***EDIT – part of the SYSTEMICS II book
[ some hints for modern artist, as well as deep but childlike males and females ]
When possibly one of the greatest painters of the female nude, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, had to lend his ear to the accusation of not being modern enough, not enough of a ‘revolutionary’ like ‘everyone else’ at the time, he replied, in order to justify his love for classicism and renaissance art, that, well, “the female form looks still the same like it used to”. What he sarcastically implied with that confident quote was that if that weren’t the case anymore, he wouldn’t actually bother painting. He would’ve probably just carried on playing the second violin in his local orchestra to pay the rent and get on with his life (that’s apparently what he really did at one stage). For me, it’s very interesting to look at the progression that went on, from the days he devoted to the exposition of the female form in an attempt to capture some of her divine mystery and beauty, to how the genre finally evolved to be suitable for the complexities of the world today.
Well – there came of course the impressionists, carried away under the steamy embraces of teen-nymph and wannabe-artist Suzanne Valadon and as far as I know there wasn’t a single one among the Montmatre crew – Renoir, Degas, Manet, Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec, you name it – who hadn’t succumbed to her seductive charms. All of them duly dedicated many of their female ‘impressions’ to her. The Valadon was, attaining fame as the most notorious muse in art history, perhaps the key to be officially ending the artistic discipline of nudes for the mainstream, as the mainstream was from now on required (as a preparation for the end-of-days) to be flooded with the self-ingratiating outbursts of nitpicking and mediocrity, protected under the puffed-up, gay hat of pseudo-sophistication, that was to become today’s modern art.