I'm reading "Maggi Hambling: 'I was put forward to paint the Queen Mother but the word came back saying I was a bit risky'/As a painter and sculptor, she’s an art-world legend – but as our intrepid interviewer discovers, Maggi Hambling's private life is every bit as colourful as her work" (The Independent).
That's from 2010. I got there from Wikipedia, where I went because Hambling — whom I'd never heard of — is trending on Twitter this morning because....
"People Are Furious Over This New Statue of Pioneering Feminist Mary Wollstonecraft in London/The internet wishes she were a bit less nude" (ArtNetNew).
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Was Hambling's tribute to Oscar Wilde more respectful? He's rising out of a tomb.Genuine question: Why present Mary Wollstonecraft as naked?
— Aunty Malorie Blackman (@malorieblackman) November 10, 2020
I’ve seen many statues of male writers, rights activists and philosophers and I can’t remember any of them being bare-assed. https://t.co/CNUmBgzldD
Wollstonecraft is rising out of a wave. Hambling seems to like the human figure coming up out of something. Something awkward. I mean... I just don't think the sculptures are very well done, quite aside from the conception and whether it properly honors the famous person. Does the Oscar Wilde look like Oscar Wilde?
As for Mary Wollstonecraft — do you have a picture in your head of how she looked? I did not. I needed to look it up...
I'm not British. I'm not caught up in the worship of Maggi Hambling. I take it there's some kind of adulation of her that has them giving her money for things that don't seem to be very good at all.
But isn't that the way of public sculpture in the last 50 years? Money is spent and eyesores are installed.
But if there's nakedness, that will get the most airplay, and the people talking about it will seem like rubes and prudes.
She likes jokes....
Meet Rodin's nude Balzac. pic.twitter.com/q5ALwQy5fZ
— Jon Hutson (@JonHutson) November 10, 2020
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55 comments:
There’s the nude bronze of Balzac by Rodin. And yes, you can see his balzac.
JSM
If you ever spent any time on any city's arts council, you understand everything. When all the deciders get together at their conferences, Hambling was what they were talking about. Arts councils love controversy. It's good publicity. Just spell all the names correctly.
"What a coup!"
That said, I knew nothing of the artist and her work, but I know a lot about Benjamin Britten and I very much like the scallop Hambling installed in his memory on his beach. I look at it and hear the interludes from Peter Grimes.
If you're going to do naked Mary Shelley sculptures and you're (to be polite) not really good at faces, you should put eyeballs instead of nipples on the breasts so we know who it's supposed to be.
Although in the Ken Russell movie "Gothic," it's her sister Claire who has the eyeballs on the breasts. It's one of those things people of good will can still disagree about.
The naked female form is, of course, a popular artistic subject, and for good reason. But usually the form is the subject of the art. When the subject is a particular person, the nudity distracts.
Hambling's out on the Wollstonecraft statue is that she wasn't trying to DEPICT Wollstonecraft--she was expressing the SPIRIT of Wollstonecraft. The swirly bits are supposed to be other women and the spirit vindicating the rights of them is coalescing and emerging.
I might have just described that more clearly but perhaps erroneously than she did because I couldn't quite figure out from her description if the whole image is the spirit of Wollstonecraft or just the top bit. Since Wollstonecraft is a feminist foremother, would it make more sense if she is the swirly bit? I think it's conceptually muddy, but perhaps I haven't read the right text. That said, should anyone have to read a long verbal description to understand a visual piece of public art?.
I still think the statue is terrible: The plinth is disproportionate and visually jarring. The figure at the top is too small to be monumental. And then there's the strange modeling which makes it look, to me, like a female Frankenstein monster--makes me wonder if Hambling confused mother and daughter a bit.
A bit of an aside: as recognizable statues of specific figures come under attack, I wonder, if public sculpture continues at all, we'll see more abstracted pieces to stuff it'll be hard to take specific exception to.
The real woman wasn't overweight but she had soft fat you'd expect from someone who wasn't training to be an athlete or a model. The statue looks underfed.
This is because, the sculptor isn't enough of a visionary to escape his own culture. He gives us a statue that he thinks transcends women as objects of their time. Her defiant pose isn't sexy, but bold in the face of her naked vulnerability...blah, but the artist embraces modern notions of ideal feminism in the process.
The work like most banal art is more a selftribute to the artist than the subject.
Showing her in period clothing might make her look like a relic from the "racist" colonizing past. We must strip her of all that she was and honor her for what we want her to be - that's what goes for feminism.
Everyone must bow to the hedonists. Women, it turns out, really are nothing but fruitless waify bodies, and stern faces says this art.
Except, even in this case, the artist can't even imagine the woman in a way where she performed the greatest of all feats of nature -- creating life in the womb or bringing it into existence. A true feminist -- creating life that she can pass on to change the world down through all posterity.
It shows the loathing and lack of imagination that our sculptures don't depict a powerful women at the height of their sexual power - bringing a life into the world, but instead can only imagine the literally fruitless depictions of that sexual being.
Want to make a bold statement. Show that powerful women giving birth in your statue. Show us the fear, love, the pain, the tearing and bleeding, the exhaustion, the excruciation, the misery, the urgency, the dread and the dawning of joy that all accompany child birth.
Our "artists" are blind to this task. Our self-congratulatory culture still doesn't know how to revere women and their heroic deeds.
If a female is not nude, nobody much is interested, imagewise.
Dressed, women are indistinguishable, supported by the female demand for the beauty products industry.
Didn't you give up five years ago? ...but last year... 'thought:..It's my birthday. I'll smoke.'
And kept on smoking.
If you give up drugs, you have to give up drugs; EVERY DAY
If you resume drugs, you only have to resume Once; Then you are back smoking (EVERY DAY)
Lots of people ask me; "Why don't you Ever drink?" and i say; "Because i stopped"
and THEY say; "But why can't you drink a toast to my wedding??!"
and I say; because THEN, i would be drinking
[this message brought to you by the Alcohol and Tobacco are DRUGS Corpotation ]
As nearly as I can tell she's barbie-nude but with pubic hair. It's hard to sculpt hair. The feminist idea is trying to match the honesty of the male nude in women, since the lady is a feminist icon, producing a weird mons veneris effect. "Oh I see, that's supposed to be hair."
Probably the feminist complaint is penis envy.
rhhardin incorectly said...
Dressed, women are indistinguishable, supported by the female demand for the beauty products industry
nope. It works like this
Men are Visual, their brains process images
Women are Verbal, their brains process words
This is why Men Lie... And why women use beauty products
RH Hardin is making a lot of sense today.
What greater creative artistic expression is there than bearing a lot of children and having a large family? Such an expression is not only projected forward in time but it grows and adapts to always stay relevant. C365 is right on this one.
Couldn’t whoever photographed Oscar not included the five trash bins? Yeeesh.
Fascinating. Is c365 a bot?
Pretty sure I've never asked this question in my life, but what is with the proportions of that vulva? The statue is supposedly a representation of the feminine spirit but looks very androgynous to me. In fact, the first thing it reminded me of was Donatello's David.
"People Are Furious Over...", "The internet wishes..." Now there's a headline and subheading that really capture the zeitgeist. Turns out "people" and "the internet" are a handful of tweets. How much of reporting today is just scrolling through Twitter feeds?
The Percy Bysshe Shelley Memorial at University College, Oxford, is a nude, and unlike the statue of his mother in law, is a beautiful and moving work of art.
c365 said This is because, the sculptor isn't enough of a visionary to escape his own culture.
Or the sculptor is a female, which is the case here. A lesbionic female on top of it. I always thought I would have a lot in common with a lesbionic female, sharing the same interests and all. But that's another story.
As for the statue, I like it. People aren't paying enough attention to the 80% below the naked lady. I can see a human head, a penis, a vulva--and that's from a quick look at a poor resolution photo from a single angle. Just think what you can see if you spend a little time with her.
Isn't The Thinker naked? Is it different because this is a real person and not an abstract person?
"Dressed, women are indistinguishable, supported by the female demand for the beauty products industry."
-- This is the most ridiculous thing I'll hear all day. Let's not pretend we can't tell the difference between, say, Serena Williams and Emma Watson.
There’s the nude bronze of Balzac by Rodin. And yes, you can see his balzac.
Probably it's the way the statue is lit, but it looks like that guy has one monster balzac between his legs.
"Dressed, women are indistinguishable, supported by the female demand for the beauty products industry."
Every art history lecture who ever said "Pay careful attention to the drapery on this figure" is rolling over in the grave.
She turned down a chance to paint the Iron Lady? Pfft. What great artist wouldn't jump at that challenge?
The depiction of a pelvic prolapse is a nice touch, especially to those survivors whose voices remain unheard.
One nasty comment on Mary would be that she became famous partly because of her husband. This could easily be forgotten today because virtually no one, I believe, reads Shelley the poet, but Hollywood and popular culture keep Frankenstein's monster on everyone's mind. In my work on Jonathan Swift, who may have originated science fiction with the Flying Island (related to the actual science of his day), I have encountered the claim that MWS deserves this distinction; she had read some medical research about using electricity to re-animate dead flesh. In the actual novel, by the way, the monster eventually calms down and is reasonably happy, but he demands the doctor make him a girlfriend/wife. The doctor tries, but this time the experiment is a failure. Monster goes mad, gets very violent, so in a way the warnings about modern science come true. Mel Brooks gave us a happy ending, with operatic singing by the great Madeline Kahn.
Feminists have used seine-nets or maybe sieves to find neglected or under-appreciated females in all fields of human endeavour. MWS's name will certainly come up. But again, she is somehow famous for being a woman--the fact of her female body is somehow relevant.
In Regina, Saskatchewan (Canada) there was a statue for some years of Louis Riel, famous for leading two rebellions, at different times, against the government of Canada. Who says Canadians are wimps? In the statue he wore a coat, but under the coat it was possible to detect fairly accurate genitalia. Somebody--I'm afraid it was probably young men, egging each other on--spray painted the gear gold. Eventually the statue was replaced--another victory for the fucking do-gooders.
Perhaps that is a merkin over the muff. Maggi looks like Oscar Wilde @75yo... Or maybe Quinton Crisp.
Professional art is a tough gig. It's nearly impossible to actually make it and when you do the public loves taking a giant shit on you.
https://www.amazon.com/Mary-Shelley-Elle-Fanning/dp/B07DD77Q5X
We watched this movie about Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly on Amazon prime. I say we my girls liked it I walked out about a third of the way into it and then came back for the end when they were all dead. Spoiler alert
Conclusion: Sculptors in solid media shouldn't try to model female pubic hair...
(...you know you were thinking it...)
The nude figure has all the subtlety of an injection mold. Although it looks like the sculptor invented a new sexual organ, and I'm interested in how it operates.
They did smoke a lot of opium in that era
Is she wearing a codpiece, or what?
Would we really see people's individuality if they were naked? I doubt it. We'd see all their imperfections but all those body parts would tend to blur together. Seeing the clothes people wear gives us an insight into their personalities. And it can help us to tell them apart. It seems like a good question for semiologists (who may not have much else to do).
AA, you might be interested in this twitter thread:
https://twitter.com/k_faulkner/status/1326466091745423360
"When I went to see the Mary Wollstonecraft statue yesterday, two members of the committee who chose it were also there. They were lovely and well meaning. You could see on their faces that they knew it looked awful, and that a terrible mistake had been made. When I asked why...they voted for this design over the other, they looked embarrassed and said that said that it was felt the other statue - which showed Mary Wollstonecraft clothed, with a stack of books, was too ‘prosaic.’ They also thought people would criticise them for choosing the male ...sculptor over the female. So in other words, out of an intellectually muddled notion of equality, the committee chose the woman sculptor at all costs - regardless of the merits of the design - and prioritised perceived artistic edginess over any of the following..."
This could easily be forgotten today because virtually no one, I believe, reads Shelley the poet
11/11/20, 7:27 AM
I like Shelley, but I think he lives on in popular culture through references more than through people reading his poems.
"Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!" (First line of "Ode to a Skylark" that gave Noel Coward the title to his play "Blithe Spirit".) Also, Alex ("A Clockwork Orange" mentions that one of his droogs, Dim, has a book by PeeBee Shelley. I'm sure there are more, but I'm not awake enough yet to think of any.
The Percy Bysshe Shelley Memorial at University College, Oxford, is a nude, and unlike the statue of his mother in law, is a beautiful and moving work of art.
11/11/20, 6:46 AM
Which mother-in-law? The Mary people are complaining about was one of his wives.
One nasty comment on Mary would be that she became famous partly because of her husband.
The statue is of Mary Shelley's mother.
I got a yuge balzac of anti-Trump tweets following the final twitter link.
Ignore this line in my previous post. Which mother-in-law? The Mary people are complaining about was one of his wives.
I'm starting to wake up now. The statue is of Mary Wollenstonecraft not Mary Wollenstonecraft Shelley. I know the mother was an author, but not one of the same fame as her daughter, so I assumed (incorrectly), in my half-awake state, that any sculpture would be of the daughter.
As I was reading the article my first thought was of Rodin’s statue of Balzac, which you already show. My second thought was about an episode in Richard Feynman’s autobiography. Feynman had developed an interest in painting, and apparently became quite good at it. One painting he exhibited showed a young, nude woman, lit from below, that he titled “Marie Curie Discovering Radium.” His idea, or so he claimed, was to show Madame Curie’s femininity, that she was a beautiful woman at the same time that she was a great scientist (two Nobels, in two different fields of science).
The punch line was that someone looking at the painting wanted to know how Feynman convinced Madame Curie to pose for him.
Scrolling down to the next article on the page, I saw the story about the nude Medusa with the head of Perseus in New York. If you're going to do a nude female statue, go big or go home! And Medusa's a seven-footer.
I would suggest that Percey Bysshe Shelley's poem "Ozymandias" is his most widely read and quoted. End lines (/spoiler warning!)
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
The statue (of Rameses II) that inspired it was not naked, however. P
These two sculptures are rubbish.
The sculptire of th he nude woman is for, not of, good old Mary.
The nude bronze of Balzac by Rodin was a study piece for the final statue, where Balzac is covered by a very large cape. Make of this what you will. I have a charming photo of my son at age 4 facing one of the half life sized nudes, arms crossed and head held haughtily in imitation of the writer.
http://www.musee-rodin.fr/en/collections/sculptures/monument-balzac
I’ve seen many statues of male writers, rights activists and philosophers and I can’t remember any of them being bare-assed.
Then you’re gonna shit when you see this.
“This is likely one of the final nude studies for the figure beneath the drapery in the completed Balzac monument. Instead of an aging, dissipated body, which the commission had criticized, Rodin turned to a more athletic and muscular figure. That he sought to portray a very specific conception of genius is evident in his decision to make the author’s right hand grip his erect penis, explicitly equating male sexual virility with artistic creativity. Balzac surely would have agreed: his wife recalled a letter in which he had once explained that he prepared himself to write his novels by ‘masturbating his brain.’”
She takes the titillation out of tits. Tits without titillation are like an apple pie without cinnamon.....Anyway, you can look at it and know it has something to do with women so maybe it's not a complete loss. Her first impulse was probably to sculpt something like a flower sprouting out of a brick wall..... I endorse the concept of statues of naked women, but I guess in this era it's too much to ask that they be sexy....I like Bernini's statue of St. Theresa. It shows the power of prayer. I'd like to see Wollstonecraft depicted with that kind of expressiveness. A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Anyway it was crafted in stone so the sculptor didn't betray that part of her identity.
I once informed an antique store owner that he had a 1798 edition of Mary Wollstonecraft's "Rights of Man" woefully under priced. He auctioned it for $10,000 and was very nice to me until he sold his store some years later.
The Wollstonecraft sculpture reminds me of the blobs I used to get when I dribbled molten lead into a bucket of water back in my "just to see what would happen" days. The generic nude emerging from the top looks like an afterthought in the context of the whole thing, and a hood ornament when examined more closely.
I think we should thank our lucky stars that Hambling's Oscar Wilde has not emerged from the coffin further than he has. We might have to contemplate his syphilitic, decomposing schlongoola, and that would not be pleasant.
Another no-talent public lesbian. How transgressive.
I just want to state for the record that I'm a pro-woman, pro-tits feminist.
I'd prefer a statue showing Mary Shelley in a threeway with Percy Shelley and sister Claire Clairmont, as reportedly happened. Or maybe Nary in a DP with Percy and Lord Byron. I wouldn't be surprised if that happened. They were wild and crazy kids.
Some have said the female figure is never boring.
Maybe that's the thing.'
But I'm with EP.
More exposed tits for expression of ___.
Femen had a good thing goin'.
I suspect she might have had some initial contact with the folks who wanted a statue of Margaret Thatcher. But, as often happens, they chose someone else, perhaps someone with sculpting talent. But now, 35 years later, none of that committee are still alive, so she can say she turned them down, because no one left of Boris Johnson has anything nice to say about the baronness.
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