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How many artfully-draped centaurs, bacchantes, and nymphs does it take to make a dirty magazine? Only one early 20th-century periodical has the answer: The Aesthetic Nude (Le Nu Esthétique), an amazing period piece culled from the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries for the Department of Prints and Drawings’s Undressed: The Art of Privacy.

Illustrated entirely with unclothed models enacting quasi-mythological imagery, the covers alone range from a rapturous Leda and the Swan to a centaur’s semi-consensual abduction of a nymph. Inside each issue appear even more views of studio models in increasingly far-fetched poses, all of which were ostensibly meant to supplant the live model in studio practice.

It’s not clear that anyone ever copied these compositions in paint, but the effort that went into cutting out the photos in lively shapes, and the publication’s run of several years (c. 1902-06), suggests a market existed for it!

These ‘aesthetic nudes’ beg the question of what constituted nudity, as opposed to nakedness in the late 19th and early 20th century. Was it simply the academic and mythological guise that made these images acceptable, even collectible?

In Undressed’s adults-only Prostitution gallery (127A), less is definitely more. In fact prices increased inversely to the amount of clothing removed by skilled Parisian courtesans in the 19th century! While those often-raucous images must be experienced in person, the nearby gallery with the Aesthetic Nude (127B) focuses on the purer nude. Full of academic studies of (mainly) male models, this space offers a curious contrast to the scores of women caught in the act of undressing elsewhere in the exhibition. Drawing from the nude was a necessary step in artist training, for only after apprentices had mastered copying from sculpture casts and engravings could they attempt the live model. The emphasis remains on classical form; indeed, these figures are so detached from the context of clothing, the final result is hardly provocative. Even discounting the novelty of photography, these ‘aesthetic nudes,’ however, are something else entirely.

Undressed:  The Art of Privacy is an exhibition of works on paper (open through September 29 in the Prints and Drawings Galleries) complementing the Art Institute’s summer extravaganza, Impressionism, Fashion, & Modernity.  Undressed strips the veneer of fashionable public clothing and shows European and American women and some men from the 18th into the early 20th century anywhere from a state of nature to fashionably deshabillé.

Image Credit: Selections from Émile Bayard, Le nu esthétique: l’homme, la femme, l’enfant,  (The aesthetic nude:  man, woman, child), no. 36 (September 12, 1905).  Ryerson and Burnham Libraries.

Though this painting was initially titled Portrait of Madame ***, we know exactly who this lady is: Pauline Croizette, the wife of the artist Charles Carolus-Duran. His portrait of Pauline was an immediate success, wining a medal at the French Salon the same year it was painted, 1869. The French Salon at this time was the “official” exhibition of French artists, part of a tough system that required artists to submit paintings every year in order to ultimately earn commissions, gain students, and make a living as artists. At least initially, the Impressionists were less than successful in gaining entry into this universe of official artists. Just six years before this painting, the French government actually sponsored its first exhibition of rejected artists—the Salon des Refusés—after artists protested the rejection of more than 3,000 works for that year’s Salon.

Carolus-Duran had a foot in both camps. He would go on to be a well-known portraitist with a highly regarded atelier, but his Lady with the Glove demonstrates his avant-garde leanings—not a surprise when you learn that he counted “rejected” artists such as Manet, Degas, and Monet as his friends. This painting is, on the one hand, a beautiful example of “society portraiture” with its invisible strokes and nearly microscopic level of detail. (In fact, Carolus-Duran’s attention to dress and costume was so fastidious and lush that later one Salon art critic would refer jokingly to the “Carolus-Duran Line of Velvets.”)

But there are elements of his portrait of Pauline that point to modernist tendencies. Carolus-Duran has lavished attention on a hat and hair accessories that would quickly become unfashionable, thus engaging in the same transitory subjects as the Impressionists and their emphasis on la mode. And perhaps even more “impressionistic” is that Pauline is captured in the act of removing her gloves, one being peeled off with the other already dropped at her feet. “High life” portraiture at this time would have depicted women in a much less transitional state.

During this period, gloves were worn extremely tightly—see the real-life examples in Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity and try to imagine fitting even a pencil into the fingers—and the act of removing them held a sensual allure. A woman who was liberating her fingers from her gloves often fluttered them to regain circulation, a coy and feminine act. Compared to many of Manet’s renderings of gloves—slashing and indeterminate strokes—Carolus-Duran’s gloves are charged with a quiet yet keen allure, perhaps the promise of things to come.

Image Credit: Charles Carolus-Duran. The Lady with the Glove, 1869. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, RF 152, RF 2756.

Abelardo Morell, whose retrospective The Universe Next Door opened June 1, has become known for making pictures that get to the heart of photography. He has turned entire rooms into cameras, employing a phenomenon that has been known since antiquity: that light entering a darkened room (“camera obscura”) through a small aperture will project an image, upside-down and reversed, on the opposite surface. More recently, he has been making pictures with the tent camera, a kind of portable camera obscura he designed himself. A lens in the top of the tent projects the outside scene onto the ground—whether rocks, sand, grass, or city sidewalk—and he then photographs the combination of the two.

Morell’s influences, however, are not strictly from the field of photography. In fact, he finds himself looking more to painting for models. When he was a student at Bowdoin College in Maine, he discovered Winslow Homer, the 19th-century painter who so famously depicted the New England landscape, especially the sea. One of the foremost scholars of Homer, Philip Beam, taught at Bowdoin, and Morell—who had dropped out of college but remained in town working at the university art museum—ended up photographing numerous paintings and book reproductions for the professor.

With his tent camera, Morell says he now feels more like a painter. In the Modern Wing’s Bucksbaum Gallery, where the tent camera pictures are on view, you can see how gravel on a Manhattan rooftop starts looking like pointillist dots, or how cracked earth along the Rio Grande begins to mimic thick flourishes of paint. He took his tent camera to Winslow Homer’s home and studio in Prouts Neck, Maine, an isolated stretch overlooking the ocean, where the painter lived and painted seascapes for much of his last 25 years. Morell positioned the tent over a patch of sandy grass and directed the periscope lens onto the sea. The resulting picture shows wisps of clouds over the ocean’s horizon, rendered more abstract through the tangled mesh of plants. In an homage to an artist he admired, Morell merged the present and the past and combined painting and photography.

Take a look at this watercolor from the Art Institute’s collection (above) and Morell’s tent camera photograph (below):

—Elizabeth Siegel, Associate Curator of Photography

Image Credits:

Winslow Homer. Breaking Storm, Coast of Maine, 1894. Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection.

Abelardo Morell, Tent Camera Image on Ground: View of Sea from Winslow Homer’s Studio Backyard, Prouts Neck, Maine, 2012. High Museum of Art, gift of the artist in honor of Daniel W. McElaney, Jr., 2012.218.

Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte rarely moves. As one of the masterpieces in the collection, it’s almost always in the galleries for your viewing enjoyment. It’s also one of the very few works in the Art Institute’s collection that absolutely does not travel.

In fact, the last time it left the museum was over 50 years ago. The occasion was a Seurat retrospective that began at the Art Institute and traveled to the Museum of Modern Art in March 1958. The painting was famously insured for one million dollars and accompanied by a conservator and an armed guard during its trip. The exhibition was a hit in New York and all was fine until Tuesday, April 15. On that day, workmen were busy installing a new air-conditioning system and when they left for lunch, combustible painting materials close by caught fire. The blaze quickly spread and although the consequences were severe—one electrician was killed, dozens of firefighters were injured, and a Monet water lily was destroyed—the fire narrowly avoided La Grande Jatte, which was quickly ushered to another building. After that close call, trustees made the decision that the painting would never again leave Chicago.

So here it stays. But it will be included in our upcoming Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity, so just this morning, a multitude of art handlers, conservators, and the exhibition’s collection manager had the complicated task of moving this 10-foot painting from our Impressionist galleries to Regenstein Hall, where the exhibition will open to members on June 23 and to the public on June 26. We’re pleased that the move was successful and here are some pictures of the journey. . .

Image Credit: Georges Seurat. A Sunday on La Grande Jatte–1884, (1884-6). Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection