Transforming the Human Figure: From Ingres to Picasso

Throughout the history of art, painters, sculptors and other artists have displayed a particular attention to the human body form in their works. And over time, the depiction of the human figure has been frequently altered to represent the beliefs and ideologies during a given period of art. While many early artists' emphasis was to portray the realistic form of the human figure, new phases of art and ideas had artists drastically transforming the human body from its realistic stages into more innovative forms. Such late 18th and early 19th century artists like Claude Michel, Antonio Canova and Jean-Auguste-Dominque Ingres depicted this sort of realism in the human figures while late 19th and early 20th century artists like Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso began to change the way artists, critics and viewers looked at the human figure through more abstract and modern forms.

The Rococo style of the human figure that originated in the 18th century showed the anatomical attention developed during the High Renaissance while also adding a more expressive, rougher form to reveal two significant themes of the era: love and frivolity.

In his 1775 Intoxication of Wine, Clodion paints a satyr - a woodland creature that is part man and part goat - firmly gripping the rock at which he sits while bringing close a nude woman to his body.

Poised in this erotic position, the satyr looks up as she pours wine into his mouth and straddles his thigh. The sexual action of the nude excites the satyr to lift his right leg as she leans closer, pressing against his body. A fruit basket, a sexual reference for love and frivolity, lies on the ground as grapes spill out.

With this scene, Clodion represents the two lovers in a realistic, yet idealized form stuck in a twisted and rather orgiastic pose. But one main difference between the High Renaissance days and Rococo is how the subjects are portrayed in much more muscular forms and rougher textures.

These differing and erotic qualities are shown in the satyr's rippling muscles, bony fingers and shaggy, detailed hair. The embrace of Clodion's Intoxication of Wine ultimately reveals the realistic human body forms of the High Renaissance, yet it also contains the rough detail and imperfection that creates much of the sexual excitement conveyed in Rococo art.

Shortly after Rococo, the classical human figure of ancient Greece and Rome returned to art during an era known as Neoclassicalism. This revival of Greek and Roman antiquity can be noticed, for example, in Antonio Canova's Cupid and Psyche (1787-1793).

Unlike Clodion's amorous, erotic embrace between the two drunken lovers, Canova's embrace depicts the classical subject of a Greek tragedy. Cupid tenderly leans over to take hold of his lover as his wings spread into a V-shape, and Psyche takes the traditional classical, Greek position of the reclining nude, leaning back into Cupid's arms, placing her hands on his head and staring deeply into his eyes. Cupid's hair, in the meantime, is classically detailed, and Psyche's drapery slides across her body.

By sculpting his figures in an idealized and lifelike fashion, Canova strives for human anatomical perfection. While both Clodion and Canova portray the strong love between man and woman, the smooth textures, gentle gestures and graceful, elegant pose of Canova's classical, tragic work separates him from Clodion's rough, forceful style of Rococo.

However, this objective for human anatomical perfection gradually began to transform in later periods of art.

Starting with the evolution of Neoclassicism, art saw a revitalization of Greek antiquity and the return to compositional and figural perfection. Different in their own right from the Neoclassical forms demonstrated in paintings by Jacques-Louis David, Jean-Auguste-Dominque Ingres incorporated Neoclassical elements with regard to the human figure in his work.

In his exotic Grande Odalisque of 1814, Ingres reveals this unique mixture of Neoclassical and Romantic aspects. While the reclining nude is a classical subject demonstrated in such paintings as Titian's Venus Urbino, Ingres' subject faces away from the viewer and instead turns to gaze back in graceful fashion.

Featuring this Neoclassical subject, Ingres surrounds her with the exotic treasures and ornaments of the Middle East: silk curtains and sheets, peacock feathers of a fan, fur bed covering, an intricate, decorative headdress and a hookah.

This the untraditional, Arabic setting merged with the clear, idealized form of the reclining nude hints toward a new interest in the sublime, a move away from Neoclassicism and a transition into Romanticism. Consequently, these particular aspects of Ingres' odalisque eventually lead to future Romantic paintings like Delacroix's exotic, oriental subjects in his Massacre at Chios, Death of Sardanapalus and Women of Algiers.

In much of his work, Ingres shows his attentiveness to the nude's anatomical features with clear, bold colors and delicate, precise lines. However, Ingres' odalisque does not fully attain human anatomical perfection - the curvilinear, elongated back facing the viewer shies away from the Neoclassical ideal of the human figure.

What Ingres demonstrates in his Grande Odalisque is an attempt to clearly and formally idealize the human figure, yet it's his impractical proportions that begin to show a departure from the standard, classical human figure.

Toward the end of the 19th century, the representation of the human figure began to drastically transform into much more modern and abstract forms. The traditional, classical strive for human anatomical perfection had disappeared, and artists were starting to use looser brushstrokes, losing clarity and making it difficult at times for observers to distinguish gender.

Paul Cézanne's Great Bathers (1898-1905) lacks the figural perfection that Clodion, Canova and Ingres all strived to achieve in their earlier works. Rather, the bathers in Cézanne's large canvas are loosely sketched and carry little anatomical clarity and detail.

Although the painting is not considered to be a narrative, Cézanne presents a group of nude women bathing in a river. The group of women blends with the landscape through Cézanne's figural construction and is centered by the pyramidal shape of the trees. Two undistinguishable figures stand across the river, lacking form and detail.

Along with Cézanne's lack of figural attentiveness, the painting reveals his interest and mastery with modern, abstract spatial relationships. Blue and green patches representing the sky and trees overlap and blend together to create spatial abstraction between foreground and background.

It was this sort of late post-impressionistic work from Cézanne that revealed a significant transformation in art's representation of the human figure, which now lacked the idealization and clarity that earlier artists had provided.

Furthermore, in the early beginnings of the 20th century, the representation of the human figure became further abstracted thanks to Pablo Picasso and his creation of Cubism.

One of the most noteworthy pieces that represented this change in the human figure and spatial transition to Cubism was Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Women of Avignon) in June-July 1907.

Like Cézanne's Great Bathers, Picasso blends his background shapes with the foreground, creating this modern, spatial illusion. The two central women portray traditional, classical poses of Venus, while the standing figure in profile form on the left mimics the pose of ancient Egyptian kings. Her right leg extends forward in front of her left leg, and she clenches her right fist along the side of her body.

While the poses appear to be authentic, each of the women's bodies throughout the composition is fragmented into basic lines and shapes, ignoring the formal idealization of the human figure from the Rococo and Neoclassical periods.

The women on the right, meanwhile, both have their faces covered with African wooden masks. On the mask of the sitting nude on the right, or "squatter," Picasso purposely does not idealize shape the nose on the mask but instead leaves it as a long, curved, solid wedge.

Like his seated figure, the facial disposition that Picasso portrays is unnatural and informal. The nose, in fact, curves to one side as the mouth moves to the other side. Even more, the eyes of the two central nudes are not parallel, the nose is not directly above the mouth and the ears are uneven.

The body configuration of the "squatter" also has innovative qualities. Similar to Ingres' Grande Odalisque, she faces away from the viewer and looks back over her shoulder, as the visible masked face and back creates an innovative illusion for the observer.

In terms of his subjects, Picasso's figures are fragmented into geometric shapes, using straight lines to form sharp edges and angles. These relatively deformed figures reject the true portrayal of the human character, the one that High Renaissance painting was founded on over 200 years earlier.

Ultimately through the course of multiple genres of art, the representation of the human figure has been dramatically transformed. Highly idealized and studied by 18th and early 19th century artists Clodion, Canova and Ingres, the human figure became an abstract, conceptual form for 20th century artists like Cézanne and Picasso.

From Rococo to the early stages Romanticism, the human figure became slightly modified in texture and shape but continued to display realistic features. Nevertheless, the influence of Post-Impressionism and Cézanne had Picasso distorting the human figure into geometric lines and shapes rather than depicting the flowing, curvilinear body form from previous eras.