The Beauty Myth as Kitsch

[Guest guest]

[The depiction of female beauty in art has almost always been in

purely physical terms often hidden as kitsch, argues Prasenjit

Chowdhury in today's Deccan Herald.]

 

"O woman! lovely woman! Nature made thee

To temper man; we had been brutes without you.

Angels are painted fair to look like you ..."

 

Thomas Otway, "Venice Preserved" (Act i. Sc. I)

 

*****

 

Does not the sight of a beautiful woman dwarf the male pen by much

the same scale as the human ovum dwarfs the spermatozoon? Does not a

lusty gaze at them appeal, appal, dizzy and delight you? What would

have come to art and sculpture, the lore of creation, the industry

of pleasure and pain if there were no woman? Did we have anything

called aesthetics without them?

 

We, by general consensus, choose to be bowled over by the ethereal

Madhubala, gorgeous Madhuri, regal Maharani Gayatri or sexy

Aishwarya. "Beauty in the human species is, above all, a feminine

attribute," so thought Havelock Ellis. But then you can say, that

the new concept of beauty is also an attempt to redefine mothballed

feminism which harbours a "prissy censoriousness" against "the

feminine mystique," so apt a term coined by Betty Friedan, one of

the founding mothers of feminism's second wave.

 

But the point of female beauty has almost always been in its stark

physicality, its outward manifestation first, followed by its

meditative, inner quality later. But ironically, an overall survey

of the works of art in our own tradition reveals the emphasis on the

subtleties of the woman's body from Mohenjodaro to MF Husain as the

artists have continued the search for a perfect visual code to

define the mystique of the female form.

 

The early depictions of humanity — the Venus of Brassempony, the

Venus of Willendorf and the Venus of Laussel are all over-blown,

blousy, sexually exaggerated human female forms. In Ruben's (17th

century) Rape of the Sabine Woman women are great ponderous fleshy

creatures with enormous bosom and trunks, in Botticelli's (15th

century) Birth of Venus she is smooth-hipped with small breasts.

 

The two ideals of the feminine are utterly opposed: Ruben's women

are Flemish giantesses while Botticelli's goddess approximates the

modern ideal. Beauty in woman is worshipped as ethereal, inhuman,

impersonal on the one hand, while on the other, the expression of

the warm, living woman whose beauty is an indication of the sexual

promise — the fulfilment of desire — represents the extreme of

sensuality.

 

The scene becomes curioser in an Indian context, the land of

suppressed libido and liberated womanhood. In the 1990s, India had

one of the highest number of international beauty contest winners

and one of the lowest rates of female literacy in the world.

 

Depiction of female beauty has almost always been in purely physical

terms, often hidden as kitsch. If one comes across Dr Alka Pande's

rewritten version of Vatsyayana's Kama Sutra and a couple of books

on Chinese and Indian erotica, one may be struck at how she has

taken up the aesthetics of the female body.

 

"The book is a celebration of the female body," Pande said

elsewhere. Drawing upon all kinds of influences like the Puranas and

the sacred texts, she has explored the body through dance, music,

literature, art and even popular culture.

 

Before we delve deep into the subject, let's consider that the main

theme in Indian art is woman, sometimes called `female art'. Art

historian EB Havell wrote, "Indian art knows no Aphrodite or Diana

but the majesty and mystery of divine motherhood, expressed with

wonderful sincerity of feeling and splendid craftsmanship."

 

Woman here is essentially the creator of new life, not just divine

fantasy, a spirit or an idea. Mauryan, Sunga and Buddhist art

revelled in the symbolised fertility of a full breasted, broad

hipped woman.

 

And now if you come to terms with the evocations of the pictorial

canonical tradition of Sringara Rasa or the erotic, popular for the

delineation of the female form as the nayika or heroine preoccupied

in adorning herself for her beloved, a whole panoply was presented

by Anjolie Ela Menon, Arpana Caur, Jayashree Burman, Paresh Maity,

Ramananda Bandhopadhyaya and Suhas Roy in an exhibition of visual

art titled Navarasa curated by Alka Pande and mounted at the Visual

Arts Gallery, India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, in August last year.

 

Anjolie's works were dictated by images of nostalgia, languid nudes,

metaphorical portraits and metonymic identities. Arpana Caur has

employed woman in the category of nayika as classified by Bharata

that suggested her release from the clutches of her environs set

free against a backdrop of congested concrete jungle while the

strength of Ramananda lay in his Bengali tradition and his lyrical

line. Exploration of the female form in the nude, however, is not

without paradox.

 

But aesthetics and pornography are the two dichotomies that govern

nudity. Think about the furor over MF Husain's nude rendition of

Saraswati or Bharat Mata. World-renowned painter Manjit Bawa thinks

nudity is classic art, an attempt to capture the eternal beauty of

life on canvas. But there have been a rich celebratory aspect of the

female body, so vividly encapsulated by the oeuvre of Amrita Sher-

Gil.

 

The problem is, writes Wendy Steiner, how to imagine female beauty,

in art or outside it, without invoking stories of dominance,

victimisation or fake consciousness.

 

The noted French political analyst for Le Figaro, Francois Gautier,

tartly remarked that countries such as France or the US, who are

often preaching India on women's rights never had a woman as their

top leader. Maternal mortality rates in some rural areas of India

are among the worst in the world, yet India has the world's largest

number of professionally qualified women than the US.

 

Long live the eternal India and its women. More power to them.

 

SOURCE: The Deccan Herald

URL:

http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/mar52006/finearts14485320063

2.asp