The Naked and the Nude

If your apartment overlooks Place Rodin in the 16th Arr. and you love art, you might feel lucky to see a cast of Auguste Rodin's "l'Âge d'Airain" (The Bronze Age) every time you look out your window. There are casts of it in the Musée d'Orsay, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Met in New York. So I feel like I'm getting a good deal when I walk by it for free a few times a week on my way to Jardin de Ranelagh. 

If you don't like art, it's just a guy flashing you--which may or may not be an issue. He's been there since 1947, so there would be little point in complaining if you didn't want to see it.

Two perspectives of Rodin's "l'Âge d'Airain."

Not that many people in France would bother complaining. Nudity in public art in the U.S. isn't very common, and is almost unheard of as exterior decoration on buildings. That's what made Attorney General John Ashcroft's cover-up of the "Spirit of Justice" statue at the Department of Justice building in 2002 so funny and sad. It's probably the thing he'll really be remembered for in the long run. 

But in France, naked artworks are found in almost any public park and adorn buildings of all description. I'm not the first American to note this. And Americans aren't the only people can get hung up over it.

Some of the works evoke the classical age, so the nudity makes sense in that context (if Grecian urns accurately reflect the fashions of antiquity). We've seen this with the fisherman hauling in Orpheus' head and lyre in the Jardin du Ranelagh, with Acis and Galatea at the Jardin du Luxembourg, and Eve on the Lavirotte building (although whatever else it connotes, Eve's nudity is usually a good sign; in Genesis, she didn't start covering up until after the rest of us had been doomed to hard work and death).

The "classically inspired" explanation holds up best when you don't push too hard on it, though. For example, the seduction of maidens by satyrs and fauns is a common theme in Roman and Greek mythology--but "Premier Frisson" (1921) by René Barcour in Parc Monsouris, 14th Arr., pretty much jettisons the classical fig leaf (to mix metaphors) and just acknowledges the sex that is central to, but usually unmentioned in, classical stories such as Orpheus, Acis and Galatea, and Adam and Eve. Paul Gasq's evocation of Pygmalion's living statue on the façade of the Grand Palais (1900) also gets right to the point of Ovid's proto-Frankenstein/Pinocchio story.

"Premier Frisson." Barcour's candor is refreshing. The gentleman's hooves are not.

Paul Gasq evoked Pygmalion and his beloved statue for the Grand Palais' façade, 8th Arr. 

Maybe it was just the Belle Époque joie de vivre, because sex is front and center even in some public artworks without nudity--for example, in the monument to Frederic Chopin (1906) by Jacques Froment-Meurice in the 8th Arr.'s Parc Monceau. While technically she's clothed, Chopin's #1 fan clearly is having a moment that wouldn't be out of place at a Barry White concert--unless that's Chopin's ghost playing to a grieving lover, in which case this is history's greatest artistic masterpiece (and still about sex).

"Monument à Chopin," Parc Monceau, 8th Arr.

And some French nudity or near-nudity is not about sex or the classics. It's just for fun.

La Maison Tordo in Nice.

Good lord ... oh wait, it's just Hercules fighting the Hydra. Perfectly normal.