Perspective and naturalism in art

¶ … naturalism in art -- a reconfiguration of Renaissance ideals

According to Renaissance artistic ideals, the principles of truth, beauty, and proportionality were all synonymous. To represent a female form truthfully, was to do so realistically, and the definition of realism was to show life as it might appear in a photograph. An artist had a responsibility in his or her work to create the illusion of depth, to make it seem as if the gazer could touch the lovely, tactile figures on the two-dimensional canvas before his or her eyes. This is why Pablo Picasso's early Cubist masterpiece "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" shocked the art world of its day. Picasso wished to realistically represent the lives of common prostitutes. These women lived a masked life of artifice, and dealt with humanity at the most primitive, sexual levels of existence. Thus Picasso used primitive techniques to render these women's collective existence and used stylized, posed and seemingly hardly human shapes to do so. The women are reduced to geometry.

In the painting, one of the women wears an African-like mask. All of the women are rendered in a primitive style, and the texture and line of the work and the female bodies is flat, stark, and angular. The colors are flat. The nudes are not 'placed' in any particular location, as they are placeless women who walk the streets. This is a more realistic way, or at least a more truthful way to render the lives of the women -- their lives are not beautiful and symmetrical, but harsh and irregular. Picasso paints the lines of the women's souls; he does not show their faces and bodies as mirrors of preconceived notions of beauty.

Doing away with depth and proportional representation, however, does not automatically mean that the artist must take such a confrontational view of his or her subject. Paul Cezanne's "The Large Bathers" shows willowy female nudes as blurry shafts of color. The waving figures of the women seem to become like the wild plants near the river. The women have become, by bathing in nature, a part of nature, and to show this their physicality is not conventionally realistic, but blends in with the landscape. This is another example of how truthfulness and realism are not always synonymous. The naturalness of the bathers is shown by making the lines of their bodies similar to the lines of the natural landscape.

Henri Matisse's "The Joy of Life" is not even an arrangement of posed figures like Cezanne and Picasso's works of art, rather it is a cacophony of color and the rounded, nude sensual female figures engage in various activities all over the canvas. The truth of the joy of life is not represented in a singular principle of beauty, or a clear, narrative scene or pose, but in an almost confetti-like fashion of figures. Over Matisse's canvas different women, some with faces, some without faces, engage in traditional activities of joy, like dancing in a circle or playing the pan pipes. These activities might be also found in Renaissance paintings, but the level of enthusiasm for life in the artist's heart is shown is the artist's clear stylistic alteration of earlier traditions. The depiction of the figures is flat, but not to create a sense of coolness, as in Picasso, but to allow the viewer a panoramic view of a multiplicity of activities from a variety of vantage points. The joy of life is everywhere, not in a single location, or seen from a singular perspective. There is no singular focus in the work, not even a lake like in Cezanne's work, or a single individual.