Thursday, November 2, 2017

Observing the Nude

At the press view of the New English Art Club, Egyptian Hall. About 10 people, half women, in the one gallery sparsely hung with eccentric landscapes imitative of early Italian and Dutch work, a few soft hazy portraits, a few intelligent originalities, a few sterile meaningless absurdities, and one striking, shouting, insistent, dominant nude by Wilson Steer. In the centre of the gallery a table with sandwiches, wines and cigarettes, which everybody carefully avoided in spite of whispered invitations from a middle-aged male attendant.
   Seated in front of the nude - a slim woman of 30, with full and red cheeks sitting up in a very large bed – were a man and a woman talking In loud Kensington tones which outraged the prim silence of the gallery. After a long time he joined in the conversation of the other two, and they began even more loudly to discuss the nude, dispraising it in a few light easy sentences of condemnation. It certainly was not a masterpiece with its hard, laboured, unreal flesh-painting, but the manner of this condemnation almost made me like it.

   When I next turned round the art critic had withdrawn and the other man was elaborately raising his silk hat from his grey head to the departing woman. She left him to talk to another woman in a corner and then stood alone staring around the gallery. She was a tall, well-developed woman of 34 or less, with the face and bearing of a Sunday-school teacher; her thick mouth worked in that calculating contemplative way that I have noticed in Sunday-school teachers with a passion for gossip at sewing meetings. To see her in the street no-one would have dreamt that she was a professional art critic, capable of discussing – however foolishly – an uncompromising nudity with her male acquaintance for half an hour at a time.
                                                                           Journals of Arnold Bennett - Friday, November 13th 

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