A Model’s View, continued
With their puritanical roots, it’s no surprise that Americans have been skeptical of nude modeling. A model was definitely not someone you’d bring home to meet mother, and the motivation of artists who drew her were suspect, too: never mind that drawing the human body is probably an artist’s single most valuable exercise. There was just something shameless about the whole affair.
Seventy-nine year-old Cleo Dorman is probably the oldest working model today. Now living in Los Angeles, she remembers when she first posed at the Cleveland Art Institute, female models were required to shave the front triangle of pubic hair “and keep their legs together.” Male models wore jock straps, and those who posed for photography placed paper bags over their heads.
Dorman also recalls the anxious days of the early 1950’s when the McCarthy Commission conducted a witch-hunt for alleged communists. Both artist and model were categorized as having loose morals and questionable sense of patriotic allegiance, and in some cities professional art models were required to register with City Hall. (Painters using a predominance of red were removed from public museums.)
But what about today? Have attitudes towards “women such as that” changed? (This article has focused on the female model for obvious reasons.) Are those who work as nude models different in some way—morally, spiritually, physically—from, say one’s next-door neighbor?
Picture this: you’ve enrolled in a figure drawing class at local college and are about to draw, for the first time, from the nude. The model steps onto the platform, drops her kimono and gracefully, unselfconsciously moves into a pose. Who is this woman? After the session she’ll more than likely go back to her “other” work, which may be a wife and mother, run a small business, drive a van for senior citizens, be a bilingual tutor.
What today’s models do have in common (besides a healthy acceptance of their bodies) is an appreciation of the flexible hours offered by modeling, and the extra money earned performing a work that is creative (both imagination and emotion are used in modeling), peaceful (all the rest of the world could be at war,
but in the middle of the studio all is quiet concentration), and personally nourishing (during a long pose one can, if the position is relatively comfortable, meditate, ruminate, daydream).
Oh, but don’t for a moment assume that models simply sit around. Maintaining the same position for up to six hours in a day (five minute breaks are taken every 25 minutes) is real work, although ‘painful’ might be a more accurate description of that particular inactivity. However, an experienced model knows her (or his) body’s particular strengths and weaknesses and poses accordingly.
A more physically strenuous session might include gesture poses which are changed every few minutes, down to 30 seconds. Used mostly for warm-up, they are more animated than long poses, thereby offering the artist a more expressive repertoire of form. But any model will tell you that a morning or day spent doing nothing but gesture poses takes stamina…and inventiveness.
Yet despite the passage of time, the crossover of cultures and plethora of information about art and life and people, a stigma (particularly in the United States) continues to surround nude modeling. Move away from centers of art and artistic folks and out into mainstream America and one finds that most people believe THERE’S SOMETHING JUST NOT RIGHT ABOUT A WOMAN LETTINGA GROUP OF STRANGERS SEE HER NAKED.
To supplement the uneven income made as a writer and musician, I’ve modeled for more than ten years during which time more than one educated (whatever that means) person has asked, “How can you take your clothes off like that?” Le plus ca change, le plus c’est la meme chose. The more things change, the more they stay the same, and the current more strictured bent of the National Endowment for the Arts stands as testimony to that.
The human body sans clothes or doodads or any cover-ups symbolizes all of us. We’re all models of a sort, for each other, ourselves. The only real difference between the nude model and us is, they hold still.
Copyright 2006 Gayle Caldwell