueur and conventional by making works that seemed unconventional just because they were unequivocally representational and thus beyond the avant-garde pale. Nonetheless, in the late expressionistic representations the mark of his hands is clearly visible, not usurping descriptive detail but making it emotionally as well as esthetically "avant-garde," if one wants to use that wretched, overused word.
Graham has come a long way from the tableaus that first brought him recognition in the 1960s. Arteaga writes: "Graham produced some boxes which today we would classify as object-art, which recreates the space of a room. Made in acrylic, one can see their contents from every direction. Inside them are small wax figures which recreate scenes of a bedroom with a carefree sensuality or shared eroticism."(25) Arteaga thinks the "exaggerated realism" of Graham’s wax figures initiated "a new vein of ‘Pop’," noting that "soft-porn" magazines seem to be their source, although Graham has said that the female figures are as individualized as his later models. They are not stereotypes, as soft-porn nudes tend to be, but observed on the beach in Venice, California, where Graham lived and continued to live until his death. The female bathers wore bikinis and were tanned. There is no doubt a certain voyeuristic realism to the sexually explicit scenes, but the conceptual character of the tableaus is more to their artistic point.
But what is most noteworthy, esthetically, about the boxes is their sensitive use of wax, indicative of Graham’s awareness of the fundamental importance of the physical properties of the medium -- even more important than the physical properties of the female body, as a 1978 series of wax drawings makes clear. The flexibility and gracefulness of the nude’s body is matched by the malleability and softness of the wax. Medoro Rosso’s molten wax sculptural portraits come to mind, but Graham does Rosso one esthetic step better: Rosso’s portraits are three dimensional, Graham’s wax images are simultaneously two and three dimensional, that is, drawings as well as low reliefs.
Graham has always been interested in the relief -- deceptively flat yet subtly raised surfaces -- as the 1991 series of wood panels and the 1992 untitled reliefs indicate. The nudes in his untitled 1990 freepoints -- they melt into ephemeral elusiveness compared to the bodies in the tableaus -- seem to be drawn in relief. It is impossible to distinguish between flatness and roundness in them. The tension generated by the interplay of two and three dimensions is virtually a theme in itself in the 1978 Dance Door. It climaxes in the dramatic difference between the reliefs of the Virgin Mary, in her various traditional roles, on the Great Bronze Doors of the Los Angeles Cathedral, and the three dimensional rendering of a contemporary Virgin Mary on the portal above the doors. Her statue, surrounded by an auratic golden sky, with its complex amorphous geometry, contrasts sharply with the comparatively dark doors, in their simple geometrical setting.
The textural differences of their surfaces adds to the tension between lower and higher realms. Similarly, in the Dance Door, the portal ornament is relatively coarse grained and raised while the dancers are smooth and flat. Graham is a virtuoso of mediums; he can carve in wood, model in clay, plaster, and wax, and cast in bronze and copper. The results are equally impressive: the material medium becomes as inwardly alive as the nudes. Perhaps nowhere is Graham’s mastery of the medium and dexterity more evident than in the series of drawings he made in 1989. In some, for example, Lise-Ann, a few deft lines convey the nude’s body in a manner worthy of Matisse. Like Matisse, Graham leaves most of the white paper unmarked, turning it into a plane of pure light, always a sign of mastery of surface and space. Informed by the open space, the figure becomes peculiarly full-bodied, even as its outline transcends its flesh. In other drawings, for example, Erika, the figure is subtly shadowed, as though drawn in relief, giving it a density of presence that sets it apart from the paper, as though it had the power to levitate in pure space -- an ascension of the virgin, as it were. Surface tension is also crucial to the emotional effectiveness of the late expressionist nudes, the blending of roughness and smoothness in their skins awakening us to the plasticity of their bodies.
Graham’s identity as an artist is at stake in the late nudes -- it invariably becomes an issue as the artist ages and self-doubt arises, especially if the gatekeepers of the art world doubt one’s creativity because one’s art is not trendy and "advanced," at least according to their thinking -- not the identity of this or that nude. The female nude is no longer a glorious end in herself but the occasion for a final explosion of sculptural practice. Her body is no longer a sublime whole but an aggregation of amorphous masses -- a bizarre material to be shaped with all the creative license that Graham can muster. Graham’s late expressionistic nude is as sturdy and fit as his earlier classical nude, but her body seems less carefully observed, its details often blurring into her flesh, giving her a certain capricious presence. When she balances on her head, however supported by her hands, she loses classical propriety and dignity, becoming more absurd than beautiful, however beautiful she remains, if beauty involves balance.
There is something reckless and mad about the late expressionistic nudes; they are no longer self-possessed but self-dramatizing. Some of them have a Bellmer-like bizarreness, verging on the grotesque, and all of them seem blindly impulsive—possessed by uncensored instincts, and so no longer in control of their bodies. Graham has come a long creative way from the monumental Olympic Torso I (1984), an emblem of female omnipotence. His late expressionistic nudes are fallen creatures, as it were, for they have succumbed to narcissistic self-absorption, fueled by instinctive energy, making them more peculiarly forbidding and dangerous than the earlier heroines of the noble body. One keeps a worshipful distance from the upright, aloof, self-conscious nudes, but one keeps an anxious distance from the wildly expressive bodies of the fallen nudes -- nudes who have fallen from the emotional heights into the unconscious depths, where they have no individual identity, being all body and no self. Her expressionistic body now has no secrets, while her classical body had a secret self, which is why it could not be touched and violated by the male hand, in contrast to the expressionistic body, which is manhandled into compliance with the male will to power over woman.
All one has to do is compare Graham’s Louis and Ellington monuments to his Source Figure -- another public monument, radically different in kind -- to get the point. Symbolizing the water of life, the Source Figure stands alone in the center of the fountain, high on a pedestal exquisitely ornamented with crawling life that has emerged from the water. It quietly recedes into itself rather than vigorously projects into space, as the Louis and Ellington monuments do. The nude’s cupped hands are provocative and engaging: the water of life ceremonially pours from them, and the cup shape is analogous to the female genital just below the hands. It is another portal of the origin of life, as Graham’s Spanish title, Figura de Origen, makes clear; it can be read as an allusion to Courbet’s The Origin of the World. The huge gesturing claws of the (male?) crabs at the base of the fountain ironically and aggressively echo the cup shape. But however much Graham’s "wet," "original" fountain figure seems to challenge the "dry," "unoriginal" buildings that surround it, as noted, it in fact hardly stands up to them, and barely impacts the urban passerby as much they do. The fountain figure may be a magical breath of fresh emotional air in the glamorously stale world of downtown Los Angeles, but to the passerby it is probably more an object of curiosity -- perhaps charged with transient sexual meaning, by reason of its nudity -- rather than permanently charged with sacred meaning.
In contrast, the Louis and Ellington figures belong to their surroundings. Louis clearly belongs in Detroit, and Ellington clearly belongs in Harlem. It is not clear that the fountain figure belongs in Los Angeles; it could be placed in any urban desert and would have the same limited edifying effect. The Louis and Ellington figures epitomize their environment, which is why they are profoundly edifying. Louis’s fist and muscular arm symbolize his fame and glory and black power. His powerful punch made him a champion -- a giant among men. He was unbeatable, and his monument is hard to beat for emotional and cognitive impact. Graham suspends the fist and arm in an open pyramid -- a symbol of immortality -- much the way the pharaohs were preserved forever in pyramids. The pyramid is at once a tomb and a temple. The fist and arm are metonymic devices conveying the greatness and gracefulness of Louis’s powerful body as a whole. They are true to life and classically beautiful -- as lifelike and beautiful as a Roman sculpture of a powerful emperor or Hercules. They epitomize masculine beauty and strength -- the beauty of strength, the strength contained by beauty -- like Graham’s Olympian Torso II. Monumentalization is not simply a matter of making gigantic sculptures, but of refining reality until it seems inevitable. Louis’s power was god-given, which is why he has become a god in death. Graham’s sculpture deifies him, the way Roman sculptors deified emperors -- even while they were alive. There is indeed Roman character and strength in Graham’s allegorical fist.
The confident strength of the upright Ellington and his piano, the instrument of his creativity -- its lid is open, as though he was ready to sit down at it and play some new composition, or else standing in acknowledgement of the applause after his performance -- also convey his god-like presence and permanent greatness. Mounted like a victorious hero on a platform supported by the sturdy caryatids that are Graham’s typical subject matter -- the structure alludes to the Erechtheum on the Acropolis in Athens, indicating Graham’s awareness of classical tradition -- Ellington, like Louis, is a giant among men and artists. Graham’s memorial monuments -- a kind of architectural sculpture, and alternative to modernism’s geometrically pure architecture and constructivist abstract sculpture (however abstractly expressive the fragments and geometrical the pedestals) -- make it clear that Louis and Ellington are mythical figures in the pantheon of the American collective consciousness, not only in black cultural consciousness.
To reiterate: Louis and Ellington deserve to have their statues in the forum of American culture, just as the statues of the emperor gods had a commanding place in the Roman forum, commanding respect and blessing American society from the heights, just as Graham’s Virgin Mary -- a Christian goddess in contrast to the pagan goddesses Graham usually represents -- does from the heights of the new Los Angeles Cathedral.
Louis and Ellington serve as models for black youth, and above all for future artists, just as Graham’s Virgin Mary serves as an enduring model of female modesty and tranquil beauty -- beauty more than skin deep, the soul’s untainted beauty. I regard her glorious, natural, pure presence as a critique of the garishly artificial whoreish beauty of the mass produced Hollywood sex goddesses of the more popular and profane Los Angeles. Graham’s compassionate Virgin Mary reminds us that art can still be full of grace and a saving grace -- that faith, hope, and charity can still exist in a harsh world that seems beyond redemption, like the Pop culture that infests it.
DONALD KUSPIT is distinguished professor of art history and philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook and A.D. White professor at large at Cornell University.
Notes
(1) Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1993), 83
(2) Quoted in Graham W. J. Beal, "Noli Me Tangere," Robert Graham: Statues (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1981; exhibition catalogue), 24
(3) Augustin Arteaga, "Robert Graham: Sculptor," Robert Graham (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1997; exhibition catalogue), 24
(4) Albert E. Elsen, The Sculpture of Henri Matisse (New York: Abrams, 1972), 15
(5) Henri Matisse, "Notes of a Painter" (1908), Matisse on Art, ed. Jack D. Flam (New York: Dutton, 1978), 36
(6) Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1984; 4th ed.), 7 notes that Graves’s allegorical sculpture of "’Portlandia,’ the woman used to personify the civic virtues and trade of the citizens, in the nineteenth century" -- "he transformed this classical maiden into a dynamic athlete, flying over the front door of the public entrance" (like Graham’s Virgin Mary) -- disturbed the "Modernists," who "demanded that she be banished." But the public loved her, and she was installed on "the bland, technocratic façade" of the building. Like Portlandia, Graham’s nudes are publicly appealing, however personally forbidding, yet charged with expressive meaning and unconscious power, and self-consciously traditional. Graham wants to make an art that is public and symbolic, and at the same emotionally intimate and intense.
(7) Renzo Piano interviewed by Peter Aspden, Financial Times, July 8-9, 2006, W3
(8) Beal, 28
(9) Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 28-29 writes: "The real problem of modernity is the problem of belief. To use an unfashionable term, it is a spiritual crisis, since the new anchorages have proved illusory and the old ones have become submerged." Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Knopf, 1951), 170-71 adds: "in an age in which disbelief is so profoundly prevalent, or, if not disbelief indifference to questions of belief. . . the arts in general, are, in their measure, a compensation for what has been lost."
(10) Quoted in Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 552
(11) Barnett Newman, Selected Writings and Interviews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 67
(12) Étienne Delécluze, "The Salon of 1850-51," quoted in Elizabeth Gilmore Holt, ed., The Art of All Nations 1850-73: The Emerging Role of Exhibitions and Critics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 12
(13) Charles Baudelaire, "The Salon of 1846," The Mirror of Art, ed. Jonathan Mayne (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956), 127
(14) George Heard Hamilton, Painting and Sculpture in Europe 1880-1940 (Baltimore: Penguin, 1967), 95-96
(15) Ibid., 97
(16) Quoted in ibid., 96
(17) Ibid.
(18) Ibid.
(19) Ibid., 36
(20) T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 212
(21) Fritz Novotny, Painting and Sculpture in Europe 1780-1880 (Baltimore: Penguin, 1960), 210
(22) T. E. Hulme, "Mana Aboda," Speculations (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954), 266
(23) Quoted in Beal, 12
(24) Novotny, 211
(24) Arteaga, 21
