Inverness Museum and Art Gallery, 20 May – 26 June 2005

Venus Rising from the Sea

“VENUS RISING” will hopefully be a groundbreaking exhibition not only in the style of presentation for the National Gallery in Edinburgh but for the city of Inverness. With strong attendance figures this small exhibition may help persuade the powers that be that the creation of a major public gallery to exhibit larger travelling exhibitions and to showcase work from the Highlands and Islands is not only a priority but a necessity.

“Venus Rising” is an intriguing collection of paintings, sculpture and photography that explores the ideal of feminine beauty embodied in Classical times by the Goddess Aphrodite or Venus.

The exhibition ranges from 3rd Century BC to contemporary times and includes works by Giovanni Domenico Camiglia, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Antonio Lombardo, Degas, Magritte, Picasso, Scottish artists Edward Baird and Calum Colvin and the centrepiece of the exhibition Titian’s “Venus Anadyomene” (Venus Rising From the Sea).

It is the juxtaposition of work in this exhibition that makes it so interesting. In a format not normally utilised by the National Gallery in Edinburgh it is displayed not in chronological order but in a way that invites a dialogue between pieces of different historical periods.

The way in which Artists have influenced each other over the centuries is clearly seen in Titian’s “Venus Anadyomene” (1520-25) facing Picasso’s “Bather Wringing Her Hair” (1952), the only piece on loan from a private collection. The Titian Venus presents an intimate view of the Goddess suggested by the shell present in the legend of her birth and her pose from classical antiquity. Instead of bronze or marble Titian paints the soft contours of her flesh, presenting a real Renaissance woman seemingly unaware of the viewer’s gaze. Picasso’s bather in the same pose is represented from all angles at once with a boldness of line where classicism meets primitive art and the modern movement of cubism.

Bringing works like these face to face can be read in many ways, the influence of one artist upon another, examples of the female nude in art, as products of the gaze of male patrons and artists, as representations of the Goddess as an ideal female form or as depictions of feminine beauty or womanhood.

The inclusion of the work of two Scottish artists is significant. Without a historical tradition of the female nude these two works by Baird and Colvin help to contextualise the millions of pounds of “Masters” in the room.

Baird’s “Birth of Venus” from the 1930’s depicts beauty based on a real woman known to the artist and is set on a beach at Montrose. The classical subject is alluded to through the shell, the marble face cut off in the manner of a photograph and the use of the urn to represent the female body as a vessel. The photographic lenses in the painting anchor this goddess in the modern world.

Colvin’s cibachrome photograph influenced directly by the Titian depicts Venus painted onto a “set” of a mirror and chest of drawers. The open drawers and set that make up the figure suggest a more psychological layer of meaning to the depiction of feminine beauty and lead the eye into the work.

These are not untouchable masterpieces from the canon of Art History or from a foreign tradition but part of a much more human expression of beauty, the female form and a timeless preoccupation with these ideas.

The idea of the Goddess is still powerful today in our daily bombardment of images from television, film, advertising and fashion magazines. The scope of the exhibition could well have been extended to include examples of contemporary popular culture such as these allowing us to examine more closely our own current perceptions of the feminine.

A great deal has been written about the cost of Titian’s Venus, purchased from the Trustees of the Duke of Sutherland in 2003 with funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund, The Scottish Executive, and The National Art Collections Fund including the Wolfson Foundation.

The value of such a painting however is in its public exhibition, its presentation and the way in which the viewer is invited to engage with it. As a condition of purchase with public funds Titian’s Venus was to be made as accessible to the public as possible, hence this travelling exhibition that will visit Inverness, Glasgow and Newcastle.

For me highlights of the exhibition were the earliest example, a bronze statuette of Aphrodite (Venus) from the 3rd century BC that marries the ideal of the Goddess so beautifully with naturalised human form, a rare bronze from Degas “The Tub” (1889) and Magritte’s “La Representation” (Representation) (1928).

Not normally associated with work in bronze Degas’ Rodinesque statue depicts an everyday subject of a woman bathing contained beautifully in the rounded tub in which she lies. Degas challenges in this work and in his better known pastels and paintings the idealised female form. He chooses to depict dancers at rehearsal and women of the street in commonplace situations such as bathing, combing their hair or drying themselves after a bath. In a sense the Goddess is every woman. Although his work is sometimes described as voyeuristic there is an intimacy and earthiness about this piece that makes it so captivating.

Magritte’s superb oil on canvas “La Representation” appeals because it brings into question the objectification of women and the male gaze. The object in this painting is the stomach and pubic area of a woman sealed into a gold frame that follows perfectly the contours of her body. As with so many Magritte paintings “La Representation” examines the act of representation and the process of perception, in this case the depiction of the feminine and its objectification. For all the precision of paint handling and the sensuousness of the flesh it is only part of a woman that we see in this painting, which is itself a valuable object in a gold frame. True to form, Magritte’s brand of Surrealism is seldom without irony. This double edged image in the context of the exhibition as a whole is an excellent addition to “Venus Rising” and for me the most critical view of “beauty” on show, also the most thought provoking.

This is a rare opportunity to see a diverse collection of original works and I hope in the future Inverness can host larger International exhibitions in a building custom built for the purpose.

“Venus Rising” is on display at the Inverness Museum and Art Gallery until 26th June and then tours Glasgow’s Burrell Collection 1st July to 14th August and the Laing Gallery Newcastle 19th August to 2nd October.

© Georgina Coburn, 2005