Painting the Nude
Painting the Nude

Summary/Abstract: For Hungarian modernist painters, the nude was a genre where they felt particularly free to experiment. Although incomparably more drawings and paintings of female nudes were produced in Vienna around 1900, this was mainly due to the Secession’s leading master, Gustav Klimt, for whom sketching a female nude served as a “five-finger exercise” to fix movements and poses. His followers created a school of nude depiction, and compositions with nudes were something that both Kokoschka and Schiele frequently produced. Nevertheless, for these Expressionist artists, the most important function of the female nude was to project their own fears and their hatred or love for the “Female” as such. In Hungarian painting on the other hand, we do not find anyone at the turn of the century for whom depictions of the female body served as a personal emotional diary. Painting the nude was a remarkably restrained and disciplined genre with technical issues at the centre of attention, rather than the emotional ups and downs of the soul. The one or two major pieces painted by Hungarians were symbolically important in the context of their oeuvre as a whole, but they never became their main preoccupation. Moreover, even within the same style and within the same year, we can find widely different approaches. [...] A modell. Női akt a 19. századi magyar mũvészetben (The Model. Female Nude Imagery in 19th-century Hungarian Art) Exhibition at the Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest. 14 October, 2004–6 February, 2005. Catalogue. Budapest, Hungarian National Gallery, 2004, 487 pp.

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