From Private Delectation to Public Display: The Prado’s Once Hidden Nudes Flaunted at the Clark

The seemingly robust attendance (figures not yet available) at the Clark Art Institute’s current summer extravaganza—Splendor, Myth and Vision: Nudes from the Prado (to Oct. 10)—runs counter to Robin Pogrebin‘s assertion in the NY Times on Monday that “many experts are questioning” whether old masters “can stay relevant at auction houses, galleries and museums.” That analysis seems to me more relevant to art-market preoccupations than to museum visitors’ predilections.

The Clark’s ability to host this stimulating (pun intended) exhibition of monumental works is a direct consequence of its 2014 expansion.

“Paintings like these couldn’t have fit in our building before we built these galleries,” Kathleen Morris, the Clark’s director of collections and exhibitions, and its curator of decorative arts, told me after letting me tag long with a group of museum members on her tour through the 28-work installation.

Only four of the works from the Prado, arrayed in the special exhibition galleries designed by Tadao Ando, the expansion’s architect, had been previously seen in he U.S.

When it came to the show’s catalogue sales, Robin’s pessimistic take on the contemporary appeal of old masters did have some resonance: The catalogue’s price was already slashed when I visited on Aug. 16, eight weeks before the show’s close.

You can’t read the red “SALE” sticker in my photo, but the book was a bargain at $35:

At the heart of this show is the paradox described in the catalogue’s introduction:

These [Spanish] sovereigns and their close-knit circles commissioned some of the most erotically charged works produced during the Renaissance and Baroque eras, yet they also instituted the Inquisition, which expressly forbade the possession of such “lascivious” works of art. How did it come to be that the court in Madrid—a stronghold of Catholicism, known for its staunch efforts to regulate morality during the Counter-Reformation and Inquisition—flourished as a leading center for the collecting of sensual painting?

The answer, as described by Morris during the members’ tour, reeks of self-serving hypocrisy:

There was the idea that the kings and the extremely educated men had the intellectual [?!?] apparatus to understand these paintings on a different level, so that they were immune in some ways from this danger. The weaker people—women, uneducated people—had to be protected from exposure to paintings such as these.

The “protection” of women from images of nude women took the form of salas reservadas—private spaces where the king and others deemed worthy could ogle sensuous depictions of bare bodies “on a different level.” During its first years, between 1827 and 1838, the Prado itself had a sala reservada for paintings of nudes from the royal collections, housed “in a secluded section of its ground floor,” according to the catalogue.

The picture in the Clark’s show that seems to be getting the most press is arguably its most prurient:

None of the reviews I’ve read seem to have found this orgy of voyeurism—for both the distracted keyboardist and the complicit viewer—as thoroughly hilarious as I did. It’s not just that the organist can’t take his eyes off Venus’ crotch. (Does the pun on “organ” work in Spanish?) It’s that everything in this wacky tableau conspires to suggest that he’s about to fall off his bench and into her lap—the impossibly precarious tilt of his carriage; the extended leg of the antlered stag in the outdoor scene that appears to be nudging his left shoulder towards her; the unconvincingly oblivious Venus’ left foot making playful contact with the musician’s derriere.

Difficult to make out in the above image is the phallic angle of the sword hilt behind the organist’s back. The gargoyle above the keyboard takes it all in, with a pained look, directed at the viewer, that seems to say, “Can you believe this?”

One of my two favorite paintings in the show involves a complicated confrontation that requires a long stint of close looking to decipher:

If you don’t take time to sort out who’s who in this scrum (the “good guys” on the left; the would-be abductors on the right), it’s easy to be confused about what’s going on, as Jason Farago seemed to be in his NY Times review. He saw the drama on the right side of the picture as an “acrobatic rendering of a centaur carrying off a tumbling, bare-breasted horsewoman.”

Horsewoman?!? The horse’s lustrous hindquarters are the rear end of the centaur, who is trying to carry off the fair maiden from her wedding feast. In Ovid‘s story, the good guys (led by Theseus, the central figure, above) ultimately win. That hero’s posture in this picture seems to echo the butt-thrust of his half-equine adversary.

In Jason’s defense, the labels don’t do a great job of elucidating what’s going on in some of these pictures.

Here, for example, is the label text for “Hippodamia”:

This violent scene of abduction formed part of the large series of mythological paintings that Philip IV commissioned from Rubens for the Torre de la Parada. The strong horizontal composition reflects Rubens’s study of classical friezes and contributes to the scene’s dramatic energy and sense of rapid movement. Rubens executed small oil sketches for each of these scenes in Antwerp before the final compositions were painted and sent to Madrid.

Because of the extent of work entailed in the commission and the artist’s ill health, many of the final paintings were done by studio assistants, based on the small sketches. This work is one of the rare canvases in the cycle by Rubens’s own hand.

Only by reading the catalogue entry does one learn that Hippodamia’s rescuer is none other than “the Athenian hero Theseus….An older woman who attempts to restrain the bride falls to the ground, …while another man in the left rear leads two other young women away to indoor safety. Theseus’ two strong, young friends leap boldly to his assistance, toppling wine and fruit from the table of the wedding feast.”

During Kathy’s tour, I sometimes found myself missing the late, great Walter Liedtke, curator of Dutch and Flemish painting at the Metropolitan Museum, who never saw a veiled sexual innuendo that he didn’t delight in unpacking. The round fruit in the lower left corner of the Rubens, with their nipple-like protrusions, seemed to evoke bare breasts. The fluid spilling from the spout at the far left suggested… (I’ll leave that to your fervid imagination).

Farago wrote in the Times that “the sexiest pictures…were reserved for the kings’ private chambers.” But that’s not entirely true. “Hippodamia,” for example, was not among those consigned to a sala reservada. Neither was this one, which Morris said she regarded as “the greatest painting in the show,” in part because of how the figure at the left implicates the viewer:

In the peculiar moral calculus of Spanish monarchs, biblical subjects (as in the painting above) or pictures deemed to impart lessons on how to be a great ruler (like Theseus, defender of the innocent, in “Hippodamia”) could be publicly displayed, no matter how erotic.

My other favorite work in the show was, to me, the most emotionally powerful. With the quiet intensity of a single figure and the dramatic Caravaggesque chiaroscuro, this is the antithesis of the Rubens:

Poor Saint Sebastian suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous censorship in the 18th century, when (in the words of the catalogue) “a decision was made to extend the loincloth up his midriff to hide more of his thigh and abdomen. Such acts of direct censorship, though unusual, demonstrate the concern over the eroticism of such religious paintings.” Might the Reni ever be restored to its original state? (Probably not: too risky.)

Part of an exchange arrangement with the Prado that sent to Madrid Williamstown’s choice Renoirs, this show was conceived under the auspices of the Clark’s veteran (now retired) director, Michael Conforti. But its final realization occurred during the interregnum that saw much of the museum’s senior curatorial staff leave for plum positions: Richard Rand to associate director for collections at the Getty Museum; Tom Loughman to the directorship of the Wadsworth Atheneum; David Breslin to chief curator of the Menil Drawing Institute at the Menil Foundation. Morris has held down the fort, with the help of a recently hired interim curator of paintings and sculpture, Laura Yeager-Crasselt.

Olivier Meslay, previously senior curator of European and American art at the Dallas Museum (who, before that, held a series of curatorial positions at the Louvre), assumed the Clark’s directorship just a few days after my visit.

“I’ve known him for a long time,” Morris said of the new director, who was once a Clark research fellow. “I don’t know where his priorities are going to lie. But I am really looking forward to finding out!”