Michael Turner WiTh conTribuTions froM alasTair J.l. blanshard ana carden-coyne and WilliaM K. ZeWadsKi 1 2 conTenTs foreWord david ellis 4 The TeMple of The body: herberT lisT in Greece Michael Turner 6 naKedness WiThouT nauGhTiness: a brief hisTory of The classical nude alasTair J.l. blanshard 14 inTiMaTe encounTers WiTh The classical body: social provocaTions in phoToGraphy ana carden-coyne 22 caTaloGue Michael Turner 31 The classical alibi, or hoW nudiTy in phoToGraphy found cover in The classics WilliaM K. ZeWadsKi 130 indeX of phoToGraphers 140 acKnoWledGeMenTs Special thanks are due to the following for helping to make this exhibition and accompanying catalogue possible: Seth Pevnik, Devon Dargan and Todd Smith (Tampa Museum of Art), Jennifer Hardin and Louise Reeves (St Petersburg Museum of Fine Art), William K. Zewadski, Josef Lebovic (Josef Lebovic Gallery), Rex Dupain, Lewis Morley, David Potts, Rowan Conroy and Michael Myers, who all lent works. Alastair J.L. Blanshard, Ana Carden-Coyne and William K. Zewadski who contributed articles to the catalogue. Beverley Chong whose passion for the Nicholson Museum, and subsequent generosity, has contributed to the production of this catalogue, as have the Friends of The Nicholson Museum. The great team that is Sydney University Museums, especially Director, David Ellis, Collections Manager, Maree Clutterbuck, Exhibition Oficer, Luke Parker, Conservator Alayne Alvis and with very special thanks to my assistant, Emma Harrison. Anthony Wells for the catalogue design and Rowan Conroy for project managing image reproduction. Alastair J.L. Blanshard and Diane Turner have corrected the worst of my excesses and lights of fancy, and have been continuing sources of inspiration. Finally and above all I would like to express my admiration for the boundless enthusiasm of William K. Zewadski without whom this exhibition would not have been possible. Michael Turner January 2011 3 foreWord david ellis Photographers have long been fascinated with the naked body, and with the Classical nude of Greece and Rome as an idealization of the naked form. It is an association as long as the history of photography itself. Exposed: Photography & the Classical Nude explores that association and fascination through the eyes of some of the most prominent photographers of the 19th and 20th centuries; names such as Henry Fox Talbot, Eadweard Muybridge, Wilhelm von Gloeden, Leni Riefenstahl, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Chim, Brassai, Robert Doisneau, Herbert List, Max Dupain, Lewis Morley and more. The exhibition continues, and in many ways broadens, the Nicholson Museum’s focus on the Classical Mediterranean worlds. Exposed provides another pathway into understanding these worlds and their inluence on visual culture of the recent past. This exhibition forms part of the 2011 Sydney Festival, of which the University of Sydney is a major partner. This is an important collaboration, connecting the University to the wider community as an active participant in the cultural life of the city. I would like to thank the institutions and private collections who have so generously supported the exhibition through loans: from Florida, USA: William K. Zewadski, Tampa Museum of Art, St. Petersburg Museum of Fine Arts, from Australia: the Josef Lebovic Gallery that provided access to works by Max Dupain, Lewis Morley and David Potts, and Australian photographers Rowan Conroy and Michael Myers. The organisation of loans of this type, many travelling long distances, is not straightforward and I would also like to thank the collection management teams on both continents for enabling the loans to proceed smoothly. Special mention and thanks goes to Mrs Beverley Chong, Friend of the Nicholson Museum, whose generous inancial assistance and enthusiasm for the project made the production of this catalogue possible. Finally my thanks to Michael Turner, senior curator of the Nicholson Museum who conceived the idea for this exhibition, put it together, and wrote the catalogue (with contributions from Alastair Blanshard, Ana Carden-Coyne and William Zewadski). His boundless energy, creativity and enthusiasm are valued and appreciated. Director, Museums and Cultural Engagement, The University of Sydney 4 essays The TeMple of The body: herberT lisT in Greece Michael Turner naKedness WiThouT nauGhTiness: a brief hisTory of The classical nude alasTair J.l. blanshard inTiMaTe encounTers WiTh The classical body: social provocaTions in phoToGraphy ana carden-coyne 5 essay The TeMple of The body: herberT lisT in Greece Michael Turner If I were to choose one image from the Exposed exhibition to sum up the concept of ‘photography and the Classical nude’, it would be Herbert List’s Antikythera I (ig. 1). Photographed in the gardens of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens in the summer of 1937, it shows the back of a marble statue of the god Apollo. The statue had been found nearly forty years earlier at the bottom of the sea in a shipwreck. herberT lisT Herbert List was born in 1903 in Hamburg, where his father was a prosperous coffee importer. In 1923, after two years in Heidelberg learning about the coffee trade and attending lectures at the university on Greek art and literature, List joined the family business. Over the next few years he visited plantations and contacts in Central America, Brazil (where he stayed for six months) and the United States. It was at this time that he began taking photographs. In 1926, wealthy and handsome, List was back in Hamburg, where his Bauhausstyle studio apartment became a meeting place for the beautiful and avant-garde. The English poet, Stephen Spender met him in the summer of 1929 and later went on a walking holiday with him down the Rhine. ‘Herbert was at that time the centre of a group of friends who represented for me all Fig 1. Herbert List, Antikythera I 1937 [Catalogue no. 4] that was freest, most open-minded, most consciously new about the new Germany. They were the Children of the Sun. To them, far more important than politics, business, selfpromotion, was “Life”. “Life” consisted of friendship, free love, the cultivation of their own bodies, nature and the sun.’1 Of his apartment, Spender wrote: ‘Here was a kind of tasteful asceticism, a design for living expressed in the simplest material. Despite the bareness – or perhaps because of this 6 – it suggested naked lesh and easy physical relations between youths who seemed to have stepped out of the Parthenon frieze’.2 Spender is an important source for this period of List’s life. His autobiographical novel, The Temple (written in 1929 but unpublished until 1988), is dedicated to W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and ‘with memories of Herbert List’. In it, the character of Joachim is List, that of Paul, Spender. Joachim shows Paul his photographs. One, of a naked bather, catches Paul’s eye. Taken from below, the Fig 2. George Hoyningen-Huene, Untitled (Horst on a cast of the Parthenon horse) 1931 young man’s sunlit breast and thighs are set [Catalogue no. 24] in a dramatic interplay of light and shadow. ‘Oh, wonderful!’, said Paul, ‘The temple of the body’. ‘Joachim laughed, ‘I like that – the temple. It’s always seemed to me like a pagoda, layer on layer, tier on tier, but I suppose that’s what a pagoda is, a temple!’.3 On his father’s death in 1931, List took over the business, all the while becoming increasingly interested in photography. New technology – a twin-lens relex camera – and artists such as Picasso, Man Ray, Max Ernst and de Chirico inspired him to experiment with contemporary Surrealism. ‘Visual art has always held a very important place in my experience of life,’ List later wrote, ‘at the end of the 1920s I found certain of my ideas realized in Surrealist painting.’4 By the mid 30s, his homosexuality, exuberant life-style, outspokenness, and part-Jewish background were bringing him increasingly to the attention of the ruling National Socialist regime. (In Spender’s The Temple, Joachim [List] claims ‘a Jewish great-aunt in Brazil’.)5 In 1936 he led the country leaving the family business in the hands of his brother. Moving between London and Paris, he now met many of the artists and photographers who had been inspiring him, including George Hoyningen-Huene who tried to persuade him to take up fashion photography. Although Hoyningen-Huene was the one photographer to work in a similar style (ig. 2) – the two travelled together through Greece in 1939 – List’s work can also be compared to contemporaries such as Brassai and Cartier-Bresson. In the spring of 1937, List made his irst trip to Greece, returning again each summer. He was in Athens when war broke out in 1939, staying on to work for the Greek Government after failing to get permission to sail for America. In 1941, prior to the German invasion, the German Embassy ordered him to return to Germany. As a non-Aryan and out of favour with the regime this was a dangerous time, although exhibitions of his work for the occupying forces were held in Athens in 1942 and Thessaloniki in 1943. By the end of the war, he was working as a mapmaker in occupied Norway. 7 lisT in Greece List was captivated by Greece. Most photographers recorded what they saw, either overwhelmed by, or only interested in, the ever-present ruins and their history. Objects, the land and the people were rarely imbued with any metaphysical symbolism, let alone any mythical signiicance. William Woodhouse, for example, who died in 1937, the year List irst visited Greece, and who is represented in the exhibition (Cat. no. 3), left a fascinating historical record of over 2,500 glass negative images of archaeological sites and ruins, of the countryside, and of the Greek people from the 1890s through to the 1930s.6 They are the work of both an archaeologist with an eye for the details of remains and of an anthropologist recording the passing of a way of life. They are not the work of an artist, and yet the composition and fall of light in his Untitled (View of the Acropolis from the Temple of Olympian Zeus), Athens c. 1900 (ig. 3) stands comparison with List’s Column drums, Temple of Olympian Zeus, Athens 1937 (ig. 4), both showing the same fallen column from a different angle. The difference is that Woodhouse was photographing temple ruins and positioning them in relation to the Acropolis; he was looking to record their design, in situ, to share with like-minded archaeologists and students. He is purposely saying ‘Classical Athens’, List, more metaphysically, is saying ‘Greece’ and all that that implies. Woodhouse would have been nonplussed at the suggestion his photographs form an exhibition or a book of art. List on the other hand was composing a still-life image imbued with meaning – exploring the dramatic fall of sunlight on the broken and luted surface of the fallen column. Fig 3. William J. Woodhouse, Untitled (View of the Acropolis from the Temple of Olympian Zeus) c. 1900 Nicholson Museum, The University of Sydney 8 In 1937, List visited the Aegean island of Delos. His most recognised picture from that trip, Archaic phallus is of a damaged, metre high, erect, marble phallus (ig. 5). The phallus, one of several, was erected at the Sanctuary of Dionysos in about 300 BC to celebrate victory in a theatrical performance (of which Dionysos was the god). It stands on a tall marble plinth on the sides of which, in carved relief, are Dionysiac scenes. At the front, under the erection, is a carved phallus bird – a cock whose head and neck are an erect penis. List ignores theses details and instead ills his frame with an angled view of the broken penis. The bright sunlight and the accompanying shadow accentuate the shape of the testicles and of the engorged vein at the base of the broken shaft. Some might ind it erotic; although Roland Bathes’s qualiication Fig 4. Herbert List, Column drums, Temple of Olympian Zeus, Athens 1937 M. Scheler & M. Harder (eds.), Herbert List: The Monograph (2000) p. 129 9 that ‘an erotic photograph does not [make] the genitals its central object’, does rather obviously come to mind, ‘It need not even show them; rather it leads the viewer out beyond the frame’.7 Matthias Herder (I hope) has his tongue irmly in cheek when he suggests that, ‘erotic connotations are at their most conspicuous [in this photograph]’, and that this phallus represents, ‘the symbol of maleness tout court on a pedestal!’.8 List’s was an artistic world, in which he was looking to transform the often broken and mundane into something important and full of meaning, be they column drums, chairs on a beach, or the remains of ancient sculpture – a phallus, a torso, a head (ig. 6). It was a world at once egocentric and nostalgic that Fig 5. Herbert List, Archaic phallus (Sanctuary of Dionysos, Delos) 1937 [Catalogue no. 19] excluded the problems of the real world. In his images of Greece, there is little or no intimation of, or indeed interest in, the social tensions sweeping late 1930s Europe. His pictures of young men are then at the same time both beautiful and poignant. His vision is homoerotic, continuing the tradition of earlier German travellers in the Mediterranean from Winckelmann to von Platen and Thomas Mann, all of whom idealized the concept of youth and beauty – concepts which were shortly, once again, to be brutalised by the outbreak of war. Spender wrote of List’s young men: ‘Living lesh and the sculpted stone are brought together in arrangements which have a kind of dramatic stillness in their settings of landscape and seascape. Often the male nude or semi-nude here seems a key unlocking the sexuality enshrined in stone and the Greek countryside. At the same time the nude igure, under the inluence of the setting of chiseled stone and severe landscape, becomes erotic rather than purely sensual – bridling sensuality with the aesthetic. Sometimes the imagery of the Greek statues seems to invade – petrify almost – the youthful nudes’.9 This idea becomes manifest in List’s Beneath the Poseidon Temple 1937 (ig. 7), where a young man sits in the ruins of the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion. In 1810, the English poet and hero of the Greek War of Independence, Lord Byron carved his name into one of these columns and mentions the site in his poem Don Juan, Place me on Sunium’s marbled steep, Where nothing, save the waves and I, May hear our mutual murmurs sweep; There, swan-like, let me sing and die. 10 Shot from below in shadow, the boy’s features and muscles are thrown into sharp relief by bright sunlight, his brown body contrasting with the whiteness of the towering columns. The luting of the columns is soft against the boy and the hard edge of the shadowed wall. The setting – the rising columns, the wall – is indicative of antiquity, but unless you are an archaeologist or historian interested in temple ruins, unspeciic. It is enough that the setting represents antiquity and so gives a setting for the unknown, motionless model that in turn gives the picture its objective power and beauty. ‘Detail properly selected’, List later wrote, ‘is more powerful than a picture of the complete subject. A symbol often expresses a dramatic Fig 6. Herbert List, Classical head of a youth 1939 [Catalogue no. 18] occurrence more clearly than the event itself. Imagination and sensitive discipline of the subconscious are prerequisites here.’ ‘Visual art is vision made visible’, is a mantra that he was fond of repeating, and highly applicable to his Greek photographs.10 apollo In April 1900, two sponge-ishing boats from the island of Syme were heading north from the African coast when they ran into a storm off the island of Antikythera, halfway between Crete and the Peloponnese. Sheltering off the island’s north-east coast, the divers went looking for sponges. At a depth of over ifty metres, one of them found what he described as ‘a heap of rotting corpses and horses’. A second diver went to explore and returned with a large bronze arm. They had discovered what was to become known as the Antikythera Shipwreck. Dating to the 1st century BC, it contained, as well as bronze and marble statues (the so-called ‘heap of rotting corpses’), furniture, jewellery, pottery, coins and amphorae. The Greek Government commissioned the divers to explore the wreck further, and over the next few years, several important inds were brought to the surface. The two best known are a 4th century BC, larger-thanlife bronze statue of a naked youth known as the Antikythera Ephebe and an extraordinary mechanical device known as the Antikythera Mechanism. The Mechanism, badly damaged after nearly two thousand years at the bottom of the sea is a complex ‘computer’ dedicated to astronomical phenomena and the tracking of the cycles of the Solar System. It is the most sophisticated machine to have survived from antiquity. Indeed nothing like it has survived from the next thousand years of human history. 11 The ceramic inds, pottery and transport amphorae, suggest that the ship sank sometime between 88 and 69 BC. Given its ind-spot and the fact that its contents included Greek religious or cult objects heading away from the Aegean, it is likely that the ship had been on its way to Italy when wrecked. Between 88 and 63 BC, Rome fought three wars against Mithridates VI, king of Pontus in northern Anatolia (now northern Turkey). The expansionist king was one of the great enemies of Rome, only inally beaten by Pompey. In 86 BC the Roman general Sulla (138-78 BC) sacked Athens, which, under its tyrant Aristion, was loyal to Mithridates. The sack was bloody and dramatic – several Fig 7. Herbert List, Beneath the Poseidon Temple 1937 [Catalogue no. 65] columns from the temple of Olympian Zeus (igs. 3-4) were removed and shipped back to Rome to be included in the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill. It is possible that the Antikythera ship may have been on its way from Athens to Rome, following the sack, with war loot. Two marble statues of Apollo were among those recovered from the wreck. Both were badly damaged after so long underwater. Their identity was conirmed by accompanying tripods, symbol of the god’s sanctuary at Delphi. In 1937, List photographed them outside the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. As they were damaged, they were neither on display in the museum, such is the wealth of its treasures, or even in the safety of a storeroom. Instead they leant against a wall in the garden of the museum. List’s Antikythera I (ig. 1) is immediately different from standard views of ancient sculpture. There is a dramatic stillness in the photograph, an immediate sensuality tinged with a profound sadness, a sense of loss. At irst sight, and for a moment, it could be a real body – a young man just off the beach, covered in sand. You can almost feel the heat radiating of his sun bronzed back, smell the sun oil. So real that you could be forgiven for asking, ‘who is he?’, recalling Stephen Spender’s comment about the anonymity of List’s models: ‘I am reminded of a remark Auden made somewhere about poems of Cavafy in which the poet describes some sexual encounter many years ago in an Athenian brothel. ‘We know what happened to the poet, but I always wonder what happened to the young man.’11 (ig. 8) And then comes the realisation. Taken from a low angle, List’s photograph shows instead the rear of a headless torso. The dramatic fall of the bright sunlight throws the body into sharp relief, hiding rather than accentuating, as one might expect in a more traditional representation, its extremities. Is 12 it armless and legless? It’s not immediately clear. We know only with hindsight that the picture was taken at the National Museum in Athens. There is nothing in it that even hints at a speciic location. The only clue we get is in the title, and even that involves a journey of discovery. The statue leans against a wall beside what appears to be a slab of weathered stone. Their surfaces are in sharp contrast, the coarse stone only emphasizing the tactile smoothness of the statue’s back. It comes as a shock then to discover, again with hindsight, that the coarse stone is the second statue, twin of the irst. Even more shocking is the discovery that the front of the irst statue is similarly worn and damaged – disigured and disabled.12 On the one hand, there is beauty, on the other, decay – the polarities of mortality. Young men age then die. Statues of marble last forever (or so we imagine), unchanging, Fig 8. Herbert List, Morning 1937 [Catalogue no. 64] immortal as beits a god or a hero. They do not decay. It is this that makes the image so disturbing, that and the fact that List really does, for a moment, inspire life into a beautiful piece of marble. As a result, we actually care. 1 2 3 4 5 6 S. Spender, ‘Introduction’ in G. Metken, Herbert List: Photographs 1930-1970 (1981), p. 7 S. Spender, in the introduction to Herbert List: Junge Männer (1988), no page number S. Spender, The Temple (1988), p. 69 ‘List on List, 1973’, in M. Scheler & M. Harder (eds.), Herbert List: The Monograph (2000), p. 323 S. Spender, The Temple (1988), p. 52 These photographs are now in the Nicholson Museum at the University of Sydney. Born in England in 1866, Woodhouse was Professor of Greek at the University and Honorary Curator of the Nicholson Museum from 1903 until his death in 1937 7 R. Barthes, Die helle Kammer (1989), p. 68 8 M. Harder, ‘Myth and Apocalypse: Views of Antiquity – Post War Reality’, in M. Scheler & M. Harder (eds.), Herbert List: The Monograph (2000), p. 108-109 9 S. Spender, in the introduction to Herbert List: Junge Männer (1988), no page number 10 Both quotes from H. List, ‘On Photography as Art, 1943’, in M. Scheler & M. Harder (eds.), Herbert List: The Monograph (2000), p. 322 11 S. Spender, in the introduction to Herbert List: Junge Männer (1988), no page number 12 On the current damaged state of the two statues, P.C. Bol, ‘Die Skulpturen des Schiffsfundes von Antikythera’, AM 1972, p. 57-58 13 essay naKedness WiThouT nauGhTiness: a brief hisTory of The classical nude alasTair J.l. blanshard Looking at naked bodies is a confronting business. It can even be a matter of life and death. One of the many stories told about Livia, wife of the Roman emperor Augustus, recounts the time that she intervened to save the lives of a group of naked slaves who had accidently exposed themselves to her. In their defense, she declared she wasn’t insulted by their nakedness because ‘to a chaste woman such men were like statues’ (Cassius Dio 58.2.4). It is an intriguing little story and it has much to tell us about ancient attitudes to art and the naked body. Of particular interest is the distinction that Livia draws between the naked body in art and the naked body in real life. Real naked bodies are unpleasant, distasteful, and not it for female viewing. Art is a different matter. Normal rules don’t apply Fig 1. Constantine Athanassiou, Acropolis Excavated (Kritios Boy and the Moschophoros) 1866 [Catatogue no. 1] to it. In Livia’s comment, we see the creation of a new kind of body, a body that transcends morality, sloughs off sensuality, and aims to signify nothing more than beauty itself. In short, the nude. It is hard to work out when this distinction between art and real life came into being. One can certainly see the appeal of the division in Rome, which always had an ambivalent attitude towards nakedness. Unclothed and semi-naked bodies were associated with servile or debased status. Slaves were stripped when they went to market. When Rome wished to humiliate her enemies, she forced them to strip down to their undergarments and pass under the yoke in a symbolic display of their subjugation. To be naked in Rome was to be without status, honour, or position. It seems paradoxical then that Romans would ever embrace the nude. Yet, from the irst century BC, we see them not only copying and collecting nude statues, but even allowing themselves to be portrayed naked or semi-nude in art. The explanation for this outbreak of gymnophilia (‘the love of nudity’) lies not in a radical change in attitude, rather it arises as the by-product of a love affair. Rome was a passionate admirer of all things Greek - and there were few things more Greek than a naked statue. 14 From the archaic period onwards, we ind the Greeks frequently choosing the naked male body as the medium by which they want to memorialize themselves or represent the divine or heroic. Nudity was a marker by which the Greeks distinguished themselves from the surrounding cultures of the Mediterranean. Greek sculpture may have been inluenced by Near-Eastern prototypes, but in its embrace of nudity, it was unique. The Moschophoros or ‘Calf-bearer’, (ig. 1) Fig 2. Nelly (Elli Souyoultoglou-Seraïdari), The dancer Nikolska in the Parthenon 1929 which claims pride of place in the treasures [Catalogue no. 74] unearthed in the excavation of the Acropolis clearly owes much to Egyptian statuary, but what makes him distinctly Greek is the amount of lesh that he exposes. Likewise, it is hard to ind any parallel in Egyptian statuary for the nudity of the Kritios boy that leans against him. In the ifth-century BC, the historian Herodotus lists a number of features by which Greeks differ from the barbarian, it is no surprise that amongst this list are attitudes to nudity. Yet nakedness was more than an ethnic marker. The naked body was also endowed with an ethical value. In a world where beauty was associated with divine favour, the naked body takes on special signiicance. Nudity was heroic. It was possible to read a man’s worth from every delineated abdominal muscle, meaty thigh, or bulging pectoral muscle. Some philosophers went even further, arguing that one could see the harmony of the cosmos in the perfect proportions of the human body. Given such a solid investment in the naked form, one can see why the irst generation of Romans in the Greek East could not object to being commemorated by naked statues. From the East, the fashion spread westwards following a path already trod by philosophy, mathematics, and rhetoric. The elite Roman appetite for the signiiers of Hellenism was practically insatiable. Yet, it is worth observing that there were limits to the artistic display of the naked body in Greece and Rome. The Greeks were not as free as many imagine. The female body was especially problematic. The Hungarian dancer Nikolska may have thought that she was getting in touch with the Greek spirit in her famous series of scantily-clad acrobatic leaps inside the Parthenon, but she couldn’t have been more wrong (ig. 2). Ancient Greeks would have been appalled. In Greek vase-painting, exposed female lesh is mainly associated with the marginal, the uncivilized, and the wild. Nudity and semi-nakedness is the province of prostitutes, maenads, and amazons. Only one goddess appears regularly naked in art, and that is Aphrodite (Roman: Venus). Roman matrons might occasionally appear in naked statues of themselves, but when they do, they always go to elaborate lengths to dress themselves up as the goddess of love. By borrowing the attributes of the goddess, they were able to appropriate the license permitted to her representation in art. 15 The most famous, and possibly the irst, freestanding naked statue of the goddess was the famous Aphrodite of Cnidus by Praxiteles. According to legend, the statue had originally been commissioned by the island of Cos, but when they were confronted by the naked goddess, they chose instead an alternate clothed version. In a form of sculptural striptease, Praxiteles seems to have produced versions of the goddess from the clothed to the semi-naked (the Arles Aphrodite is perhaps a copy of one of them, ig. 3) to the fully nude. Cos’ loss was Cnidus’ gain. When the statue was installed in Cnidus, it instantly became a hit. No tour of that part of the world was complete without an inspection of the artwork. Indeed, we know far more about the statue Fig 3. Adam Fuss, Venus holding an apple in her right hand 1986 [Catalogue no. 10] from ancient rumour and travelers’ reports than we do from archaeology. The statue was lost in antiquity and ever since then scholars have debated which of the numerous copies of naked Aphrodite statues replicates the Aphrodite of Cnidus. The eighteenth-century favoured the Medici Venus as the closest approximation of the statue. Its combination of exposed nakedness with just the hint of modesty in the hand across the breast and crotch (‘the pudicitia pose’) seemed to it the description laid out in our ancient sources. Certainly, the Medici Venus is a desirable statue, a standard of beauty by which a number of photographers have wished to measure their models (igs. 4 and 5). Fig 4. Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Night Bather I 1939 [Catalogue no. 48] If we needed a reminder that Aphrodite’s nudity represents an exception to normal rules of female exposure then we need look no further than the story of Actaeon, the unfortunate Greek noblemen who accidently came across Artemis (Roman: Dianna) while she was bathing. As punishment for catching sight of the naked 16 goddess, he was turned into a stag and torn apart by his hunting dogs. With its strong voyeuristic content, the story has been a popular one with artists. The story has been the subject of sculptures, paintings, opera, and ballet (ig. 6). Intriguingly, it is a story whose representation divides ancient and modern artists. Each chooses a different moment in the story to illustrate. Since the Renaissance, artists have found the thought of the surreptitious sight of female lesh irresistible and so consequently have expressed a preference for illustrating the moment when Actaeon comes unaware upon the bathing Artemis. It is a moment rarely illustrated in the ancient world where depicting Artemis naked comes all too close to repeating Actaeon’s crime. Fig 5. Lewis Morley, Marie-Lise Grey for She c.1965 [Catalogue no. 51] Instead, ancient artists prefer the moment of Actaeon’s destruction where the transformed prince is attacked by his dogs and where, in a telling reversal, Actaeon is often depicted naked whilst Artemis is always fully clothed. Yet whatever moment in the story that we choose to focus upon, the message is clear. Actaeon reminds us that looking at the female classical body is something that one does at one’s own peril. Indeed, the ‘thrill of looking’ is an emotion to which the ancients were well attuned. Art could inspire the deepest emotions. Amongst the many anecdotes that we have about art in our ancient sources is a large collection of stories about people who felt such passion for statuary that they tried to make love to them. The Aphrodite of Cnidus was just one of many statues which was assaulted in this way. We have stories preserved about statues in Delphi Fig 6. George Platt Lynes, Actaeon 1937 [Catalogue no. 78] 17 and Samos which suffered similar fates. Such passion was even celebrated in myth where we hear of the sculptor Pygmalion who falls in love with the statue that he is carving. His love is such that he is driven mad by the statue. He dresses it, chats with it, and gives it gifts. He is a pitiful sight. So pitiful in fact that eventually the goddess Aphrodite puts him out of his misery by turning the statue into a living girl. For the early Christians such stories as the one about Pygmalion just conirmed their opinions about the corrupting potential of ancient art. The early church father, Clement Fig 7. Holly Wright, Untitled (Belvedere Torso) 1986 [Catalogue no. 7] of Alexandria, for example, launched an attack on ancient art using Pygmalion as his prime example of its dangers. Ancient art, especially the depiction of naked bodies, could inspire madness in the minds of viewers. Statues of Aphrodite should be thrown down. At their mildest, they increased lust. At their worst, they inspired idolatry. Such attacks proved a potent force. Eventually, Clement’s arguments succeeded. By combining an awareness of the latent dangers of nudity with their own principles of abjection of the body, Christians were able to effectively end the valorisation of the nude that featured so strongly in the irst four centuries of the Roman Empire. In contrast, the Christian nude was a very different creature. Nudity in Christian art revisited the original Roman tendency to associate nudity with poverty, suffering, and criminality. The emblematic story for the Christian world about nakedness was the story of Adam and Eve. Nakedness was a sign of the distance between God and Man - it was a sign of shame, a reminder of original sin. Nakedness and semi-nakedness in Christian art is largely reserved for scenes of Christ on the cross, depictions of beggars, and representations of sinners in Hell. One might have empathy for the igures, but one would never have desire. The period from late antiquity until the start of the Renaissance represents a low point in the history of the classical nude. Whilst the classical form never completely died out, it was not until the ifteenth-century that we see the return of the classical nude in any signiicant manner. In many cases, this recovery was a literal one. One of the key stimuli for the resurgence of the classical body was the unearthing of a number of classical statues in Rome and other Italian cities. Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) in his Lives of the Artists recounts the excitement that new discoveries of antique sculptures caused amongst artists and their patrons. As the photographer who captured the unearthing of the statue of Antinous in 1894, there is something extraordinary about that moment when statues emerge out of the ground (cat. no. 2). 18 Amongst the elites of Rome and Florence, there developed a passion for collecting antique sculpture. Part of the enjoyment of such collecting was the opportunity it gave for games of connoisseurship. Some might denigrate a statue whilst others might praise it to the heights. The fortunes of particular marbles rose and fell according to taste and argument. Artists promoted certain statues. Few saw the value of the Belvedere torso (ig. 7) until Michelangelo adopted it so enthusiastically. After that, we ind it cropping up everywhere. Along with the re-emergence of the classical nude was a renewed insistence on the ethical nature of these bodies. Christian concerns about the passions they might awaken were negated through a process of sublimation. 8. Apollo Belvedere, Botanic Gardens, Sydney c.1890-1915 It was a move not limited to classical [Catalogue no. 86] art. Whenever elements of pagan culture threatened to challenge Christian morality, Renaissance defenders of the antique past would endeavour to show that pagan culture was complementary rather than antithetical to Christian positions. Thus, the story of Zeus’ lust for the beautiful boy Ganymede could be represented as an allegory of soul’s journey to God after baptism. In the hands of humanists, Ovid, Virgil, and Plato were all turned into proto-Christians. The same happens in the ield of art where potentially corrupting images were drained of their erotic charge. Here beauty became collocated with notions of grace. It is no accident that the irst free-standing nude statue produced since antiquity was not a pagan igure, but a biblical one. Donatello’s David (c. 1430-2) looks towards the antique in the curve of its slim boyish hips, absence of body hair, and enigmatic smile. Yet as the decapitated head of Goliath that lies beneath his right foot all too ably demonstrates, he is also a igure that does God’s work. Of course, such sublimation was not always successful. Images of Ganymede might appear on the bronze doors of St Peter’s, but they also circulated as homosexual love gifts amongst artists and their beloveds. The desirability of some bodies is just impossible to repress. Indeed, one of the dynamics in the history of the nude is the way in which the eroticism of the naked form needs to be constantly stiled 19 or refashioned. We see this perhaps no more clearly exempliied in the work of Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768), a igure who is often credited with the invention of the discipline of art history. Winckelmann’s masterwork History of the Art of Antiquity (1764) acquired an international reputation upon its publication. Few works of art history can rival it for impact. It is a vast, sprawling, complicated work that attempts to schematise Egyptian, Etruscan, Greek, and Roman art. It is a work that is simultaneously lyrical and philosophical. Yet, at its heart, lies a notion of ideal beauty predicated on the classical nude. For Winckelmann, ideal beauty might be impossible to create, but the classical nude represents the point at which one gets closest to it. One nude in particular stood out for Winckelmann, the Apollo Belvedere (ig. 8). For him, the statue was ‘the highest ideal of Fig 9. Untitled (woman with pan pipes before a Classical herm) 1890s [Catalogue no. 60] art among the works of antiquity that have escaped its destruction’. The statue had been discovered in the late 15th century and had been much liked by Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo, but it was Winckelmann who cemented its place in the canon of art history. His rapturous description of it made it impossible to ignore. Its particular virtues, its ability to reconcile masculinity and youth, tenderness and grandeur became the benchmarks by which art was subsequently judged. If art-historical eyes had begun to stray from classical sculpture, Winckelmann focused them back on the marble. Ultimately, it is Winckelmann who is responsible for the profusion of casts and copies of the antique that litter art schools. He reinstated classical sculpture at the centre of the artistic curriculum. However, perhaps his most signiicant legacy was the creation of a mode of criticism in which one could write and talk passionately, but not erotically, about the naked body. In his rejection of coarse sensuality, Winckelmann reafirmed the distinction between ‘art’ and ‘pornography’. For Winckelmann, the ideal body should be pure, lavourless, like the clearest water. Such emotion as a nude elicited should arise from form, from the interplay of surface and line, not from projected fantasy. 20 Fig 10. William England, The Greek Slave c.1860 [Catalogue no. 11] Admittedly, not everyone was prepared to buy into such a chaste, metaphysical vision. Pagan forms inevitably bring forth the voluptuous associations of pagan morals. Erotic art has always had a fondness for classical mise-en-scène (ig. 9). One can understand why the suspicious might suspect that the philosophy of the nude might just be an alibi for the promulgation of lustful thoughts. Given the impossibility of ever completely sublimating the erotic from the nude, clashes over the nude are unavoidable. Hiram Powers’ The Greek Slave (ig. 10), for example, could simultaneously be lauded by the Boston Daily Advertiser as ‘the most beautiful statue in the world’ and denounced by the Governor of Vermont as ‘obscene’. Posterity has judged both opinions to be exaggerations, but that shouldn’t blind us to the fact that both positions arrived armed with compelling arguments. As we have seen, tensions between the sexualised body and the idealised form go all the way back to antiquity. Such tensions still play out today. In many ways, modern media such as photography foreground them. Separating out the reality of the naked from the artistry of the nude is hard to do at the best of times. The situation becomes even more complicated when the medium locates itself at precisely the juncture where the real ends and art begins. Photography for all its artful composition never lets you forget that behind those artiicially composed forms lies a real, breathing, body – a body that lives, but, more importantly, loves. 21 essay Photography has, inTiMaTe encounTers WiTh The classical body: social provocaTions in phoToGraphy ana carden-coyne historically, provoked an important social and political tension between voyeurism and intimacy. This can be seen in the photography and documentation practices of colonialism and archaeology, for instance. Photography maintained an important role in the negotiated exploitation of colonial resources, both economic and cultural, of exporting globalised images of empire at home and abroad, and disseminating imperial projects as public education1. At a time of ierce competition between western empires, photography dramatically exposed to the world the staged moment of the archaeological discovery of the Delphi Antinous, near the Temple of Apollo in 1894, by the French School in Athens under the Director M. Homolle and assistants M.M. Convert, Bourguet, Perdrizet, and Millet, who do not appear in the image (ig. 1). Fig. 1 Discovery of the Delphi Antinous 1894 [Catalogue no. 2] While the British and Americans had failed in negotiations with the Greek government, described in The New York Times as ‘our lost opportunity’, the French struck a political deal, including a commercial treaty and paying 500,000 francs for the permission to excavate. In documenting and publicising the unearthing of the statue, the violence of imperial archaeology is alluded to in the mounds of piled-up dirt, with exhausted Greek labourers hired by the French team framing the scene. From the 2nd century AD, the marble statue of Antinous had commemorated the Emperor’s dead lover, creating a cult of Antinous while extending erotic power to Hadrian’s imperium3. Strikingly, the photograph of the excavation appears as a seductive unveiling set within a private world. The ideal beauty of the revered igure of Hadrian’s inconsolable desire renders the archaeological endeavour natural and intimate, the special secret of a closed community. Tension between the private and public is mirrored in the exposed nakedness, shy poise and downturned eyes of Antinous, as he rises from the depths of the chthonic, libidinal past with the digniied grace and coquettish allure that the Victorian imaginary projected in photography. Indeed, from the late nineteenth century, photographs of classical statues and 22 classicised male youths were not just crucial in legitimising homoeroticism and shaping homosexual identity, but also in stirring together the human capacity for emotion and desire with objects of material culture. What was important about photography in constructing intimacy and emotional affect within its voyeuristic mechanics was that it was not removed from real life. This was even more evident when classical sculptures and nudes were central to the image, since Fig. 2 Chim, Bernard Berenson at the Borghese Gallery on his 90th birthday 1955 [Catalogue no. 43] the photographic medium could intimately entwine and conlate real bodies and idealised forms of the bodily beauty and sensuality.4 Just as nudes were rendered as living sculptures, classical statues were imagined as living beings, and such images could be profoundly provocative in their tragic, comic and sexualised representations. Rather than death, modern photography’s encounter with the Classical body was all about life and its passions. Roland Barthes famously noted that photography ‘produces Death while trying to preserve life’ (Camera Lucida, 1981), while Susan Sontag associated photography with death; by its technology and usage, the medium was akin to memento mori (On Photography, 1977). Barthes observed this confusion of real and ideal bodies, and that while photography froze life in images, dead bodies were horrifying precisely for their capacity to immortalise5. In the meeting of modern photography and classical statuary, the distinction between life and death, lesh and image, the spiritual and the physical was collapsed as encounters between human beings and marble or bronze sculptures, between statues and within environments, personiied sculpture and rendered moments of time and interactions between people and objects more intensely social and, signiicantly, more embodied and tactile. Intimate encounters of human beings with classical marbles have been presented in the interiors of museums, as ordinary viewers and experts alike are impelled by the allure of classical sculpture’s lesh, more intensely erotic and inviting than a naked model. Chim Seymour’s portrait of Renaissance art historian Bernard Berenson at the Borghese Gallery on his 90th birthday 1955 (ig. 2), taken a year before the photographer’s death, imbues the connoisseur’s intense admiration of beauty with the longing of desirous eyes. The wise expert is diminished before the grandeur of Canova, the skilled ‘old master’ that Berenson had studied. The scene becomes a private encounter between the diminutive man seated before the sultry and voluptuous Pauline Bonaparte as Venus Victrix (Antonio Canova, 1805-08). Yet the private men’s world of artistry and connoisseurship occupied a privileged history that framed notions of taste and the conditions of art’s public exposure. Mary Bergstein notes how, historically, masculinity has been ‘identiied as a generative force in artistic creation’, and the female body cast as the natural, complementary passive object of his gaze. In the twentieth century, fashion magazines and the mass circulation of images 23 of feminine couture and cultural modernity played an important role in delivering the mystique of the photographer’s studio as an atelier, reinforcing the classical western paradigm of female seduction resembled in the classical nude, only now – through fashion – creating a new gender order of male producer and female consumer.6 Indeed, this exhibition includes photographs where modern and classical female models are staged together, in seductive conversations, and in fashionable encounters that were designed to sell couture through magazines. Many fashion photographers’ professional reputations were secured through this permissibly tasteful sexual imagery, such as in Louise Dahl-Wolfe’s work for Harper’s Bazaar, (cat. no. 48: Night Bather I 1939); George Hoyningen-Huene’s features in French Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar (ig. 3); Fig. 3 George Hoyningen-Huene, Toto Koopman, dress by Augusta Bernard, Paris 1934 [Catalogue no. 49] Genevieve Naylor’s photojournalistic fashion style for Harper’s Bazaar and Look, (cat. no. 50: Dorian Leigh in Rome 1952 – Leigh was a high-proile model); and Lewis Morley (cat. no. 51: Marie-Lise Grey for She 1965). Morley’s portraits of Christine Keeler and Joe Orton, and in magazines like Tatler, led to his fame as the quintessential chronicler of 1960s London. From the 1920s onwards, modern femininity, mass culture and photography – convened in the mythic image of the sexually libertine lapper (and her descendents) – was upheld in the classical paradigm of supreme, universal beauty in conjunction with the sexual reconstruction of women after the irst and second world wars.7 aMusinG Muses and funny bones Unlike the male nude, whose beauty and masculine perfection is supreme but whose symbolism of sexual desire is ambiguous, the female classical nude rarely required an alibi for her seductive poses, sensual alabaster skin, and erotic provocations. While it has long been argued that the female classical nude was an invention of the artistic imaginary of heterosexual men that produced the western canon of aesthetic beauty, photographers have also worked against such an approach, injecting humour into the gendered and sexualised encounters of men and women with classical female – and male – nude sculpture. Artists and photographers resisted the heteronormative paradigms of the classical imaginary, generating their own seductive narratives, as seen in the longstanding genre of homoerotic photography 24 represented in this exhibition. There was also an alternative genre to the feminine erotic: the amusing muse, whose funny bones were not necessarily female. This counter to the canon of western art – not just the mark of postmodern parody, since it began almost as soon as photography was invented – deprived the classical body of its status, rendering it more real than ideal. Thus the classical body became more humanly ridiculous, exposed not for its alluring beauty but the ludicrous Fig. 4 Henri Cartier-Bresson, Museum, Naples 1960 [Catalogue no. 53] assumptions of bourgeois taste and power. Photography allowed the historical muse of the classical body to come down off the pedestal and become amusing. Herbert List’s Hercules Farnese: the Flirt (cat. no. 52) which seemed to parody the famous scene in Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy (1953), where the long perspective and the camera angle shot high above the statue diminishes the body of Ingrid Bergman, who stands below the great Italian marble of Hercules in the Farnese collection. In the ilm, the romance of the classical heritage is broken by the estrangement of the protagonist couple; Hercules appears as a dramatic third character in this ilmic portrait of a dissolving marriage. By contrast, List’s Hercules is both comic and tragic. His body appears distorted with overburdened limbs and cumbersome lesh; idealised anatomy becomes peculiarly funny in this interaction. The lone woman is arrested by the sculpture’s affect of looking at her, yet she is quite vulnerable under the dark shadows of his leering masculinity. Nevertheless, the surprise in the woman’s body language lends an absurdist twist to the scene, encapsulated in the title of Hercules ‘the Flirt’. That uncanny sense of antiques coming to life in museums is also represented in Henri Cartier-Bresson’s depiction of two visitors studying a marble igure of kneeling Aphrodite, while another statue in the foreground gazes backwards as though ‘she’ is studying them (ig. 4). The quizzical posture of the visitors seems to question: ‘Is Aphrodite alive?, Is she looking at me?’. The igure in the foreground provides the answer. No mausoleum for ancient relics, modern photography created dynamic bodies in space, bringing classical sculpture to life with mysterious power. Robert Doisneau took this affective realism outside, into the gardens of the palace of Versailles, projecting the intense longing of one sculpted body for the erotic beauty of another, as the Barbarian prisoner gazes with salacious desire upon the Callipygian Venus (or Vice and Versailles) (cat. no. 79). The renowned French photographer of occupied France and Life magazine often composed images with comic elements and absurd juxtapositions that exposed awkward tensions in relationships. Scholars have also seen this as typical of photography’s ability to make the viewer complicit with the voyeurism of the male gaze, and indeed the interrogating power of the camera.8 Yet, it could be argued that eroticism and the life-giving power of desire was a great antidote to the brutality and death that photographers such as Doisneau and Cartier-Bresson, who were also part of the French resistance, had witnessed during the Second World War. 25 Throughout the twentieth century, intimate encounters in photography collapsed the separation of real and represented bodies, which some artists played with by injecting humour into the scene. From the 1980s, Adam Fuss’ pinhole technique created beautiful photographs without cameras, using chemicals and light sensitive paper that distort the perspective, illuminating classical statues with life and motion, such as in Venus Holding an Apple in Her Hand (cat. no. 10). The armless Venus de Milo in the Louvre was said to have once held an apple in her hand, a factor that Fuss plays with in his version, where Venus - arms reinstated - almost offers the apple to the viewer through the pinhole. Fig. 5 David Potts, Epstein Retrospective, opening night 1953 [Catalogue no. 45] Far from being ‘psychologically unavailable’, with her turned-away gaze and sensual mystique hidden in dark shadows, as Adolphe Braun had photographed Venus de Milo in the 1820s, Fuss’ Venus invites the viewer into her world. This is no ‘lonely Aphrodite’, as Bergstein, elaborating from Henry James, describes the historic practice of the documentary photography of antiquities.9 The pinhole technique – where light passes through the tiny hole generating an image without a camera lens – emphasises the depth of ield, the play of light, and produces movement that made the sculptures literally come to life. Fuss’s work questions the spiritual dimension of human life, and through the intensely closed world of the darkroom creative process brings great tactility to the image and poignancy to the upclose encounter. Fuss has noted his desire to produce ‘much more intimacy and feeling than a normal photograph’.10 The elegiac quality to the images, the ability of the sculpture to engage with us (rather than the other way around) – to stare back, for instance – not only transforms statues into metaphysical beings, but reshapes the museum in the background as an ethereal space, as a magical place inhabited by gods and goddesses. Having moved to New York from London, Fuss was working at the Metropolitan Museum: ‘I’d be waking at night through the classical sculpture galleries. The igures have a certain kind of life perhaps because their life span is so much longer than ours. They’ve seen the generations of people walk past ... At night, they’d come alive, full of power and mystery.’11 Fuss’ intimate night-time encounters among the classical collection became the inspiration for this important body of work. Museums provide important critical spaces for photographers to explore the modern and the classical, the public and private, the institutional and the intimate, especially as high art pertains to beauty, masterpiece and erotic aesthetics. Artists have parodied this, providing comic moments that undercut the canon of classical art, such as in David Potts’ depiction of the Epstein Retrospective, opening night 1953, where the nude 26 caryatid in the foreground frames the human scene of an elegant couple in the background, seemingly discussing Epstein’s exhibition. The statue appears stern, cold and expressionless, compared with the elegant couple and the woman in glamorous evening gown, laughing haughtily (ig. 5). Potts makes the fashionable pair appear as though they, too, are posing as lovers of modern art. Similarly, in 1975, Tod Papageorge – photographer and Yale University art educator – intuitively captured the fashion status of an art opening at the New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (ig. 6). A glamorous woman – glass of wine swinging in hand – leans nonchalantly on the pedestal of a classical statue. Resembling the breast-revealing drapery of antique caryatids, combined with the brash contrasts of light and dark, the modern female body commands the focus of sexual attention. Only the feet of the statue is visible, a mere prop for the chic woman posing as the Fig. 6 Tod Papageorge, Museum opening with Canova’s Perseus 1975 [Catalogue no. 46] real model of the exhibition. A similar irony is expounded in William Klein’s Italian Watchman casually leaning on a sculpture of wrestlers; the action of the classical group contrasts with his laconic posture (cat. no. 98). While classical imagery was elevated in postwar fashionable circles, it also continued as the material for parodying both antiquity and modern culture. MeTaphysical desire and inTiMaTe desTrucTion Inluenced by Surrealism and Bauhaus in the 1920s and 1930s, the German photographer Herbert List – renowned for his homoerotic portraits of young men – used the camera to infuse the classical nude with magical qualities, creating intimate encounters by blurring the visual and sensual distinctions between human lesh and marble statues (cat. no. 4). List’s classical nudes were affective bodies that breathed life while eliciting the viewers’ desiring touch. Far from an excavated marble, the sandy buttocks and torso resemble sensual lesh on the beach at sundown, akin to the sun-saturated muscular arms of Max Dupain’s Sunbather 1937. Lustful camera angles transform marble fragments into bulging, phallic icons (cat. no. 19). Leaving Nazi Germany in 1936, List worked in Paris and London, and following tours of ancient temples and sculptures, had his irst solo exhibition in 1937 at the Galerie du Chasseur d’Images (Paris), followed by another in 1940 at the Parnassos Gallery (Athens). The journey from Germany to Paris to Athens traced his admiration for the sexual allure of classical bodies. The muscled bodies of male youths were playfully erotic, bursting with adolescent urges. Forced to return to Germany in 1941, the part-Jewish, homosexual 27 photographer was unable to work, but was instead drafted into the German Army in 1944. List’s metaphysical, dreamy classical bodies were playful representations of male youth, entwining the real and imagined in powerful homoerotic fantasies and gentle scenes of male intimacy. But this idyllic world was soon shattered by the brutality of the Second World War and, indeed, the desolate Munich to which List returned with his camera. Nevertheless, List continued to create intimate scenes and Fig. 7 Herbert List, Man leading horse, by Bernhard Bleeker, Munich 1946 [Catalogue no. 69] emotional encounters between the destroyed city and the classical nude, marking the passing of the violent past. The works are haunting, possessed with an eerie and sombre quality; the silent aftermath of bombed out buildings enveloping a toppled classical statue, lying prostrate and corpse-like in the square as though awaiting the collection of the dead. The citizens are absent; only broken marbles remain as relics of the human. In List’s postwar work, the destruction of Nazism’s once-monumental power is evoked in the fallen classical marble by leading Nazi sculptor, Bernhard Bleeker (1881-1968) (ig. 7). This sculpture, Man Leading Horse, once asserted the false power of idealized perfection, looking down upon the city’s imperfect human subjects. Photographed from the ground perspective, List composes the statue with a beseeching gesture. Indeed, in 1945 Bleeker had sought permission to have his WW1 monument to the ‘unknown soldier’ restored (Schlafende Krieger, Kriegerdenkmal crypt, 1925-25), but was initially prohibited by the American authorities. Similarly, List’s photograph of classical plaster casts in the ruins of the Academy building (1946) uses light and shadow to intensify the image of the corrupted classical past in a state of collapse. Fig. 8 Herbert List, Plaster casts, Academy I 1946 [Catalogue no. 70] A seated nude observes with poignant resignation the muscular, sculptural group, almost struggling in the rubble (ig. 8). Arguably this was provocative work in the aftermath of war, and yet it delivered a powerful message about the distortion of history and humanity for depraved political and imperial ends. 28 The concept of classical sculpture as a symbol of humanity in modern war photography mirrored Lee Miller’s Revenge on Culture, where the muse of the arts and sciences lies dead among the ruins of London’s Blitz, a symbol of the brutalizing of civilization in this uncivilised war (ig. 9). Yet Miller – once herself the muse of Surrealist photographer Man Ray – lent an air of surreal ecstasy to the death of beauty. It is precisely in the igure’s tactile allure that the chill of death is affected. Indeed, Miller had made editorial selections so that the sight of death and horror during the Blitz could not be made into a spectacle. In 1941 Miller’s images were widely circulated, in Britain as Grim Glory: Pictures of Fig. 9 Lee Miller, Revenge on culture 1940 [Catalogue no. 68] Britain Under Fire, and in the United States as Bloody but Unbowed: Pictures of Britain Under Fire, and were probably known to List, and indeed ‘Revenge on Culture’ has become an iconic symbol of the destruction of the Second World War.13 Both Miller and List’s work is a far cry from the awkward triumphalism of such propaganda images as Hitler with the Roman copy of Myron’s original bronze Discobolus (cat. no. 67). The Nazi state bought the revered statue from the Italians in 1938 for ive million lire, displaying it with National Socialist pride in the Münich Glyptothek on the Day of German Art as a gift from the Führer and as a symbol of the relationship between the Axis powers.14 Post-war photography’s engagement with the classical body revealed the capacity to turn destruction into intimacy, pain and suffering into a history of grief and renewal through sensual beauty. Tragic, comic and erotic encounters with the classical body became social provocations to endure and regenerate – and never forget the living history of humanity. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (1997) ‘Excavations at Delphi Plaster Casts and Photographs of Statuary Exhibited in Paris. WILL ULTIMATELY GO TO THE LOUVRE These Recent Discoveries the Result of the Labors of the French School at Athens – Our Lost Opportunity’, New York Times, January 6, 1895 Caroline Vout, Power and Eroticism in Imperial Rome (2007) Emmanuel Cooper, Fully Exposed: the Male Nude in Photography, Routledge (1995), p. 195 Cited in Michelle Henning, ‘Photography and Death’, in Liz Wells (ed), Photography: an Introduction, 2nd edition (2000), p. 245 Mary Bergstein, ‘The Artist in His Studio: Photography, Art and the Masculine Mystique’, Oxford Art Journal, 18, 2, 1995, pp. 45-58 Ana Carden-Coyne, Reconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism and the First World War (2009), pp. 219ff Mary E. Law, Confronting the Uncomfortable: Questioning Truth and Power (1989), p. 24 Mary Bergstein, ‘Lonely Aphrodites: On the Documentary Photography of Sculpture’, The Art Bulletin, 74, 3, 1992, p. 487 Cited in Shadow Catchers: Camera-less Photography video, Victoria and Albert Museum, Oct 2010-Feb 2011, http://www.vam. ac.uk/collections/photography/shadow-catchers-camera-less-photography/videos/adam-fuss/index.html Cited in Eric Renner, Pinhole Photography: From Historic Technique to Digital Application, (2008) Gavriel David Rosenfeld, Munich and Memory: Architecture, Monuments and the Legacy of the Third Reich, (2000), p. 115 Caitlin S. Davis, ‘Lee Miller’s ‘Revenge on Culture’: Photojournalism, Surrealism and Autobiography’, Woman’s Art Journal, 27, 1, 2006, pp. 3-9. See also Antony Penrose, The Lives of Lee Miller, (1999) Raimond Wünsche, Glyptothek, Munich: Masterpieces of Greek and Roman Sculpture (2007), p. 205 29 30 caTaloGue eXposed: phoToGraphy & The classical nude Michael Turner 31 Acropolis excavated (Kritios Boy and the Moschophoros) 1866 Unknown photographer, possibly Constantine Athanassiou 1 Albumen print, 26.7 x 20.7 cm Collection of Mr William Knight Zewadski In 480 BC, the Persian army of Xerxes sacked the city of Athens and lay siege to the Acropolis. On inally capturing it, according to Herodotus, the Persians killed the defenders, looted the temples and burnt everything to the ground. In 1864, work began building a museum on the Acropolis to house its archaeological inds. As the foundations were being dug, sculpture and architectural remains came to light from the time of the Persian destruction. These included the body of the so-called Kritios Boy, described by Kenneth Clarke as ‘the irst beautiful nude in art’, and the delightful Moschophoros or Calf Bearer. 32 2 Discovery of the Delphi Antinous 1894 Unknown photographer Archival carbon pigment ink print from scan of original glass negative, 28 x 20 cm The French School at Athens C304 In 1891, the Greek Government gave permission for the French School at Athens to begin major excavations at the ancient site of Delphi, seat of the famous Oracle. On 13 July 1894, one of the most complete and beautiful cult statues ever found of Antinous was unearthed in a building close to the Temple of Apollo. Today, now in the Delphi Archaeological Museum, it is one of the treasures of ancient Greece. Antinous was the gay lover of the emperor Hadrian (AD 117-138) and only eighteen when he drowned in mysterious circumstances in the River Nile in AD 130. After his death, the devastated Hadrian instituted an empire-wide cult to the now deiied youth. On the day of discovery, Théophile Homolle, Director of the excavation, could hardly contain his excitement: ‘His supple lesh seems alive, throbbing with life; his muscular chest is puffed out as if having just taken a powerful, healthy breath. His legs are slender, beautifully curved.’ Some ifty years later, in 1941, the American writer Henry Miller described his own moment with the beautiful boy: ‘And inally we stood [in the museum] before the amazing statue of Antinous. Nothing could better convey the transition from light to darkness, from the pagan to the Christian conception of life, than this enigmatic igure of the last god on earth who lung himself into the Nile’. 33 Broken satyr (Theatre of Dionysos, Athens) c.1910 William J. Woodhouse (English/Australian, 1866-1937) 3 Archival carbon pigment ink print from scan of original glass negative, 20.5 x 27 cm Nicholson Museum, The University of Sydney NM 2007.86.1 William Woodhouse was an English archaeologist and classicist, later Professor of Greek at the University of Sydney and Honorary Curator of the Nicholson Museum. He was also a highly accomplished photographer. The archive of his work, now in the museum, includes nearly 2,000 unpublished glass negatives, mostly taken in Greece from the early 1890s through to the 1930s. The majority of the photographs show classical architecture and sites as well as the people and places of late 19th-early 20th century Greece. The latter are an extraordinary evocation of an age now lost. Later in life, Woodhouse was to express regret at the coming of modern technology and the indiscriminate way in which it destroyed centuries old cultures and customs. He was proud to have recorded it. In the photograph, a fragmentary satyr, its head, arms and legs missing, leans against a broken column in the middle distance. It is an architectural feature used to support a roof or stage – the male equivalent of a caryatid. With bowed head and hands on hips, it dates to the 2nd century AD and was one of a group recovered from the Theatre of Dionysos in Athens. 34 4 Antikythera I 1937 Herbert List (German, 1903-1975) Gelatin silver print, 33.5 x 23.5 cm Museum of Fine Arts, St Petersburg, Florida. Gift of William Knight Zewadski 2005.22.30 For a moment the body is real. Then realisation. This is the irst of eight Herbert List photographs in the exhibition. Each, in its own different way, captures to perfection the sensuality of nudity and the power of Classicism. Be it sun-drenched hedonistic Greece in the late 1930s, his celebrity portraiture, or even war-ravaged Munich in 1946, List’s meticulously planned shots have a languorous grace that transcends time and place. The statue, said to be Apollo, was recovered from a 1st century BC shipwreck found in 1900 by sponge divers off the Aegean island of Antikythera. Also found in the wreck was a complete bronze statue – the so-called Antikythera Ephebe, and the famous Antikythera Mechanism, the oldest known complex scientiic computer. 35 This image to be replaced Untitled #1, Agora Series 2010 (Statue of Aphrodite from the Stoa of Attalos, Athens) Rowan Conroy (Australian, b. 1982) 5 Archival pigment print, 34 x 22.5 cm © Rowan Conroy 2010 ‘The broken statue of Aphrodite, like a fragment of Sappho’s poetry, has lost none of its beauty despite being dismembered by time. The fragmentary nature of Classical remains add to their allure. Missing marble limbs, exquisitely carved but now lost and forgotten, spur a longing for what might once have been.’ (Rowan Conroy 2010) 36 6 Untitled (combination of Discobolus and artist’s nude torso) 1987 Anne Rowland (American, b. 1957) Chromogenic print (Type C), 48 x 38 cm Tampa Museum of Art. Gift of Mr and Mrs William Knight Zewadski 1990.39.37 © Anne Rowland 1987 ‘I’d done a series of faces (including Sigmund Freud’s) that involved projecting a slide of a photograph from a book onto my face – irst draping part of my face with a cloth so that the image showed up very well on the cloth and somewhat legibly on the skin on my face. My skin and the cloth then functioned as a projector screen. I think this work was about being the picture, or revivifying the picture, or revivifying the person in the picture. I suppose the same could be said about the work I did involving Roman and Greek statues. I made eight of those, including one using Aphrodite from Kyrene, and another using the Kritios Boy.’ (Anne Rowland 2010) 37 Untitled (Belvedere Torso) 1986 Holly Wright (American, b. 1941) 7 Gelatin silver print, 16 x 16.5 cm Collection of Mr William Knight Zewadski © Holly Wright 1986 ‘The Torso of Herakles appears to be one of the last perfect works that art produced in Greece ... abused and mutilated to the extreme, deprived as it is of head, arms, and legs, this statue still appears, to those capable of looking into the mysteries of art, in a blaze of its former beauty. In this Herakles, the artist has igured a high ideal of a body raised above nature and a nature of virile maturity elevated to a state of divine contentment.’ (Johann Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, 1764) ‘From a series [of photographs] made in Rome and called Corpus Delicti. My idea was that aging (even of sculptures) can increase the carnal aspect of a body’. (Holly Wright 2010) 38 8 Torso 1986 Geanna Merola (American, b. 1952) Gelatin silver print from a black and white negative with unique applied colour, 49.5 x 40 cm Tampa Museum of Art. Gift of Mr and Mrs William Knight Zewadski 1991.45.3 © Geanna Merola Photographed in the courtyard of the Capitoline Museum in Rome, Torso 1986 is from a group of works by Merola that used images of Italian antiquities in combination with applied colour and drawing. ‘In order to enhance the emphasis of the marble sculpture the negative was printed twice, once on a neutral toned paper and once on a warm toned paper. If you look closely you will see that the torso from one print is actually cut out precisely and collaged into the larger image where this section had been removed, like a puzzle part’. (Geanna Merola 2010) 39 Untitled (four male igures) 1985 Antoine Poupel (French, b. 1956) 9 Gelatin silver print, 49 x 60 cm Tampa Museum of Art. Gift of Mr and Mrs William Knight Zewadski 1990.39.36 © Antoine Poupel ‘I create images with obsessive themes such as death, eroticism, religion and the body (living, dead, or represented). In my work since 1982, I’ve played with contradictions, bringing together the solid and the luid, the openly erotic and the veiled, the macabre and the playful, the religious and the transgressive, the mechanical and the real, the human and the animal’. (Antoine Poupel 2010) 40 10 Venus holding an apple in her right hand (Louvre, Paris) 1986 Adam Fuss (English/American, b. 1961) Gelatin silver print from pinhole camera, 59 x 49.7 cm Tampa Museum of Art. Gift of Mr and Mrs William Knight Zewadski, 1993.33.3 © Adam Fuss, Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York Adam Fuss has made a career out of creating beautiful images using traditional techniques. There is nothing simpler than a pinhole camera. A lightproof box, any box, with a piece of ilm or photographic paper attached to one interior side opposite a tiny hole will do the trick. The size of the hole and the time of exposure determine the quality and distortion of the inal image. The statue is the so-called Venus of Arles, a marble Roman copy of a possible 4th century BC Greek original attributed to the great sculptor Praxiteles. It was much restored by François Girardon, following its discovery in 1651, and is now in the Louvre in Paris. 41 The Greek Slave c.1860s Possibly William England (English, c.1820-1896) 11 Stereoscope, 8.5 x 17 cm Collection of Mr William Knight Zewadski At irst sight the Greek Slave appears to be a typical ancient Greek, or perhaps Greek-inspired Neo-Classical sculpture of the type known as the Aphrodite of Cnidus. Only on close inspection can it be seen that the statue’s hands are, unusually, chained together and that a Christian cross hangs from its right hand. The statue, made in Florence in 1844 by the American sculptor Hiram Powers (1805-1873), was to become one of the most famous single pieces of sculpture in the second half of the 19th century. It caused a sensation when irst shown in America in the 1840s and subsequently at the Great Exhibition of London in 1851. Mid-19th century morality ensured that the Greek Slave’s nudity was initially shocking. Powers went to great lengths however to justify it and to explain it. ‘The Slave’, he wrote, ‘has been taken from one of the Greek Islands by the Turks, in the time of the Greek Revolution [1821-1832] ; the history of which is familiar to all. Her father and mother, and perhaps all her kindred, have been destroyed by her foes, and she alone preserved as a treasure too valuable to be thrown away. She is now among barbarian strangers, under the pressure of a full recollection of the calamitous events which have brought her to her present state; and she stands exposed to the gaze of the people she abhors, and awaits her fate with intense anxiety, tempered indeed by the support of her reliance upon the goodness of God. Gather all these aflictions together, and add to them the fortitude and resignation of a Christian, and no room will be left for shame.’ Powers further added that the Greek Slave’s nudity was through no choice of her own. So convincing was his argument that the statue became a model of Christian purity and chastity, eulogised by among others Elizabeth Barrett Browning. 42 12 Hiram Powers with a bust of his Greek Slave c.1870s Longworth Powers (American, 1835-1904) Albumen print, 9.5 x 6 cm Museum of Fine Arts, St Petersburg, Florida. Gift of Costas Lemonopoulos 1988.34 From his studio in Florence, Powers oversaw many copies of the original Greek Slave. Six full size copies, three half size copies and nearly eighty busts survive. The bust, as with the broken, disembodied portrait head, can be signiicant as a representative of the original statue. Given a personal knowledge of the full statue’s context and meaning – the Greek Slave or a statue of Aphrodite for example – a head can often retain the power of the whole and as such is redolent with the same meaning. Other times of course it is simply a head. The following six photographs explore the concept of disembodied heads. 43 Broken proile and distant torso 1957 John Gutmann (German/American, 1905-1998) 13 Gelatin silver print, 31 x 25.5 cm Tampa Museum of Art. Gift of Mr and Mrs William Knight Zewadski 1990.39.30 © 1998 Arizona Board of Regents. Collection Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona Sightless eyes look on a headless body. Their closeness is surprisingly sensual. Neither will ever know the beauty they once represented. 44 14 Photographer, California 1981 Ruth Thorne-Thomsen (American, b. 1943) Gelatin silver print from pinhole camera, 12 x 13.5 cm Tampa Museum of Art. Gift of Mr and Mrs William Knight Zewadski 1989.109.212 © Ruth Thorne-Thomsen, Courtesy Laurence Miller Gallery, New York As with other montage images in her surreal Expeditions series, Thorne-Thomsen juxtaposes a igure in a desolate landscape, in this case a photographer and a Greek statue head. Is the scene real? It is momentarily perplexing. 45 Classical busts c.1970s Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 15 Vintage gelatin silver print, 30.5 x 35 cm © Courtesy the Dupain Family and Josef Lebovic Gallery Australian photographer Max Dupain saw Classical antiquity as the pinnacle of human achievement. It was only natural therefore that the Classical body should represent his physical ideal. This is the irst of twelve Dupain photographs in the exhibition, each inspired by Classicism, often a surreal-inspired Classicism. In Untitled (Birth of Venus) 1936 (unavailable for the exhibition), Dupain superimposed a shadowy, heavily pregnant naked woman between a twice repeated, inward looking, cast of the Venus de Milo to the same scale as the woman. Her powerful, yet ephemeral fecundity was then in sharp contrast to the eternal but broken beauty of the marble Venus, creator of sexual desire. In Classical busts 1970s, two heads of Venus converge, meet, and overlap. No body. No need. No pregnant woman. The child now born. Broken glass, shattered mortal dreams. And still the eternals of stone and desire. 46 16 Homage to D.H. Lawrence 1937 Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Vintage gelatin silver print. Printed 1970s, 48 x 40.5 cm Courtesy the Dupain Family and Josef Lebovic Gallery Dupain was inluenced by the English writer D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) and in turn shared with him a belief in the sensual power of nature. The creative, intuitive force of ‘capital N’ Nature has been a powerful inluence on great lives. In direct response to the scientiic humanism of their increasingly industrial, modern worlds, those such as Goethe, Nietzsche, Freud, Lawrence and indeed Dupain all found inspiration and solace in its inherent nostalgic pantheism. In Homage to D.H. Lawrence 1937, industrial modernism represented by the saw-like wheel has seemingly severed the arm of the haloed Classical igure representing the old world of nature, whose arm lies empathetically on the Selected Poems of Lawrence. 47 High tide, Newport 1978 Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 17 Vintage gelatin silver print, 50.5 x 40.5 cm © Courtesy the Dupain Family and Josef Lebovic Gallery For the Romans she was Venus, for the Greeks, Aphrodite – ‘she who came out of the foam’. According to Greek myth, Gaia (the earth) could no longer bear the sexual advances of Uranus (the heavens). Each night he lay heavily on her. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t move, and in the end she persuaded her youngest son Cronus to castrate his father and throw his testicles into the sea, away from the earth. Their sperm became foam, and out of the foam (aphros) Aphrodite was born, subsequently coming ashore at Paphos in Cyprus. She was to become the goddess of sexual desire, of birth and of re-birth. Together with her son Eros she was, and still is, a dangerous, but vital force. Without them there is and would be nothing. A head again represents the whole in this glorious image. Triumphantly, Aphrodite is washed ashore on the high tide. 48 18 Classical head of a youth 1939 Herbert List (German, 1903-1975) Gelatin silver print, 27 x 23 cm Tampa Museum of Art. Gift of Mr and Mrs William Knight Zewadski 1990.39.32 Where less is more. ‘Like drawing, photography is the art of leaving out; the one is made to stand for the many, right detail for the whole, clear, concentrated form for profusion, and for a situation or action the symbol’. (Herbert List, ‘Zur Photograie als Kunst’ as quoted by M. Harder, ‘Myth and Apocalypse’ in M. Scheler & M. Harder, Herbert List: The Monograph (2000) p. 107). 49 Archaic phallus (Sanctuary of Dionysos, Delos) 1937 Herbert List (German, 1903-1975) 19 Gelatin silver print, 30.5 x 26 cm Collection of Mr William Knight Zewadski According to Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BC: ‘The Egyptians celebrate the Festival of Dionysos in much the same way as the Greeks, except that instead of a phallus they use puppets whose genitals are as big as the puppet and are made to move ... Now personally I believe Melampus [a legendary Greek mystic] knew all about this festival, for it was he who introduced the name of Dionysos into Greece, together with the sacriice in his honour and the phallic procession.’ This monumental phallus, originally intact, was one of a pair erected in the Sanctuary of Dionysos on the island of Delos in about 300 BC. It was set up to celebrate victory in a theatrical performance, of which Dionysos was also the god. 50 20 The Nicholson Hermes #1 (from the Journal of Hellenic Studies no. 7, 1896, pl. 71) Unknown photographer, possibly Charles Waldstein (American, 1856-1927) Photogravure, 17 x 11.5 cm Nicholson Museum, The University of Sydney In 1896, the art historian Charles Waldstein published the antique sculptures and reliefs in the collection of Sir Charles Nicholson, the eponymous founder of the Nicholson Museum. At the time these were in Nicholson’s house, The Grange, in Totteridge, North London. Five years later the house was destroyed by ire and many of the sculptures lost. Hermes survived as it stood in the garden by the duck pond. The ig leaf he wears is intriguing. It was no longer there in 1934 when the statue was donated to the museum by Nicholson’s three sons. Intriguing, because it could be argued that the photograph of the statue with the ig leaf is considerably more sensual than the one showing Hermes in his emasculated misery (no. 21). What is hidden behind that very large leaf? In fact nothing, but at least that most sensual of all organs, the brain, has had a chance to engage in lights of fancy. 51 The Nicholson Hermes #2 2010 Michael Myers (Australian, b. 1964) 21 Archival pigment print, 31 x 18.5 cm © Michael Myers 2010 This larger than life size, 2nd century AD, Roman marble statue of Hermes (itself a copy of an earlier Greek bronze statue of the 4th century BC) was found in a river bed in Izmir in Turkey in the 1870s. It had ended up there quite possibly a victim of Christian iconoclasm. Deprived of its symbols of power as a pagan god – its winged helmet, winged boots and staff, quite literally de-faced, and inally emascualted, it is now, symbolically, little more than a piece of stone. Such is the power of iconoclasm. 52 22 Tony Sansone as the Doryphoros c.1930 Edwin F Townsend (American, 1879-1957) Gelatin silver print, 25.5 x 20.5 cm Collection of Mr William Knight Zewadski Like his contemporary Rudolph Valentino, Tony Sansone was at the forefront of making male physical beauty both desirable and acceptable. He is the Greek ideal incarnate, Apollo and Adonis in one. For the sculptor Arthur Lee, who used Sansone, he was ‘the thrill and despair of genuine artists because they know – could they do him justice by rendering his form on canvas or realizing it in a statue – they would become as great as the Greeks, who are the greatest artists the world has ever known’. For colleague Charles Atlas, he was simply ‘the most beautiful man in America’. 53 Lisa Lyon as the Anavysos Kouros, New York City 1983 Joel-Peter Witkin (American, b. 1939) 23 Toned gelatin silver print, 37 x 37.5 cm Collection of Mr William Knight Zewadski © Joel-Peter Witkin Despite standing only 1.6m and weighing just 47 kilos, Lisa Lyon was a pioneering and champion female bodybuilder of the early 80s. Between 1980 and 1982 she was photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe. The subsequent series of aesthetically exquisite images, a homage to the erotic power of the female body, has since become iconic. Joel-Peter Witkin is best known for his bizarre and often morbid photographic allegories, more Goya or Hieronymous Bosch than Sandro Botticelli. His Lisa Lyon as the Anavysos Kouros, however, has a statuesque grace that is in sharp contrast to his regular use of the transgendered, deformed, crippled, insane or indeed dead. It should come as no real surprise therefore that Lyon’s statuesque grace is an inversion, given that the original 6th century BC Greek statue, of both the title and the identical pose, was male. 54 24 Untitled (Horst on a cast of the Parthenon horse) 1931 George Hoyningen-Huene (Russian/French/American, 1900-1968) Gelatin silver print, 19 x 22.5 cm Collection of Mr William Knight Zewadski George Hoyningen-Huene and the German-born Horst Bohrmann (1906-1999) are two of the great names of mid-20th century fashion photography. In 1931, at the time of this photograph, they were lovers living together in Paris, where Hoyningen-Huene was working for Vogue. Later in the year, Horst (he took the name Horst P. Horst) was to take his irst picture for the same magazine. In 1935, having separated, Hoyningen-Huene moved to New York where he worked on Harper’s Bazaar with the likes of Louise Dahl-Wolfe (no. 48). 55 Strength 1936 Leni Riefenstahl (German, 1902-2003) 25 Lithograph, 24 x 18.5 cm Collection of Mr William Knight Zewadski Much has been written about the paradox of Leni Riefenstahl’s life and work, a staggeringly beautiful oeuvre forever tainted through association with Hitler and her perceived gloriication of the Nazi ideal of the strength and beauty of a white, Aryan, German master-race. Her discus thrower in Strength 1936 is modelled on one of the great works of Greek art, Myron’s 5th century BC Discobolus. This statue was so central to perceptions of the ideal Classical Nazi body that it not only featured in the dramatic opening sequence of Riefenstahl’s ilm Olympia, but Hitler himself bought its most famous copy, the Palombara Discobolus, from the Massimo family in Rome in 1938 (no. 67). 56 26 La belle dame sans merci c.1936 Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Vintage gelatin silver print, 45.5 x 31.5 cm Courtesy the Dupain Family and Josef Lebovic Gallery A strange but speciic title. La belle dame sans merci (‘the beautiful woman without pity’) is a Circe igure, the sexual temptress who entraps the unsuspecting, questing knight. She was the subject of a 15th century poem and of a later poem by Keats. 57 Untitled 1992 Hans Fahrmeyer (German/American, b. 1963) 27 Gelatin silver print, 34 x 25.5 cm Collection of Mr William Knight Zewadski © Hans Fahrmeyer Three images that explore the body as sculpture. We have become so used to shattered and broken sculpture as high art, the Venus de Milo for example, that it is surprising that it still comes as a shock when the human body is presented likewise. 58 28 Aphrodite with Jana and Tony 1992 Len Prince (American, b. 1953) Gelatin silver print, 29 x 21.5 cm Collection of Mr William Knight Zewadski © Len Prince 1992 In 1992, Len Prince was commissioned by the Tampa Museum of Art, at the instigation of William Knight Zewadski, to photograph nude models interacting with a selection of their antiquities. In 1994, in the catalogue to accompany the ensuing exhibition, Zewadski wrote: ‘These photographs are not classical in the sense of being an intentional copy of an ancient image, but they do capture some of its aesthetic idealism and purity. The classical ideal is, after all, a richly varied and uncertain lode from which almost any social observation can ind a source. Prince projects on its dust the protean quandaries of a postmodern age – love, gender, death, equality, human struggle, loneliness and alienation. It is this manipulation of the ancient image, the recontextualization of the object, that gives the inal image its power’. 59 Poseidon with David 1992 Len Prince (American, b. 1953) 29 Gelatin silver print, 29 x 21.5 cm Collection of Mr William Knight Zewadski © Len Prince 1992 ‘Len Prince’s Tampa Museum Project began with the comment to his Atlanta dealer, Fay Gold, that Robert Mapplethorpe had never succeeded in combining an image of a nude and an authentic Classical antiquity’. (William K Zewadski 1994) 60 30 Judgment of Paris 1992 Len Prince (American, b. 1953) Gelatin silver print, 25 x 19.5 cm Collection of Mr William Knight Zewadski © Len Prince 1992 ‘For the most beautiful’. To which of the goddesses should the golden apple with this inscription be given? To settle the argument, Zeus asked the young Trojan prince Paris to judge between Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. Each offered the young man a bribe – Hera, royal power; Athena, success in war as a mighty warrior; Aphrodite, the body of the most beautiful woman in the world. The boy, a typical boy really, chose the sex offered by Aphrodite. A dangerous choice. The ‘most beautiful’ woman was already married. Her name was Helen. The consequence was the Trojan War. Prince uses two fragments from a 4th century BC South Italian pot to cover his model’s genitals. In the circumstances, a most appropriate ‘ig leaf’ – they show Aphrodite standing in front of the seated Paris at the critical moment of judgment. 61 Impassioned clay 1936 Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 31 Vintage gelatin silver print, 25 x 17.5 cm Courtesy the Dupain Family and Josef Lebovic Gallery The title, Impassioned Clay, is referential to Llewellyn Powys’ 1931 book of the same name. In 1932, in the journal Nature, an anonymous reviewer wrote, ‘to-day we meet the less pleasant and more dangerous Mr. Powys, a self-confessed Epicurean. Happiness is the keynote of Mr. Powys’ cry, happiness at all costs, be it sensuous or sensual ... All religions are counterfeits, he tells us; Christianity has ever been opposed to natural happiness. All ethical considerations are man made; he even goes so far as to mitigate the horror of a drunkard’s grave. The book is an open appeal to youth, and it is to be hoped that youth will pass it by.’ In essence, the book is a pantheistic paean in praise of nature and of natural human instincts, including the sexual. Powys was to be an important source of inspiration for Dupain. In the photograph are three superimposed images of a nude female igure, stone, and a broken seashell. For Powys, the cowrie shell represented female sexuality. 62 32 Untitled 1988 Hans Fahrmeyer (German/American, b. 1963) Gelatin silver print, 32.5 x 22 cm Collection of Mr William Knight Zewadski © Hans Fahrmeyer The next three images, in their different ways, pay homage to the Classical ideal. In the irst Hans Fahrmeyer, a leading gay photographer, places his model on a column capital. The pose is referential to Hippolyte Flandrin’s famous 1855 painting ‘Jeune homme nu assis sur le bord de la mer’. It is a pose that has subsequently been used and abused many times, especially in homoerotic photography, from von Gloeden to Mapplethorpe. It is however the sheer quality of this photograph that transcends the mundane. It is, as it should be, very beautiful. 63 Funeral offering 1992 Len Prince (American, b. 1953) 33 Gelatin silver print, 19.5 x 25 cm Collection of Mr William Knight Zewadski © Len Prince 1992 Another from Len Prince’s Tampa Project (nos. 28-30) and an intriguing image on many levels. The choice of a South Italian vase of the 4th century BC as an offering vessel complete with funereal lilies might at irst sight seem bizarre. Nice, but bizarre. In fact, the many thousands of similar pots in museums and private collections around the world were originally just that, funerary vessels, made to be placed in graves. Their distinctive, yet enigmatic red and black imagery, relected the eternal concerns of death and rebirth. Possibly the only person in modern times to have quite openly used one of these vessels as a funerary vessel is Sigmund Freud. Today, the South Italian pot containing the great man’s ashes can be readily seen at the Golders Green Crematorium in London. In his lifetime, the pot sat on a table in his study, behind his chair, where it was photographed in 1938, as here, full of lowers. 64 34 Ebony and ivory (from Camera Notes vol. 2, no. 1, 1898) Fred Holland Day (American, 1864-1933) Photogravure, 16.5 x 14.5 cm Museum of Fine Arts, St Petersburg, Florida. Gift of William Knight Zewadski 2003.36.66 Together with Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, Fred Holland Day was at the forefront of Pictorialism at the beginning of the 20th century – a style of photography that used soft-focus to replicate the look and feel of contemporary painting and etching. Camera Notes was a photographic journal published by the Camera Club of New York between 1897 and 1903. Its original editor was the visionary Stieglitz, who left in 1902 to open the rival, and ultimately more successful, Camera Work. Both journals introduced a wide public to the ever-increasing possibilities of photography as an artistic medium in its own right. The model for ‘Ebony’ was art student J. Alexandre Skeete. Other models used by Day included a young Lebanese boy, Kahlil Gibran, later author of The Prophet. 65 Lady in black with statuette (from Camera Work no. 23, 1908) Clarence H. White (American, 1871-1925) 35 Photogravure, 19 x 13.5 cm Tampa Museum of Art. Gift of Mr and Mrs William Knight Zewadski 1995.26.23 Fred Holland Day wrote of his friend Clarence White, ‘though not numerous, [his works] claim recognition in the very front rank of photography as a ine art. Indeed I cannot refrain from naming Mr. White the only man of real genius known to me who has chosen the camera as his medium of expression.’ 66 36 Classical statue II 1934 Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Vintage gelatin silver print, 20.5 x 11.5cm Courtesy the Dupain Family and Josef Lebovic Gallery The following three photographs (nos. 36-38, see also no. 47) show how the same small plaster cast of a classically-inspired statue could prove useful in creating multiple experimental images over a number of years. In 1934, the year of this photograph, Dupain, aged 23, moved into his irst studio on Bond Street in Sydney. Like many of his generation, the young photographer was inspired by the writings of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). Of the Greeks, Nietzsche wrote, ‘the magniicent physical suppleness, the audacious realism and immoralism which distinguished the Greek constituted a need, not ‘nature’. It was an outcome, it was not there from the start’ (F. Nietzsche, ‘What I Owe to the Ancients’ 3, Twlight of the Idols, 1895). Coupled with the writings of Lawrence and Powys (nos. 16 and 31), and their espousal of the need to live a passionate life, this was a heady mix. It was quite natural that the naked Greek body represented Dupain’s physical ideal and that this small statue then becomes a simple, but powerful symbol of that ideal. 67 Still life arrangement 1935 Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Vintage gelatin silver print, 25 x 30 cm Courtesy the Dupain Family and Josef Lebovic Gallery A surreal juxtaposition of shadow, glass and light. 68 37 38 Political heap and Classical statues 1936 Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Vintage gelatin silver print, 22 x 24.6 cm Courtesy the Dupain Family and Josef Lebovic Gallery Included in this gallery of 1930s political igures (top row, second left) is later Australian Prime Minister Ben Chiley (1945-49). At the time of the photograph Chiley had lost his seat in Parliament, possibly explaining the ‘political heap’ of the title. Intriguingly too, the small statue has now got its obviously broken arm at least temporarily back, in its hand a discus. The same broken arm, female head, and presumably pile of sand can be found in Dupain’s Homage to D.H. Lawrence 1936 (no. 16). 69 Untitled 1953 Konrad Cramer (German/American, 1888-1963) 39 Gelatin silver print, 25 x 20 cm Tampa Museum of Art. Gift of Mr and Mrs William Knight Zewadski 1989.109.193 Born in Germany, Cramer migrated to America in 1911, living the rest of his life in Woodstock. Originally an abstract painter, inluenced especially by Kandinsky, he became interested in the technical problems and possibilities of photography in creating abstraction. His wife Florence said that ‘he took up photography to clarify aesthetic issues in painting’, while his friend, the American photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), helped him realize the artistic power of the camera. 70 40 Hermaphrodite c.1865 James Anderson (English/Italian, 1813-1877) Albumen print, 20 x 26 cm Museum of Fine Arts, St Petersburg, Florida. Gift of William Knight Zewadski 2003.36.6 According to the Roman writer Ovid, Aphrodite gave birth to a son, Hermaphroditus, fathered by Hermes. Travelling the world, the beautiful young lad reached a strange pool where the water nymph Salmacis lived. Despite his resistance she raped him, ‘fool, ight me as you will’, and as she did their two bodies ‘merged into one, both blended in one form and face ... they two were two no more, neither man, nor woman’. This statue, the so-called ‘Sleeping Hermaphrodite’, was the second hermaphrodite to enter the Borghese collection. The irst, the more famous ‘Borghese Hermaphrodite’, discovered in Rome in the early 17th century, was sold to the Louvre in 1807 to be replaced in the collection by this one that had been found in 1781. 71 Canova, Pauline Bonaparte as Venus Victrix (Villa Borghese, Rome) 1860s James Anderson (English/Italian, 1813-1877) 41 Albumen print, 20 x 25.5 cm Collection of Mr William Knight Zewadski Antonio Canova was one of the leading Neo-Classical sculptors of the early 19th century. The model for his Venus Victrix, begun in 1805, was Pauline Bonaparte, sister of Napoleon and wife of Prince Camillo Borghese. While the statue’s head is a mostly true likeness of Pauline, the body is considered to be that of an idealised Neo-Classical woman. Did Pauline scandalously pose naked for Canova? Apocryphally, she certainly played along by suggesting, in answer to the question, ‘how could you pose wearing so little?’, that, ‘there was a stove in the studio’. James Anderson arrived in Rome in 1838 to study painting. By 1849, he had turned his hand to the new, increasingly popular medium of photography, subsequently becoming the leading photographer of Greek and Roman antiquities in the city for the tourist market. 72 42 Canova’s Venus, New York City 1982 Joel-Peter Witkin (American, b. 1939) Toned gelatin silver print, edition 13 of 15, 38 x 38 cm Collection of Mr William Knight Zewadski © Joel-Peter Witkin As with his earlier image of Lisa Lyon as the male Anavysos Kouros, Witkin toys with the gender of an iconic image. By making the subject male rather than female, he alludes not only to the tradition of Canova’s Venus (no. 41), but also to those other famous gender-benders in the Borghese collection, its famous pair of hermaphrodites (no. 40). 73 Bernard Berenson at the Borghese Gallery on his 90th birthday 1955 Chim [David (Szymin) Seymour] (Polish/American, 1911-1956) 43 Gelatin silver print, 22 x 32 cm Museum of Fine Arts, St Petersburg, Florida. Gift of William Knight Zewadski 2007.035.015 © David Seymour, Courtesy Magnum Photos, London ‘When Bernard Berenson, ‘BB’, the noted art historian, was celebrating his ninetieth birthday, Chim and I accompanied him on a nostalgic round of Roman museums as the old man revisited some of his favourite works of art. Together they savoured great churches and beautiful paintings, and gazed appreciatively at the splendid cold marble form of Pauline Borghese. Everywhere Chim’s camera would come out unobtrusively and catch the old man in his reveries. Everywhere, that is, except in the Museo delle Terme, where the guards adamantly refused Chim the right to photograph ‘the Professor’ as he wandered about. Chim put his camera back into its little black case and walked empty-handed alongside BB. He was completely frustrated as BB stood in an especially inviting spot. ‘Look at him’, said BB, amused by Chim’s obvious distress, ‘he’s like an addict without his dope.’ (Judith Friedberg, as quoted in David Seymour-‘Chim’, New York, 1974) In 1947, Chim, together with Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, was a founding member of Magnum Photos. 74 44 Epstein Retrospective, the Three Graces 1953 David Potts (Australian, b. 1926) Gelatin silver print, 27.3 x 24 cm Courtesy David Potts and Josef Lebovic Gallery The Three Graces were the goddesses of joy, charm and beauty. What on earth then would they have made of this scene – the two women with their sherry and sandwiches and the waiter counting his tips? 75 Epstein Retrospective, opening night 1953 David Potts (Australian, b. 1926) 45 Gelatin silver print, 31.5 x 29.5 cm Courtesy David Potts and Josef Lebovic Gallery Sir Jacob Epstein (1880-1959) was one of the great modernist sculptors of the 20th century. American-born, he went to Paris in 1902 where he studied at the Académie Julian. In 1905, he moved to England where he was to spend the rest of his life. One of his earliest, and typically controversial, commissions was the tomb of Oscar Wilde in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. In 1953, the Arts Council honoured Epstein with a retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London. Australian David Potts was in London from 1950-55 working as a photojournalist. 76 46 Museum opening with Canova’s Perseus 1975 Tod Papageorge (American, b. 1940) Gelatin silver print, 49 x 33.5 cm Tampa Museum of Art. Gift of Mr and Mrs William Knight Zewadski 1990.39.34 © Tod Papageorge 1975 Tod Papageorge’s 1975 Museum opening in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art mirrors David Potts’ 1953 Opening night at London’s Tate Gallery (no. 45). It could be the same man chatting up the two different women, both décolleté, both holding a drink, and both leaning somewhat inappropriately, and seamingly unaware, against a great work of art. 77 Untitled (radio valve, broken statue and seashell) 1937 Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 47 Vintage gelatin silver print, 30 x 24.5 cm Courtesy the Dupain Family and Josef Lebovic Gallery Resting on a Sydney newspaper with an advertisement for women’s swimsuits from the David Jones department store, lie a Classical statue representing the physical ideal (no. 36) and a broken sea shell representing female sexuality (no. 31). Perfect. 78 48 Night bather I 1939 Louise Dahl-Wolfe (American, 1895-1989) Gelatin silver print, 25.5 x 24 cm. Printed 1983 Tampa Museum of Art. Gift of Mr and Mrs William Knight Zewadski 1991.45.2 Between 1936 and 1958, Louise Dahl-Wolfe was a staff fashion photographer at Harper’s Bazaar working for many years with the legendary fashion editor Diana Vreeland. She was one of the irst to take fashion photography out of the studio and onto location – often overseas and exotic. At times she used her knowledge of art history to create surprising, often humorous, juxtapositions of models and works of art, as for example in Night Bather I, where her model’s pose mirrors that of a pool-side Medici Venus. Richard Avedon, who worked with her at Harper’s, said that she was ‘the deinition of elegance and beauty. She led the way out of the European tradition into the supremacy of American fashion photography.’ 79 Toto Koopman, dress by Augusta Bernard, Paris 1934 George Hoyningen-Huene (Russian/French/American, 1900-1968) 49 Gelatin silver print, 24.5 x 18 cm Tampa Museum of Art. Gift of Mr and Mrs William Knight Zewadski 1989.109.201 In 1932, a neoclassical-style evening gown by French designer Augusta Bernard was chosen by Vogue as the most beautiful dress of the year. The model, Catherina ‘Toto’ Koopman was considered to be one of the most beautiful women in Europe. In 1937, George Hoyningen-Huene visited Sydney to work on a fashion shoot for the David Jones department store. He endeared himself to local women by saying that, ‘I have found in Sydney the most interesting woman, as a type, that I have met in my recent travels. She is Folies Bergère, Manet, and Mae West all rolled into one.’ He also spent time in Sydney with Max Dupain, who in turn would appear to have been inluenced by Hoyningen-Huene’s aesthetic in his own fashion photography. 80 50 Dorian Leigh, dress by Giovannelli-Sciarra, Rome 1952 Genevieve Naylor (American, 1915-1989) Gelatin silver print, 26.5 x 26.5 cm Tampa Museum of Art. Gift of Mr and Mrs William Knight Zewadski 1989.109.207 Courtesy Corbis Images, Australia Twenty years younger than Louise Dahl-Wolfe (no. 48), Genevieve Naylor together with Richard Avedon and Irving Penn was one of the next generation of innovative fashion photographers working in New York in the 50s and 60s on Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. At her peak in the 40s and 50s, Dorian Leigh could justiiably be called one of the irst ‘super models’. Photographer Cecil Beaton described her as combining, ‘the sweetness of an 18th century pastel, the allure of a Sargent portrait, and the poignancy of some unfortunate woman who sat for Modigliani.’ 81 Marie-Lise Grey for She 1965 Lewis Morley (English/Australian, b. 1925) 51 Gelatin silver print, 37 x 29 cm © Courtesy Lewis Morley and Josef Lebovic Gallery Lewis Morley was one of the most signiicant chroniclers of fashion and celebrity life in London in the Swinging Sixties. Working from a studio above Peter Cook’s Establishment Club in Soho, he took the irst published photographs of models Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy as well as actors Michael Caine, Susannah York and Charlotte Rampling. He is perhaps best known for his photograph of notorious model Christine Keeler sitting naked on a chair, one of the deining images of that time. 82 52 Farnese Hercules: the lirt 1961 Herbert List (German, 1903-1975) Gelatin silver print, 29.5 x 20 cm Museum of Fine Arts, St Petersburg, Florida. Gift of William Knight Zewadski 2007.035.014 © Herbert List, Courtesy Magnum Photos, London It is fascinating to stand in this gallery in the Archaeological Museum in Naples and watch people’s reactions as they enter the room. Slowly, and often shyly, their eyes move up the body of the towering igure of the socalled Farnese Hercules. There he stands, leaning on his club, heroically exhausted, exposed in all his glory. In later life, List was to develop a passion for 16th-18th century drawings. It is surely no accident then that he chose to photograph the Farnese Hercules from exactly the same angle from which Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617) made his well-known engraving – even to including a single, as opposed to Goltzius’ two, fascinated observers. The statue, monumental in scale, was recovered from the Baths of Caracalla in Rome in 1546. It is a marble copy of a lost Greek bronze original of the 4th century BC. 83 Museum, Naples 1960 Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004) 53 Gelatin silver print, 24 x 36.5 cm Tampa Museum of Art. Gift of Mr and Mrs William Knight Zewadski 1993.33.1 © Henri Cartier-Bresson, Courtesy Magnum Photos, London The museum in Naples again, an eternal source of wonder. Two Venuses enchant two children. On the right the Callipygian Venus, she of ‘the beautiful bottom’; on the left, the Crouching Venus, disturbed at her bath. Both statues, as well as the Hercules in the previous image (no. 52) are from the famous Farnese Collection. The Farnese Collection of antiquities was begun by Alessandro Farnese in the early 16th century. Farnese was to become Pope Paul III (1543-49). In 1546, he had Michelangelo design the setting for his collection in the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. In 1731, the male line of the Farnese family died out, and the collection passed into the hands of the Bourbon kings of Naples. In 1787, despite strong opposition from the Pope, the collection was removed from Rome to what is now the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, where it remains today. Henri Cartier-Bresson was the master of the moment. ‘Photography is not like painting,’ he told The Washington Post in 1957: There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.’ (From Henri Cartier-Bresson’s obituary in The Washington Post, 5 Aug 2004) 84 54 Untitled (a child on the shoulders of the Venus de Milo) 1959 George Krause (American, b. 1937) Gelatin silver print, 17 x 11.5 cm Tampa Museum of Art. Gift of Mr and Mrs William Knight Zewadski 1989.109.203 © George Krause George Krause is a multi-award winning photographer. From 1957-59 he was in the US Army based in South Carolina, where, in his spare time, camera in hand, he documented life and culture in the segregated black communities of the surrounding areas. 85 Temple of Apollo, Pompeii c. 1890s Wilhelm von Plüschow (German 1852-1930) 55 Albumen print, 21.5 x 16 cm Museum of Fine Arts, St Petersburg, Florida. Gift of William Knight Zewadski 2003.36.90 Plüschow arrived in Rome in the 1870s and later moved on to Naples and the gay beau-monde of late 19th century Capri. Like his more famous cousin, Wilhelm von Gloeden, Plüschow began photographing willing, usually naked, young men in a posed classical setting. Less circumspect than von Gloeden, he was arrested on several occassions and charged with corrupting minors. Finally, in 1910 he left Italy for good. 86 56 Der Act #99 1894-95 Max Koch (German, 1854-1925) and Otto Rieth (German, 1858-1911) Photogravure, 19 x 15.5 cm Museum of Fine Arts, St Petersburg, Florida. Gift of William Knight Zewadski 2003.36.62 Der Act was a series of one hundred male and female nude photographs produced between 1894-95 by photographers Max Koch and Otto Rieth. Models were shown with and on classical architecture – a common Classical Alibi motif, and often duplicated or triplicated through the use of mirrors. For dramatic/erotic effect female models were often masked. By today’s standards, the caryatid-like male model of #99 seems unlikely, almost comic. Balding, somewhat labby, he is the very antithesis of the new muscular body-building ideal being created by Eugen Sandow (1867-1925, see page 135). 87 Nude youth standing by door c.1890s Wilhelm von Gloeden (German 1856-1931) 57 Albumen print, 16 x 11.5 cm Museum of Fine Arts, St Petersburg, Florida. Gift of William Knight Zewadski 2005.22.27 The multi award winning photographer, Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden is one of the key igures of gay cultural history. Working from his studio in Taormina on Sicily at the end of the 19th century, he is best known for his photographs of local young men and boys posed amongst the surrounding ruins of antiquity, either naked or in period costume. Hero. For some, von Gloeden was a genius. ‘Von Gloeden interests you, he holds you, he distracts you, he astonishes you, one feels that this pleasure comes from an accumulation of contradictions. He produces a world at the same time realistic and immensely fake, a world without illusions yet madder than the maddest dreams ... [The result is] a delicious contradiction of all the literary baggage from a Greek version of Antiquity peopled with little peasant gigolos’ dark bodies.’ (Roland Barthes, from his introduction to Taormina: Wilhelm von Gloeden, 1978) 88 58 Youth with sculpture 1900 Wilhelm von Gloeden (German 1856-1931) Albumen print, 16 x 12 cm Tampa Museum of Art. Gift of Mr and Mrs William Knight Zewadski 1996.057.031 Villain. For others, von Gloeden was appalling. ‘What makes us cringe the most – after the kitsch taste of the photographer and the grotesqueness of the ‘Classical’ props he’s placed in the grubby hands of bewildered farmers – are his stage directions. He’s obviously instructed his boys to leer at each other lustfully or to gaze soulfully at one another’s ripe genitalia. ... We are far from the world of the hairless, modest, small-sexed, proud ephebe; the ‘Greek Alibi’ has never been invoked more carelessly, more grossly.’ (Edmund White, ‘Eros and Photography’, in M. Scheler & M. Harder (eds.), Herbert List: The Monograph, 2000) 89 The pipes of Pan 1905 (from Camera Work no. 23, 1908) Clarence H. White (American, 1871-1925) 59 Photogravure, 20 x 15 cm Tampa Museum of Art. Gift of Mr and Mrs William Knight Zewadski 1989.109.214 ‘I think that if I were asked to name the most subtle and reined master photography has produced, that I would name him ... To be a true artist in photography one must also be an artist in life, and Clarence H. White was such an artist.’ (Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882-1966), Alvin Langdon Coburn, Photographer, 1966). The children, possibly White’s own, were photographed in the summer of 1905 when White was staying with Fred Holland Day in Maine. 90 60 Untitled (woman with pan pipes before a Classical herm) 1890s Unknown photographer Photogravure, 14 x 9 cm Collection of Mr William Knight Zewadski A postcard sent quite openly through the French postal system, addressed to a Monsieur Roberts, 17 rue Madeleine, Roanne (Loire) and postmarked ‘Roanne 1893’. Roanne is a small town on the river Loire in central France close to the Monts de la Madeleine. The rue Madeleine no longer survives. 91 Boys wrestling 1905 (from Camera Work no. 23, 1908) Clarence H. White (American, 1871-1925) 61 Photogravure, 21.5 x 15.5 cm Museum of Fine Arts, St Petersburg, Florida. Gift of William Knight Zewadski 2003.36.10 White again uses children in a Classical setting (no. 59). On the left, in the shadows, stands an ivy wreathed column of stone with a carved bearded head. It appears to be watching intently as two naked young boys wrestle in a sunlit woodland clearing, while two other equally naked boys lie on the ground watching. The headed column is a herm, a boundary marker (seen too in the previous postcard, no. 60). In ancient Greece, herms, representing Hermes – the liminal god of boundaries – stood at crossroads and borders. They were potentially transgressive, to go beyond them was dangerous. They were also apotropaic, offering protection to those that did. As well as a carved head, herms usually had carved genitals, often erect. There is then something of the unspoken, potentially dangerous in this otherwise idyllic scene. 92 62 Untitled c.1903 (from Camera Work no. 15, 1906) George Seeley (American, 1880-1955) Photogravure, 12 x 15 cm Museum of Fine Arts, St Petersburg, Florida. Gift of William Knight Zewadski Seeley’s photographs have the same softly focused painterly quality of other Pictorialists working at the beginning of the 20th century such as Fred Holland Day, who irst encouraged him and Alfred Stieglitz, who published him in Camera Work. Although much of his work is characterised by a romantic sentimentality, he was to become one of the irst photographers to realise the possibilities of landscape as abstraction. 93 Narcissus 1-5 1986 Duane Michals (American, b. 1932) Sequence of ive gelatin silver prints, each 8.75 x 13.25 cm Tampa Museum of Art. Gift of Mr and Mrs William Knight Zewadski 1989.109.204.a-e © Duane Michals, Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York ‘I am a relection photographing other relections within a relection.’ (Duane Michals as quoted by Marco Livingstone, ‘Duane Michals Through the Looking Glass’) ‘I think that different ideas demand different solutions. I came to do sequences because I’m narrative and I tell a story so the ‘decisive moment’ doesn’t work for me all the time. I need a moment before and a moment after to expand the concept ... I consider most photographers to be newspaper reporters. They walk around the street with a camera and they photograph whatever they happen to ind, but what they found they did not invent. Whether Cartier Bresson was there or not these people would have had their lunch along the Seine. He happened to take their picture, they were historical fact and he very elegantly recorded that fact. In my situation what I photograph is completely out of my imagination ... I’m much more of a novelist. But that’s not to say we shouldn’t have newspaper reporters, I just think we should have more novelists.’ (Duane Michals in interview with Rosa Olivares, ‘The Photographer who liked to write stories’) Both quotes from EXIT #0 ‘The mirror’ Nov 2000Jan 2001 www.exitmedia.net 63 94 64 Morning 1937 Herbert List (German, 1903-1975) Gelatin silver print, 33 x 22 cm Collection of Mr William Knight Zewadski The fashion photographer Bruce Weber, in his introduction to Herbert List: The Monograph, tells how in the 1980s he was asked by Calvin Klein to photograph his underwear campaign. ‘Where do you want to go?’, Klein asked. ‘I thought about John Ford and Monument Valley. I thought about Andrew Wyeth and Maine. And then it hit me: Herbert List and Santorini.’ (B. Weber in M. Scheler & M. Harder, Herbert List: The Monograph (2000) p. 19). 95 Beneath the Poseidon temple 1937 Herbert List (German, 1903-1975) 65 Gelatin silver print, 29.5 x 27.5 cm Collection of Mr William Knight Zewadski ‘Living lesh and the sculpted stone are brought together in arrangements which have a kind of dramatic stillness in their settings of landscape and seascape. Often the male nude or seminude here seems a key unlocking the sexuality enshrined in stone and the Greek countryside. At the same time the nude igure, under the inluence of the setting of chiseled stone and severe landscape, becomes erotic rather than purely sensual – bridling sensuality with the aesthetic. Sometimes the imagery of the Greek statues seems to invade – prettify almost – the youthful nudes’. (Stephen Spender, ‘Der junge Herbert List’, in G. Metken (ed.), Herbert List (1980) p. 7) 96 66 Foro Italico, boxer 1994 George Mott (American) Gelatin silver print, 34 x 21.5 cm Collection of Mr William Knight Zewadski © George Mott 1994 The Foro Italico, built on the banks of the Tiber to the north of Rome, is today one of the classic monuments of Fascist modernist architecture. It is also a testament to the grandiose megalomania of one man’s attempt to set himself alongside the great forum builders of earlier Rome, Augustus and Trajan. Originally called the Foro Mussolini, it was a vast complex completed in 1932 to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Fascist Revolution that had seen Mussolini’s rise to power. Its statues boasted both the physical and the assumed moral superiority of Fascist youth. The boxer is one of sixty towering, four metre tall, naked statues representing all forms of (male) sporting activity surrounding the Foro’s Stadio dei Marmi. 97 Untitled movie still (Archival footage of Adolf Hitler with the Discobolus from the ilm The Architecture of Doom, First Run Features, release date 1989) Peter Cohen (Swedish, b. 1946) 67 Gelatin silver print, 18 x 24 cm Collection of Mr William Knight Zewadski © Peter Cohen/Poj Filmproduktion AB Adolf Hitler stands in the Glyptotek Museum in Munich looking somewhat bored with his latest acquisition. In 1938, with the compliance of Mussolini and against the wishes of many in the Italian government, he bought the Discobolus Palombara from the Massimo family in Rome. The Discobolus, or discus thrower, was of course, a Fascist icon, seen memorably in the prologue of Leni Riefenstahl’s 1938 ilm of the Berlin Olympic Games, Olympia. It appears as the transitory symbol from the beauty of ancient sculpture to the athleticism of modern youth. This was the most famous Roman copy of Myron’s now lost, celebrated 5th century BC bronze original. It was returned to Rome in 1948. The relationship between art and political power, beyond the overtly propagandist has always been complex, and usually worrying. Richard Walker, for example, was curator of the British Government Art Collection from 1950 until the late 70s. In this capacity he supplied pictures for the walls of 10 Downing Street. Most Prime Ministers appreciated him, others less so. Winston Churchill, on being offered a Dutch seascape, replied, ‘No thanks, I can paint my own’. Harold Wilson preferred photos of himself to ‘namby pamby’ Gainsboroughs, and when Walker told Margaret Thatcher: ‘I’ve come to speak to you about art in your ofice’, she replied, ‘I’m not interested in art, goodbye’. 98 68 Revenge on culture 1940 Lee Miller (American, 1907-1977) Gelatin silver print, 25.5 x 25.5 cm Tampa Museum of Art. Gift of Mr and Mrs William Knight Zewadski 1989.109.205 The photograph, taken in London in 1940 during the Blitz, shows the head and torso of a female statue, half buried under the debris from a German bomb. The photographer, Lee Miller, was an accredited war correspondent working for Vogue and its parent company Condé Nast. She recorded the Blitz, was in France shortly after the D-Day Landings in 1944, was the only photographer at the siege of St. Malo (where napalm was used for the irst time in Europe), and in 1945 was the irst photojournalist to report the horrors of the concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald. From the camps, Miller was sent to Munich where colleague David Scherman, of Life Magazine, photographed her taking her irst bath in weeks. Their billet, at Wasserburgerstrasse 12, was the former house of Eva Braun, Hitler’s mistress. The bath was Hitler’s own. The picture was to become iconic. 99 Man leading horse, by Bernhard Bleeker, Munich 1946 Herbert List (German, 1903-1975) 69 Gelatin silver print, 23.5 x 32 cm Museum of Fine Arts, St Petersburg, Florida. Gift of William Knight Zewadski 2005.022.029 In 1941, following the German occupation, List left Athens. In 1946, he was in Munich to record the devastation of war. Taking little or no moral stance on the horror, both human and structural, that surrounded him, he instead used his experience of photographing the ruins of Ancient Greece to create a hauntingly beautiful record of the ruins of modern Munich. This fallen bronze statue of a man once leading a horse that stood outside the Technical University, through List’s lens, becomes symbolic of the culture of an entire nation. As such, and despite List’s typical lack of emotion, the picture is a harrowing counterpoint to Miller’s ‘Revenge on Culture’ (no. 68). 100 70 Plaster casts, Academy I 1946 Herbert List (German, 1903-1975) Gelatin silver print, 29 x 23 cm Collection of Mr William Knight Zewadski Broken plaster cast statues litter the snow in the Munich Academy. The snow, in imitation of the bright light of Greece, throws the igures into sharp relief. At irst sight, they could be human. There is an obvious interplay between sculpture and the naked body in List’s Greek photographs; the two at times appear interchangeable. This however is something different. The interplay between living and dead becomes horribly ironic in the context of devastated Munich. 101 Three stereos of modern gladiators c.1900 Unknown photographer 71 Gelatin silver print, each 8 x 15 cm Collection of Mr William Knight Zewadski A classic example of the Classical Alibi. Using a special stereoscope viewer, each double image appears in 3D. If you look closely you will see that each pair of photographs is slightly different. It is this difference that creates the 3D effect, the altered perspective enhancing the depth of perception. 102 72 Greco-Roman wrestlers (from Animal Locomotion) 1887 Eadweard J Muybridge (English/American, 1830-1904) Collotype, 17 x 44 cm Museum of Fine Arts, St Petersburg, Florida. Gift of William Knight Zewadski 2005.022.031 Eadweard Muybridge (born Edward Muggeridge) is best known for his series of photographs demonstrating the locomotion of animals. He was the irst to prove that all four legs of a horse left the ground when it was at the gallop. Between 1883 and 1886, working at the University of Pennsylvania, he took over 100,000 sequential photographs using multiple cameras of people and animals in motion. The people, both male and female and usually naked, demonstrated how the body moved during both simple acts such as going up and down steps and complex ones such as physical exercise. Muybridge was also a murderer. In 1874, suspecting that his wife was having an affair, he approached the supposed lover Harry Larkyns and with the words, ‘Good evening Major, my name is Muybridge and here is the answer to the letter you sent my wife’, shot him. He was acquitted on the basis that the crime was ‘a justiiable homicide’. 103 Vassos Kanellos, known for his ‘Cymbal Dance’, at the Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco, May 1927 Unknown photographer 73 Gelatin silver print, 15.5 x 20.5 cm Collection of Mr William Knight Zewadski ‘Vassos Kanellos, recently from Athens, and a ballet headed by Thalia Zanou, will give modern and classic Greek dances at the Greenwich Village Theatre tonight. Their program includes ‘The Faun of Arcady’, ‘Spartan Eurythmics’, ‘Homeric Dance’, and ‘Peasant Romance’, all to native Greek melodies’. (The New York Times, March 28, 1920). As a young man in Greece, Kanellos met and was inspired by Isadora Duncan (1877-1927) to study ancient Greek dance and culture. Throughout his life, he carried a lock of her hair. Arriving in America in 1920, his ‘charming manner, dark eyes, accent, and a considerable skill’, soon made him a society favourite. With their patronage, he formed his own company of classical dancers. Touring the world, he was hailed as ‘the foremost dancer of Greece’ and of Classical revival dance. The palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco was built in 1915, its eclectic architecture inspired by ancient Greece and Rome. 104 74 The dancer Nikolska in the Parthenon 1929 Nelly (Elli Souyoultoglou-Seraïdari) (Greek, 1899-1998) Vintage gelatin silver print, 15.5 x 21.5 cm Museum of Fine Arts, St Petersburg, Florida. Gift of William Knight Zewadski 2003.36.58 Diaphanously clothed like some ancient Greek statue, the Hungarian dancer Nikolska relects ideally, in the perfect setting, the grace and rhythm of Classical revival dance. Such dance grew out of contemplation of the movement implicit in Greek sculpture, as well as out of more relaxed attitudes to display of the human body. It stressed coordination and physical itness and drew heavily for storylines on Greek mythology and pastoral themes. These themes, together with the freer movements and natural rhythm of the dance, were a ready source of inspiration for the modern dance of Nijinsky, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes looking to break free from the restrictions of traditional ballet. Nelly’s photographs of naked dancers on the Acropolis caused a great scandal which of course ensured her reputation. 105 David Lichine in L’après-midi d’un faune 1940 Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 75 Vintage gelatin silver print, 24 x 19.5 cm Courtesy the Dupain Family and Josef Lebovic Gallery L’après-midi d’un faune was choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky (1890-1950) for Serge Diaghilev’s company, Ballets Russes. It was irst performed in Paris on 29 May 1912, with Nijinsky dancing the role of the Faun. Both the ballet and score to which it was set, Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, were inspired by the poem of the same name by Stéphane Mallarmé. Following Diaghilev’s death in 1929, two competing companies formed to continue his tradition – Col. W. de Basil’s Ballets Russes in 1932 and the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo in 1938. It was the former of these that toured Australia on three occasions between 1936 and 1940, bringing with it many renowned dancers, including the Russian born David Lichine (1910-1972). Despite their name, and the presence of Russian-born talent, the companies never performed in Russia. 106 76 Nicholas Magallanes and Francisco Moncion in Balanchine’s Orpheus I 1948 George Platt Lynes (American, 1907-1955) Gelatin silver print, 23 x 20 cm Museum of Fine Arts, St Petersburg, Florida. Gift of William Knight Zewadski 2003.36.2. In 1948, Lincoln Kirstein and George Balanchine founded the New York City Ballet (NYCB). The Russian-born Balanchine had previously worked with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris. With music by Stravinsky, and Francisco Moncion playing the Dark Angel opposite Magallanes in the title role, his ballet, Orpheus, was the company’s irst production. Kirstein commissioned his friend George Platt Lynes to photograph the new company at work. This in turn led to an invitation from the photographer to Magallanes and Moncion to reprise their pas de deux naked in his studio. Indeed, these two photographs should more correctly be called, ‘Nicholas Magallanes and Francisco Moncion posing naked for George Platt Lynes’ (actual performance would of course have been costumed). Props for Orpheus, including the lyre, were designed by the prominent American artist and landscape architect Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988). This same lyre became the irst of several to be used as the symbol of the NYCB. 107 Nicholas Magallanes and Francisco Moncion in Balanchine’s Orpheus II 1948 George Platt Lynes (American, 1907-1955) 77 Gelatin silver print, 18.5 x 23.5 cm Museum of Fine Arts, St Petersburg, Florida. Gift of William Knight Zewadski 2007.35.12 ‘I don’t have an unpretentious bone in my body’. (George Platt Lynes) From the 1930s to the early 50s, the photographer George Platt Lynes, together with his friends Lincoln Kirstein and Paul Cadmus, was at the centre of New York’s powerfully inluential gay artistic scene. Shortly before his death in 1955, he destroyed most of his life’s work of fashion photographs, choosing instead to be remembered for his portraits and nudes. Unfortunately his death coincided with the rise of Abstract Expressionism and the decline of Surrealist-inspired Realism typical of his photography. His remaining work fell into obscurity, a victim of contemporary morality. His legacy is an extraordinary evocation of the naked body; a catalogue of some of the most beautiful men of the day, many of whom, both straight and gay, obscure and famous, readily stripped off for him. ‘When I get done photographing you, you will never want to be photographed by anyone else again’, he told the dancer Francisco Moncion. 108 78 Actaeon 1937 George Platt Lynes (American, 1907-1955) Gelatin silver print, 24.5 x 19 cm Collection of Mr William Knight Zewadski From Platt Lynes’ Mythology series of the late 1930s. In Greek mythology, Actaeon was in the woods hunting with his dogs when inadvertently, or so he claimed, he stumbled across the goddess Artemis [Diana] bathing naked in a pool. As punishment, she turned him into a stag to be torn to pieces by his own dogs. The gods could be very cruel. Artemis’ bother Apollo had the satyr Marsyas lailed alive for daring to suggest that he was the better musician. And working together, the divine siblings, both famous archers, killed the ten children of the mortal Niobe for suggesting that she was a better mother their mother, Leto. Hubris and perving on (some) naked goddesses can be very dangerous. 109 Barbarian prisoner and Callipygian Venus (also known as Vice and Versailles) 1956 Robert Doisneau (French, 1912-1994) 79 Gelatin silver print, 24 x 36 cm Tampa Museum of Art. Gift of Mr and Mrs William Knight Zewadski 1990.39.28 © Robert DOISNEAU/RAPHO Verisimilitude in the landscape. Given the coyness and anger of Artemis (no. 78), it’s good to know that at least one of the goddesses didn’t mind being caught with her clothes off. In fact just the opposite. Of course, it does help if you’re the goddess of sexual love and desire and have a beautiful bottom. The delightful Callipygian Venus again (no. 53). 110 80 Paris, Parc de St.-Cloud 1981 Édouard Boubat (French, 1923-1999) Gelatin silver print, 35.5 x 24 cm Tampa Museum of Art. Gift of Mr and Mrs William Knight Zewadski 1990.39.26 © the Estate of Édouard Boubat ‘There are certain pictures I can never take. We turn on the TV and are smothered with cruelty and suffering and I don’t need to add to it. So I just photograph peaceful things. A vase of lowers, a beautiful girl. Sometimes, through a peaceful face, I can bring something important into the world.’ (Edouard Boubat, 1991) 111 St.-Cloud 1987 Allan Janus (American, b. 1951) 81 Lith-print, 5.5 x 13 cm Tampa Museum of Art. Gift of Mr and Mrs William Knight Zewadski 1990.39.31 © Allan Janus The seasonality of life. Autumn and the Callipygian Venus. The leaves are deep. Winter approaches. With spring will come new life. As the goddess of physical desire Venus/Aphrodite was central to the creation of new life. 112 82 Adam and Eve, Ladew Gardens, Maryland 1983 Allan Janus (American, b. 1951) Lith-print, 5.5 x 13 cm Tampa Museum of Art. Gift of Mr and Mrs William Knight Zewadski 1989.109.202 © Allan Janus A strangely disquieting image, more Armageddon than the Garden of Eden. The season of the year gives a feeling of desolation, more battleield than paradise. But then again, is that not ultimately what the Garden became – a scene of defeat and retreat? 113 Bacchus in the mountains 1989 Eric Lindbloom (American, b. 1934) 83 Gelatin silver print, 19 x 23.5 cm Tampa Museum of Art. Gift of Mr and Mrs William Knight Zewadski 1990.39.33 © Eric Lindbloom Bacchus/Dionysos is the great god of wine-drinking, of theatrical performance, and of death. Implicit in these processes is the concept of ekstasis – ecstasy – literally the stepping/standing outside of the body. In stepping out one becomes, temporarily, as an immoderate wine-drinker drunk, as an actor another person, and in the ultimate out-of-body experience, dead. Bacchus/Dionysos is the god of transition, the god who enables the return to the body in sobering up, in removing the mask, and in existence in the afterlife. Without him, there is only oblivion. Bacchus in the mountains, as a title, is hauntingly reminiscent of Euripides’ terrifying play, irst performed in 405 BC, the Bacchae – a play about the consequences of denying the god. Pentheus, king of Thebes and cousin of Bacchus/Dionysos, is torn to pieces after being discovered spying on the god’s possessed female followers, the bacchantes, celebrating in the mountains. Among the bacchantes is Pentheus’s own mother, who the next day, still possessed arrives back in Thebes with her son’s head impaled on the end of her ritual staff, the thyrsos. This beautiful, youthful Bacchus (as with the equally dangerous Eros – beware the youth, beware the beauty) stands on a crest overlooking foothills on the western bank of the Hudson River most ittingly in the Benmarl Vineyard, the oldest continuously cultivated vineyard in the United States. 114 84 One who watches (Courances, France) 1997 Michael Kenna (English, b. 1953) Gelatin silver print, 19.5 x 19.5 cm Collection of Mr William Knight Zewadski © Michael Kenna Michael Kenna photographs the landscape, not people. Sculptured igures, when they appear in his landscapes, have an eerily meditative quality, hence the title of this photograph. The château of Courances lies to the south of Paris on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleu. Its garden has been described as ‘one of the loveliest in France’. 115 Untitled (Woman photographing Neo-Classical sculpture in Berlin) c.1930 Friedrich Seidenstucker (German, 1882-1966) 85 Gelatin silver print, 18 x 13 cm Tampa Museum of Art. Gift of Mr and Mrs William Knight Zewadski 1990.039.021 With hindsight, an image that evokes comedy and tragedy in equal measure. On the one hand, a fur-coated woman strains, almost falling over backwards to get the looming statue into frame. On the other hand, the statue and its location in Berlin are now forgotten; a victim of the horrors of war and its random disregard for art perhaps. Ironically, Seidenstucker is best known for the series of photographs he took of war-devastated Berlin in 1945. 116 86 Apollo Belvedere. Botanic Gardens, Sydney c.1890-1915 Unidentiied photographer for Kerry & Co Archival carbon pigment ink print from scan of gelatin silver print, 22.5 x 16.5 cm Macleay Museum, The University of Sydney HP 83.60.114 Today it is hard to appreciate the signiicance of this statue on Western thought and art. Thousands of copies have been made, of which this is just one. In 1764, Johann Winckelmann, a German antiquarian based in Rome, published his History of Ancient Art. It was a work that was to deine and standardise the concept of the Classical aesthetic. Its scholarly approach to art and archaeology was to become connoisseurship, where subjective aesthetic intuition is seen to be grounded in objective scholarly knowledge. If any work of art was to embody Winckelmann’s aesthetic – a passionate vision of the past imbued with sensuality – it would be the ‘absolute beauty’ of this statue, the so-called Apollo Belvedere, the original of which is in the Vatican. In a subtle homo-erotic paean to male beauty, he called it ‘beyond human’, suggesting that ‘an eternal springtime, like that of the blissful Elysian Fields, clothes the alluring virility of his mature years with a pleasing youth, and plays with soft tenderness upon the lofty structure of his limbs’. ‘His muscles’, Winckelmann eulogised, ‘are subtle, blown like molten glass into scarcely visible undulations and more apparent to the touch than to sight’. The Apollo Belvedere was, he added, ‘the highest ideal of art among all the works of antiquity that have escaped its destruction’. 117 Venus. Botanic Gardens, Sydney c.1908-1915 87 Unknown photographer Archival pigment ink print from scan of original postcard, 7.5 x 13.5 cm Royal Botanic Gardens Library, Sydney. Sir Clifford Smith Postcard Collection c.1880-1994, album 70 ‘A protest was uttered by Archbishop Kelly yesterday against a nude statue of Venus being exhibited in the Botanic Gardens. He was addressing the girl pupils of St Scholastica’s College at Glebe Point, and pointing out to them that marriages with Protestants were against the law of the Church. He said that marriage was under the divinity of the Virgin Mary and referred to the Pagan deities that had previously presided over marriages. Venus amongst them. Archbishop Kelly said he had been walking in one of the public gardens of Sydney [the Botanic Gardens] that morning and he saw a naked statue of Venus [in the bushes on the right]. He thought it was very bad taste on the part of the authorities to publicly expose such a statue. It might be a work of art, but it was work that would be better hidden away’. (Sydney Morning Herald, 6 December 1911) 118 88 Botanic Gardens, Sydney c.1875-1900 John Paine (English/Australian, 1833-1908) Archival pigment ink print from scan of gelatin silver print, 15 x 25.5 cm Macleay Museum, The University of Sydney HP 82.39.14 In 1915, as a result of Archbishop Kelly’s comments (no. 87), a morality campaign led to the removal of Venus and Apollo from the Botanic Gardens. In the early 1920s orders were given that they should be destroyed. ‘There should be nothing in a public park to wound the susceptibilities of any citizen. A man should be able to pass through a park without seeing anything that will bring a blush to the cheek of his wife, his daughter, his sweetheart or any other woman or child’. (JH Maiden, 1903) 119 Lo Spinario (boy extracting a thorn from his foot), Botanic Gardens, Sydney c.1890-1915 Unidentiied photographer for Kerry & Co 89 Archival carbon pigment ink print from scan of gelatin silver print, 22.5 x 16.5 cm Macleay Museum, The University of Sydney HP 83.60.119 It is ironic that the church-driven scandal surrounding the display of naked male and female sculpture in early 20th century Sydney did not touch this marble sculpture of a naked boy. It remained, and remains, on display. The original bronze sculpture, of which this is a marble 19th century copy, was made in the 1st century BC. It is in the Capitoline Museums in Rome. 120 90 Artist sketching the Venus de Milo n.d. Philip Delamotte (English, 1820-1889) Albumen print half stereograph, 6.5 x 6 cm Tampa Museum of Art. Gift of Mr and Mrs William Knight Zewadski 1989.109.028 In 1847, Philip Delamotte and Roger Fenton founded the Calotype Club in London, the irst photographic club in England. It was named after the photographic process invented in 1841 by Henry Fox Talbot. Fenton was to become famous for his images of the Crimean War (1854-1856), Delamotte for his evocative recording of the dismantling of the original Crystal Palace, built in Hyde Park, London for the Great Exhibition of 1851, and of its subsequent reassembly in Sydenham where it stood until 1936. 121 Paris, L’Académie Julian 1931 Brassaï [Gyula Halász], (Hungarian/French, 1899-1984) 91 Gelatin silver print, 37 x 27.5 cm Tampa Museum of Art. Gift of Mr and Mrs William Knight Zewadski 1996.57.29 The following three photographs of art schools illustrate the size, quality and importance of their cast collections of antique sculpture (nos. 91-93). The Académie Julian was founded in Paris in 1868. Pupils included Henri Matisse, André Derain, Fernand Léger as well as Australians Will Ashton, Hans Heysen, and for a few months in 1873, Julian Ashton (see no. 93). Gyula Halász arrived in Paris in 1924. He irst found fame with his moody pictures of Paris published in 1933 as Paris de nuit. His home town of Brassó in Hungarian Transsylvania was the inspiration for his pseudonym, Brassaï. 122 92 Portrait of Thomas J Heatherley (1824-1914) with a man, probably his son Frank, in the Antique Room of Heatherley’s School of Fine Arts in Chelsea, London c. 1880s Unknown photographer Albumen print, 20.5 x 15.5 cm Tampa Museum of Art. Gift of Mr and Mrs William Knight Zewadski 1996.57.26 Heatherley’s is the oldest surviving independent art school in London. Founded in 1845, it was also the irst art school to admit women on equal terms with men. Former students include Millais, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Lord Leighton, Sir Edward Poynter (also irst Professor of the Slade School of Art), Walter Crane, Walter Sickert, Russell Flint, and Michael Ayrton. 123 Julian Ashton’s cast room c.1930 Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 93 Vintage gelatin silver print, 23 x 30 cm Courtesy the Dupain Family and Josef Lebovic Gallery The Julian Ashton Art School in Sydney was founded in 1906, taking the name of its eponymous founder in 1935. Ashton’s students included Thea Proctor, William Dobell, Jean Belette and Max Dupain. In 1930, Dupain began a three year apprenticeship with Sydney photographer Cecil Bostock. Out of hours he studied at the Julian Ashton Art School. In this humorous image sit two cultural icons that no doubt played an important part in the physical and mental development of the young photographer. On the extreme left is a bust of Patroclus – a similar copy of which was in the collection of, and much photographed by, Henry Fox Talbot, the father of modern photography (see no. 94). In the centre sits the second icon, a true Australian one, a tin of Arnott’s Famous Biscuits, date sandwiches to be precise. 124 94 Bust of Patroclus 1843 (William) Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Salt print from calotype negative, 15 x 14.5 cm Tampa Museum of Art. Gift of Mr and Mrs William Knight Zewadski 1994.37.1 Henry Fox Talbot was a gentleman scholar, scientist and historian – a polymath so typical of his time. In 1833, while on honeymoon on Lake Como, he irst realised the possibility of, quite literally, capturing images on treated paper – what we now know as the (pre-digital) photograph. Working from his home, Lacock Abey in Wiltshire in England, Talbot continued his experiments. Finally in 1841, he was able to announce the perfection of the process he called the ‘calotype’ (from the Greek kalos – beautiful and typos – image). Using different angles and lighting conditions, he made at least forty-seven experimental copies of this one plaster cast, said romantically but probably inaccurately, to be of the Greek hero Patroclus. This extremely fragile salt print carries the date 9 August 1843. Lacock Abbey is now owned by the National Trust and houses the Fox Talbot Museum. 125 Nicholson Museum 1953 Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) 95 Vintage gelatin silver print, 22.2 x 30.2 cm The University of Sydney Art Collection UA1996.81.82 In 1952-53, Max Dupain was commissioned to record student and academic life at the University of Sydney, as well as to interpret in his own way the architecture and fabric of its buildings. Several photographs were taken in the University’s Nicholson Museum, home to the largest collection of antiquities in Australia. By 1961, the museum was so full of plaster casts and modern, mostly 19th century marble reproductions that it had become increasingly impossible to either display or appreciate the nearly 30,000 genuine artefacts in the collection. Prior to a complete 1960s makeover of the museum, the decision was taken therefore to dispose of many of the copies. Most were given away to public institutions and schools, some to art schools. With hindsight, it might seem unfortunate that so much was swept away. Indeed, only two objects in Dupain’s photograph now remain in the collection – the Augustus Prima Porta and the bust of Commodus (left, top and bottom); both are now treasures of the museum. 126 96 Untitled (SoHo, New York City) n.d. Photographer unidentiied Gelatin silver print, 20.5 x 25.5 cm Collection of Mr William Knight Zewadski Who or what is an icon? David meets Elvis in New York. I remember standing in the grounds of the ancient temple complex at Paestum in Southern Italy. Outside the museum was a stall selling full size plaster replicas of the wonders inside including a full set of Snow White and the seven dwarves. And Elvis too, of course. 127 Untitled (three men laughing at a postcard of an ithyphallic satyr) 1976 Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984) 97 Gelatin silver print, 23 x 34 cm Tampa Museum of Art. Gift of Mr and Mrs William Knight Zewadski 1994.37.50 © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco So proliic was Garry Winogrand as the street photographer par excellence of New York in the 60s and 70s, that on his death he left (in a pre digital age) nearly 300,000 unedited images and over 2,500 undeveloped rolls of ilm. A small format 35mm Leica camera enabled him to shoot quickly and freely, ever ready, as here, to seize the moment. 128 98 Watchman, Cinecittà 1956 William Klein (American/French, b. 1928) Gelatin silver print, 44 x 34.5 cm Tampa Museum of Art. Gift of Mr and Mrs William Knight Zewadski 1994.37.48 © William Klein Given the raw, even primitive, edginess of Klein’s street photography, this image of a watchman at the Cinecittà ilm studios in Rome owes more to the fashion photography the young American was making his name for in the mid 50s (together with the likes of Weegee, Diane Arbus and Irving Penn). Cinecittà was founded by Mussolini in 1937 under the slogan ‘cinema is the most powerful weapon’. Disillusioned with America, the radical Klein gave photography away in the mid 60s to concentrate on ilmmaking. His 1968 feature, the satire Mr Freedom was described by critic Jonathan Rosenbaum as ‘conceivably the most anti-American movie ever made’. Unsurprisingly, although born in New York, Klein has lived in France since his late teens. The sculpture is a copy of a famous marble statue of two pankratiasts, or wrestlers, in the Ufizi Gallery in Florence. The bronze original, now lost, was made in the 3rd century BC. This copy was no doubt a prop used in one of the many historical ilms shot at Cinecittà. These have included Quo Vadis?, Ben Hur and Cleopatra. 129 130 reflecTions of a collecTor WilliaM K. ZeWadsKi 131 reflecTions of a collecTor The classical alibi, or hoW nudiTy in phoToGraphy found cover in The classics WilliaM K. ZeWadsKi Inspired, spoofed, misunderstood, plagiarised, and copied: the Classical tradition in art has for over a hundred and ifty years served as a ‘Classical alibi’, used to justify and inspire photographic images of male and female nudity, homoeroticism, or, even (as the 19th century might have it) purity and beauty. Wherever one turns, it is impossible to escape the classical world in this ield. Even the very language one uses reminds us of the classical past. ‘Nude’, ‘classical’, ‘alibi’, ‘eroticism’, ‘photography’, ‘hetero-‘ and ‘homosexuality’ – all derive from Greek or Latin. It is interesting that society has so readily embraced the epitome of the heroic and athletic body as conceived in 5th-century Athens (and the Greek female ideal of a hundred years later), rather than the body shapes of other venerated iconic traditions such as the corpulent Buddha or Grunewald’s emaciated Christ on the Cross. Instead, we prefer the ideal of the slender body of the prepubescent Greek ephebe, beloved on Greek vases and sculptures from the sixth century BC (ig. 1), and his slightly later counterpart, the more mature muscular perfections of Polyclitus, Praxiteles and Lysippos (ig. 2); sculptures which represent a vision of the heroic and athletic perfection and whose echoes can be found in Roman derivatives, most notably in statues of Antinous (cat. no. 2). Fig. 1 Acropolis excavated (Kritios Boy and the Moschophoros) 1866 [Catalogue no. 1] It was this vision that was picked up in the Renaissance by artists such as Raphael, Poussin, Lorrain and Titian, and then used in the subsequent Baroque period, before becoming part of the Academic tradition. The 18th-century discovery of Pompeii and the inluence of the Grand Tour on art continued the trend, while the 19th-century invention of the camera – with its ability to mimic these historic images – meant that the creation of a Classical imitation only required a model with a good body and some bit of relevant costume (and the less tunic or leather skirt present, the better). 132 The exhibition Exposed: Photography & the Classical Nude analyses this tradition in photography. It presents landmark images of the evolving use and abuse of the Classical tradition in photographs of men and women over a period of more than a hundred and ifty years. Throughout this history, there has always been a strong erotic subtext. As Thomas Waugh writes in his insightful book Hard to Imagine, the artistic images that started to emerge in the early days of photography – with wreaths, costumes and classical nudes – embodied the ideals of John Addington Symonds and other Victorian apologists for the Uranian philosophy, as well as an aesthetic construct permitting sexuality, both straight and gay. From these 19th-century beginnings, Waugh’s so- called ‘Classical alibi’ lourished into the 20th century. For numerous American and European physique photographers, the alibi Fig. 2 Herbert List, Farnese Hercules: the lirt 1961 [Catalogue no. 52] was partly a legal excuse, but also provided inspiration as well as a psychological harkening back to a moment in the ancient past that embraced or tolerated homosexuality in society. A look at where this Classical inluence began in photography, and how it has evolved, helps us understand its enduring fascination, manipulation and application. For claims about the purity of Greek art, no better example is provided than the case of Hiram Power’s Greek Slave (ig. 3). This statue, inished in 1844, became an iconic image for the American emancipation movement in its efforts to abolish slavery and was the subject of dozens of photographs. Her image was widely circulated through the press, in stereo photographic views and in ‘cartes de visite’. When the statue was toured around the United States in 1847–48, the tour manager, Miner Kellogg, wrote effectively an apologia of the Classical alibi in a tour booklet: “The ostensible subject is merely a Grecian maiden, made captive by the Turks and exposed at Constantinople, for sale. The cross and locket, visible amid the drapery, indicate that she is a Christian, and beloved. But this simple phase by no means completes the meaning of the statue. It represents a being superior to suffering, and raised above degradation, by inward purity and force of character. Thus the Greek Slave is an emblem of the trial to which all humanity is subject, and may be regarded as a type of resignation, uncompromising virtue, or sublime patience.” 133 Fig. 3 William England, The Greek Slave c. 1860s [Catalogue no. 11] The widely photographed and subtly sexual but devoutly Classical sculptural invocations of Bertel Thorwaldsen and Antonio Canova (cat. no. 41), were followed in the United States by a focus on male and female nudity in photography by Thomas Eakins and Eadweard Muybridge (cat. no. 72). In the 20th century, photographers such as George Seeley (cat. no. 62), Fred Holland Day (cat. no. 34) and Clarence White (cat. nos. 35, 59, 61) found inspiration in extending the Arcadian sensibility of the Classical nude. The Classical legacy of sculpting chiseled and sensuous bodies in cold marble has informed and shaped the modern vision of the perfect physical form. As Kenneth Dutton suggests in his book The Perfectible Body, the bodies of Greek gods and heroes have become the iconic goal of the modern body builder. The trend began with Eugen Sandow’s pseudo-historic poses. Sandow has every right to the title, ‘father of bodybuilding’, his pose with the lion skin and club of Heracles, became renowned through books and photographs and began the 20th century’s craze for physical itness (ig. 4). At the same time, photographers on Sicily and elsewhere in Southern Italy such as Giovanni Crupi, Wilhelm von Gloeden (ig. 5 and cat. no. 58), von Gloeden’s cousin Wilhem von Plüschow (cat. no 55), Gaetano D’Agata, and Vincenzo Galdi posed countless youths, usually male and generally nude, in Classical settings. While their pictures became world famous, several of them were prosecuted for these visions in their later years. In the 1920s and 1930s, this fascination with the Roman tradition was pursued by photographers such as the American dancer and painter Hubert Stowitts, and the A. Noyer Studio in Paris. In Germany the naturist and free spirited Freikörperkultur (FKK) physique movement occasionally adopted the Classical pose, while in America, Edwin Townsend’s nude and almost nude, but Classically posed, images of Tony Sansone (ig. 6), became regarded as the perfect male physique. Classical images of the female were seen less often – featuring for example in George Platt Lynes’ nude ‘Mythologies’ series with its gay subtext. 134 Fig. 4 Eugen Sandow as Hercules Collection of William K. Zewadski 135 In the world of ballet, Classical themes in music, programming, and staging can be found in the world of noted dancers and choreographers of the irst half of the 20th century, such as Isadora Duncan, Nijinsky as seen by de Meyer, Ted Shawn, the Greek dancer Vassos Kanellos shown among the Classical reliefs of the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco (cat. no. 73); The Paul Taylor dancers at Jacob’s Pillow; George Platt Lynes’s then-illegal nude photographs of George Balanchine’s Orpheus Ballet in 1948 (cat. nos. 76, 77), Nelly’s photographs of nearly naked Russian ballerinas on the Acropolis (cat. no. 74), and others. Fashion and landscape photographers of the 1920-30s including George Hoyningen- Fig. 5 Wilhelm von Gloeden, Nude youth standing by door c. 1890s [Catalogue no. 57] Heune (cat. nos. 24, 49) and Herbert List (cat. nos. 4, 18, 19, 52, 64, 65, 69, 70) used Classical themes in an art deco mode together with Classical props, and to document their travels in Italy and Greece. In the lead up to the Second World War, Adolf Hitler (ig. 7), his apologist photographer, Leni Riefenstahl (cat no. 25), his sculptor Arno Breker, who adopted classical antecedents for his commissions for the Third Reich, and the various sculptors of Mussolini’s Foro Italico near Rome, (recorded so evocatively by George Mott (cat. no. 66)) all used the Classical ideal as a justiication for their vision of the future. Over the past one hundred and ifty years, the Classical world has provided an alibi for those seeking to avoid prosecution for obscenity. In 1873, at the urging of Anthony Comstock, federal censorship laws were introduced. This legislation encouraged photographers to use artistic and religious excuses when providing nude illustrations for artists. We can see such manoeuvers in the work of Louis Jean Baptiste Igout in France, or the aesthetic explorations in the United States of Fred Holland Day and his friend Clarence White. Simulacra of ancient Classical sculptures were seen around the turn of the century in photographs of the 136 tableaux vivants posed by the The Living Marbles, and The Seldoms at the London Pavilion. We can see a similar trend in physique photography. From the 1930s onwards, cover after cover of magazines such as Strength and Health Magazine featured poses inspired by Classical Greek statues. The list of physique photographers working through to the 1970s is practically endless and includes the work of the Athletic Model Guild (AMG), the Grecian Guild, Bruce of Los Angeles, Spartan Studios, John Arnt of Seattle, Fred Kovert of Hollywood, Gregor Arax in Paris, Henri Membre of Paris, Vince of London (Bill Green), Karoll of Cuba, Al Fig. 6 Edwin F Townsend, Tony Sansone as the Doryphoros c.1930 [Catalogue no. 22] Urban, Douglas of Detroit, Cliff Oettenger, and Larry Frisbee. For all of these, the presence of a pose from a Greek statue or a column, a trident, or a Roman helmet acted as the recurring Classical alibi, justifying the ever-present male nude, otherwise suspect by postal and governmental censors until the late 1960s. This alibi was not without its critics. Not only were there multiple federal obscenity prosecutions, but as Professor David K. Johnson comments, the Classical ideal also had its detractors from a physical as well as a moral standpoint. In June 1957, Strength and Health Magazine was especially critical of the gay-oriented physique publications trade, calling it a ‘fairy’ trade, and the openly queer Vim criticised the Classical veil in a number of articles. In 1965, a ‘Classical alibi’ was used as a defence in a Minneapolis pornography prosecution against the publishers of DSI publications. The defence claimed the intended audience was “artists, photographers and sculptors.” As David Johnson observes, while the federal court instead found the audience to be a “deviant group,” the defendants were acquitted on all charges because the “materials have no appeal to the prurient interests of the intended recipient deviant group; do not exceed the limits of candor tolerated by the contemporary national community; and are not utterly without redeeming social value.” Over subsequent years, several reversals of obscenity prosecutions leshed out the broadening contours of the First Amendment. 137 Fig. 7 Untitled movie still, Hitler with the Discobolus [Catalogue no. 67] In 1967, the United States Supreme Court allowed male nude images to be sent in the mail, largely ending the legal need for the Classical alibi. Despite the continued relaxation of legal restrictions in the last ifty years, the Classical alibi continues to be used in fashion, ilm, dance, advertising, photography, and pornography, packaging pseudo-historical purity with sexuality. Modern photographers, including Robert Mapplethorpe, Arthur Tress, Andres Serrano, Pierre et Gilles, John O’Reilly, Hugh Holland, Harvey Ferdschneider, Joel-Peter Witkin (cat. nos. 23, 42), Bill Costa, Robert Flynt, Hans Fahrmeyer (cat. no. 27 and ig. 8), and Len Prince (cat. nos.28, 29, 30, 33), have continued to draw inspiration from the Classical era. Meanwhile, Classically inluenced ilm, and later television, have brought action and lesh to the theme of the classics. From the days of the silent ilms and Biblical epics, through two Ben Hurs (1925 and 1959), the gay Days of Greek Gods by Fontaine and his Captives (1959), to Steve Reeves in Hercules (1958), which in turn fomented some one hundred and eighty ’Macaroni Muscle’ ilms in the following half dozen years, to the aspirations of classical male sexuality relected in the 1981 porn ilm Centurions of Rome. Serious art ilms with gay subtexts followed, for example Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane (1974, Latin with English subtitles), Fellini’s Satyricon, with its fantastic classical imagery (1969), and the pansexual fantasies of the Penthouse Caligula (1979). 138 The Roman action ilm tradition relected sexuality, including gay sexuality, in many ilms from Spartacus (1960) to the more recent Oscar-winning box ofice triumph of Gladiator (2000), and on to the explicitly gay but barely costumed Conquered (2001), Gladiators Eroticus (2001), and the more mainstream cinema of Troy (2004). In conclusion, using the Classical alibi as an excuse for male and female nudity in photography from the 1860s onwards helped bridge the censorship attacks of the Victorian age, the Comstock laws, and later postal persecutions, until nudity became legally recognised as art and not salaciousness. And, while the Classical tradition is now no longer a mere legal ‘alibi,’ it has remained as one of the most Fig. 8 Hans Fahrmeyer, Untitled 1988 persistently enduring sources for [Catalogue no. 32] contemporary depictions of nudity in photography and other art. However, this lingering Classical inluence in contemporary imagery is limited in its modern scope to the mostly white, Euro-centric context in which it once was legally necessary and in which it lourished. It is not often seen in contemporary explorations of gay identity, which are now dominated by the forthright nudity of undecorated males and females for art or for pornography, or to describe the gay experience of men or women of colour, of lesbian or transgendered populations, of fetish devotees (except for the occasional S&M costume party or parade), or in introspective and self-relective portraiture. Its inclusion in a modern image has therefore become but one source in a wide-ranging palette of many possible inspirations, drawn upon more for decorative reference, fashion, irony, humor, or parody, than for any historically substantive or philosophical meaning. Sources quoted K. R. Dutton, The Perfectible Body: the Western Ideal of Physical Development (1997) D. K. Johnson, ‘Physique Pioneers; the Politics of 1960s Gay Consumer Culture’, The Journal of Social History 43 (2010), 867-892 T. Waugh, Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall (1996) 139 indeX Anderson, James 40 Hermaphrodite c.1865 41 Canova, Pauline Bonaparte as Venus Victrix Athanassiou, Constantine 1 Acropolis excavated (Kritios Boy and the Moschophoros) 1866 of phoToGraphers 49 Toto Koopman, dress by Augusta Bernard, Paris 1934 Poupel, Antoine Janus, Allan Powers, Longworth 81 St.-Cloud 1987 82 Adam and Eve, Ladew Gardens, Maryland 1983 12 Hiram Powers with a bust of his Greek Slave c.1870s Kenna, Michael 9 Untitled (four male igures) 1985 Prince, Len 80 Paris, Parc de St.-Cloud 1981 84 One who watches (Courances, France) 1997 Brassai [Halász, Gyula] Klein, William 28 29 30 33 91 Paris, L’Académie Julian 1931 98 Watchman. Cinecittà 1956 Riefenstahl, Leni Cartier-Bresson, Henri Koch, Max & Rieth, Otto 25 Strength 1936 53 Museum, Naples 1960 56 Der Act #99 1894-95 Rieth, Otto & Koch, Max Chim [Seymour, David] Krause, George 56 Der Act #99 1894-95 43 Bernard Berenson at the Borghese Gallery on his 90th birthday 1955 54 Untitled (a child on the shoulders of the Venus de Milo) 1959 Rowland, Anne Cohen, Peter Lindbloom, Eric 67 Untitled movie still (Adolf Hitler with the Discobolus) 83 Bacchus in the mountains 1989 Seeley, George List, Herbert 62 Untitled c.1903 Conroy, Rowan 4 Marble statue from Antikythera I 1937 18 Classical head of a youth 1939 19 Archaic phallus (Sanctuary of Dionysos, Delos) 1937 52 Farnese Hercules: the lirt 1961 64 Morning 1937 65 Beneath the Poseidon temple 1937 69 Man leading horse, by Bernhard Bleeker, Munich 1946 70 Plaster casts, Academy I 1946 Seidenstucker, Friedrich 79 Barbarian prisoner and Callipygian Venus Merola, Geanna Thorne-Thomsen, Ruth Dupain, Max Michals, Duane 15 16 17 26 31 36 37 38 47 63 Narcissus 1-5 1986 22 Tony Sansone as the Doryphoros c.1930 Miller, Lee Unknown Boubat, Édouard 5 Untitled #1, Agora Series 2010 Cramer, Konrad 39 Untitled 1953 Dahl-Wolfe, Louise 48 Night bather I 1939 Delamotte, Philip 90 Artist sketching the Venus de Milo n.d. Doisneau, Robert Classical busts c.1970s Homage to DH Lawrence 1937 High tide, Newport 1978 La belle dame sans merci c.1936 Impassioned clay 1936 Classical statue II 1934 Still life arrangement 1935 Political heap & Classical statues 1936 Untitled (radio valve, broken statue and seashell) 1937 75 David Lichine in L’après-midi d’un faune 1940 93 Julian Ashton’s cast room c.1930 95 Nicholson Museum 1953 England, Wiliam 11 The Greek Slave c.1860s Fahrmeyer, Hans 27 Untitled 1992 32 Untitled 1988 Fox Talbot, Henry 94 Bust of Patroclus 1843 Fuss, Adam 10 Venus holding an apple in her right hand (Louvre, Paris) 1986 Gloeden, Wilhelm von 57 Nude youth standing by door c.1890s 58 Youth with sculpture 1900 8 Torso 1986 68 Revenge on culture 1940 Morley, Lewis 51 Marie-Lise Grey for She 1965 Mott, George 66 Foro Italico, boxer 1994 Muybridge, Eadweard 72 Greco-Roman wrestlers (from Animal Locomotion) 1887 Myers, Michael 21 The Nicholson Hermes #2 Naylor, Genevieve 50 Dorian Leigh, dress by GiovannelliSciarra, Rome 1952 Nelly [Souyoultoglou-Seraïdari, Elli] 74 The dancer Nikolska in the Parthenon 1929 Papageorge, Tod 46 Museum opening with Canova’s Perseus 1975 Paine, John 88 Botanic Gardens, Sydney c.1875-1900 Platt Lynes, George Halász, Gyula [Brassai] 76 Nicholas Magallanes and Francisco Moncion in Balanchine’s Orpheus I 1948 77 Nicholas Magallanes and Francisco Moncion in Balanchine’s Orpheus II 1948 78 Actaeon 1937 91 Paris, L’Académie Julian 1931 Plüschow, Wilhelm von Holland Day, Fred 55 Temple of Apollo, Pompeii c. 1890s 34 Ebony and ivory Potts, David Hoyningen-Huene, George 44 Epstein Retrospective, the Three Graces 1953 45 Epstein Retrospective, opening night 1953 Gutmann, John 13 Broken proile and distant torso 1957 24 Untitled (Horst on a cast of the Parthenon horse) 1931 140 6 Aphrodite with Jana and Tony 1992 Poseidon with David 1992 Judgment of Paris 1992 Funeral offering 1992 Untitled (combination of Discobolus and artist’s nude torso) 1987 85 Untitled (Woman photographing NeoClassical sculpture in Berlin) c.1930 Seymour, David [Chim] 43 Bernard Berenson at the Borghese Gallery on his 90th birthday 1955 Souyoultoglou-Seraïdari, Elli [Nelly] 74 The dancer Nikolska in the Parthenon 1929 14 Photographer, California 1981 Townsend, Edwin F 2 Discovery of the Delphi Antinous 1894 60 Untitled (woman with pan pipes before a Classical herm) 1890s 71 Three stereos of modern gladiators c.1900 73 Vassos Kanellos, known for his ‘Cymbal Dance’ 87 Venus. Botanic Gardens, Sydney c.1908-1915 92 Portrait of Thomas J Heatherley (18241914) 96 Untitled (SoHo, New York City) n.d. Unknown photographer for Kerry & Co 86 Apollo Belvedere. Botanic Gardens, Sydney c.1890-1915 89 Lo Spinario, Botanic Gardens, Sydney c.1890-1915 Waldstein, Charles 20 The Nicholson Hermes #1 White, Clarence H 35 Lady in black with statuette 59 The pipes of Pan 1905 61 Boys wrestling 1905 Winogrand, Garry 97 Untitled (three men laughing at a postcard of an ithyphallic satyr) 1976 Witkin, Joel-Peter 23 Lisa Lyon as the Anavysos Kouros, New York City 1983 42 Canova’s Venus, New York City 1982 Woodhouse, William J. 3 Broken satyr (Theatre of Dionysos, Athens) c.1910 Wright, Holly 7 Untitled (Belvedere Torso) 1986