Victorian art collections can be an embarrassment for modern galleries but York Art Gallery decided to make the best of it.
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| Cleopatra's Arrival in Cilicia - William Etty - Typical Fleshy Work |
William Etty of York, was a minor Victorian artist acquired a mastery
of flesh tones and a penchant for painting nudes but whose reputation
nosedived after his death.
The Times critic led the objectors at the
time
‘Nakedness without purity is offensive and indecent, and on Mr Etty’s canvases is mere dirty flesh.’ ...
... however roll on 200 years and York Art gallery decided their last exhibition of 2016, titled simply
Flesh, should celebrate Mr Etty’s obsession by focusing on flesh, in all its states by various artists. Spanning 600 years between the 14th-century Master painting of San Lucchese’s
‘Dead Christ with the Virgin and St John’ and Ron Mueck’s contemporary
‘Youth exposing a stab wound’ (sounds great!).
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| The Death of a Noble Lady and the Decay of her Body |
However the gruesome highlight of the exhibition was a sequence of watercolours documenting
‘The Death of a Noble Lady and the Decay of her Body’ in the tradition of
Kusozu, a genre of Japanese illustration specialising in step-by-step depictions of decomposing women.
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| Japan's Painters Obsession With Decay ... Probably Fuelled By Civil Wars |
The Japanese painters and their patrons were seemingly pretty obsessed with death and decay, as I found lots of other Japanese artists works on a similar vein from that period. We may all be the same race but we are not all the same culture.
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