Review of 'The Nude: A New Perspective' at the Victoria and Albert.

PORNOGRAPHERS prefer blondes. Clad in skimpy black underwear, one pouts at you from the 'Slap Happy Seasonal Sex Issue' of Men Only, December 1987, currently on display in the Henry Cole Wing of the Victoria and Albert Museum. 'Little Miss Innocent Strips' boasts the headline, giving soft-porn the hard- sell: yours for just pounds 1.75.
 
Cover-girl becomes court-case evidence in 'The Nude: A New Perspective'. Little Miss Innocent is Exhibit A in a demonstration of what curator Gill Saunders terms 'The Fetishized Female', where the offending copy of Men Only ('lent anonymously' the caption discreetly informs you) has been placed fastidiously under glass. Exhibit B is an anonymous seventeenth-century engraving after Jacopo Palma's Studies of an Armless Female Nude Statue. If you are left wondering what a mass-circulation pornographic magazine has in common with a High Renaissance study after the antique, the texts that pepper the walls of this show and the accompanying catalogue may prove some help. 'The objectification and fragmentation of women's bodies', writes Ms Saunders, 'is (sic) an inevitable corollary of women's status in Western society and Western art.'
 
Bent on arraigning virtually every male artist who has had the temerity to depict the female nude, Saunders proves singularly blind to subtle - or in this case not so subtle - differences between one image and another. The V & A's Director, Elizabeth Esteve-Coll, has recently been making noises about the need for 'a broader and more adventurous approach to exhibitions' at the museum, so this exhibition, with its curatorial shock-tactics and ambitious scope, is possibly a harbinger of things to come.
 
Ambitious though it is, 'The Nude: A New Perspective' does scant justice to the vast range of iconographical meanings, philosophical or...

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