Nudity in the Museum

There is much focus these days on how a museum interprets its holdings, especially with historic objects or themes. I’ve told people that my most challenging task of being a docent is to avoid sugar coating the narrative of the past even though your museum typically strives to celebrate at least a certain part of it.

True enough, but in an art museum there will likely be another challenge: artworks dealing with the exposure of the human body. “Art can never exist without naked beauty displayed,” said the English poet and artist William Blake. There are two pieces--both sculptures--I most awkwardly deal with especially conducting tours of school students. But adults can take me off guard as well. I have gotten a handle on Hiram Powers’ Bust of a Greek Slave. It is nicely paired with Remington’s The Rattlesnake so while the teenage boys are entranced over the bust of the Bust, I carry on with a general talk about the sculpting issues of bronze vs. marble and other trivia not connected with naked beauty.

But upstairs in its own little sleeping porch, making it tempting for me to ignore until someone pokes their head in and decides to linger, is Mary Frank’s Seated Female splayed on the floor in five easy pieces begging to be interpreted. “What does this sculpture mean?” a visitor suddenly asked me. From our collection description, I guess I could say it evokes “the pain and the mystery of our human embeddedness in the natural world.” Somehow I haven’t yet mastered the inflection my museum mentors do so well that would make me sound at all credible.

So if a work is difficult for me, I fall back on the words of an art historian (Ernst Grombrich) who said “there is no bad way of looking at a work of art; there are different ways.” We may respond to the aesthetics of the art or, as I frequently choose, approach from a historical perspective. I like to relate the backstory or provide “fun facts.” Either way, it will be up to the viewer to make a personal connection.

In 1974, two years before she completed this work, Mary Frank’s daughter was killed in a plane crash in the jungles of Guatemala. It is suspected that the work provided a salve to deal with the grief of the death. She did write that her sorrow “stretches past my ribs,” and indeed she accentuated the rib cage of the sculpture with a bronze-like effect. She created images of ferns in the body’s limbs by embedding the plants in the clay and letting them burn away in the kiln.

Other interesting facts about the artist in general: after moving from her home in London to New York, she studied modern dance from Martha Graham. Her initial move to visual arts was in painting and drawing. Later, while teaching art, she took up clay sculpture. Her style of the sculpture displayed as fragments, as in our Seated Female, came about when, because of the size of her first kiln, she had to fire the work in pieces and often liked leaving them disconnected. She is 87 years old at this writing and lives in New York. We also have a monoprint by her in the Reynolda collection.

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