Date: 30-11-1999
Owning Institution:
Publication:     Sunday Telegraph Features  
Subject: 20th Century  19th Century    

“Fabric of Vision”, the main event at the National Gallery this summer, is based on such a strong and simple theme – fabric and fashion in painting – that it seems odd no one has thought of making an exhibition about it before. The show is the brainchild of the prominent American historian of art and costume, Anne Hollander, who describes the project as her attempt to “trace an uneven path through one part of the huge realm of painted folds and clothes.” The paintings are drawn not only from the National Gallery’s own collection but also from museums and galleries throughout Europe and America, and arranged under headings with titles such as “Sensuality, Sanctity, Zeal” (covering clothes, sex and religion in seventeenth-century painting) or “Restraint and Display” (the contrast between quiet male clothing and loud female fashions, as shown in nineteenth-century art). Despite its unashamed didacticism and faint aura of academic thesis-making, the exhibition’s primary appeal is likely to lie in a bit of good old-fashioned titillation. As well as offering an interesting and informative potted history of western fashion – showing for example how the doublet-and-hose peacock finery of male dress during the Renaissance evolved, through the Enlightenment and beyond, into the democratically inspired sartorial restraint of the suit – Hollander’s exhibition also and more piquantly explores the invention and development of what we now know as sex appeal.

But its story starts in church, during the early Renaissance, when the impulse to paint covetably fine drapery and clothing received fresh impetus. As textile manufacture and import/export businesses flourished across Italy, new fabrics came on to the market: different types of satin and brocaded satin, silks from the East that might show two colours at once, rich damasks and fabric shot with metallic thread. In looking at paintings of richly robed saints or the Virgin Mary, it is still possible to catch a sense of the surprise and pleasure that their novelty once inspired. Expanses of gorgeous material were woven into the fabric of religious painting, their richness of pattern and colour being considered an essential ingredient in the depiction of paradise. The early Renaissance heaven frequently resembles a kind of textile emporium.

Having fallen in  love with fabric, painters soon started using it to enrich their representations of  love, and other human passions. Swathes and swatches of drapery acquired an independent – often erotically charged – life of their own during the High Renaissance. Whereas earlier artists had been at pains to ensure that the clothing they painted was as convincing as real clothing, suddenly painters began to take liberties with drapery and to redesign clothes in ways to suit their increasingly complicated purposes. Michelangelo was a pioneer in this development (although it is not a part of his achievement to which much attention has been drawn), creating idiosyncratic and unwearable fictional garments designed to liberate those parts of the human anatomy to which the painter felt sensually drawn. Sleeves go missing, or shirts are replaced by curious, waftily loose stretches of material, in order to reveal a model’s naked, muscled arm and shoulder. The same bit of the male body appealed to Caravaggio a hundred years later when he painted his famous, scantily draped Boy Bitten by a Lizard  – as it has also many more recent artists or photographers, ranging from David Hockney to Robert Mapplethorpe. Behind the unconventional use of fabric in painting, a kind of sensual (and, in this case, homoerotic) aesthetic is being formed.

The heyday of astonishing drapery in art was probably the period extending from the late Renaissance and Baroque to the end of the eighteenth-century. In the art of Titian and Tintoretto, Rubens and Van Dyck, Hyacinthe Rigaud and Nicholas Largilliere, the gratuitously introduced swathe of brightly coloured material became an independent force in the world of art, acting in defiance of gravity, becoming a pictorial substance in and of itself. In portraits, sitters often seem almost surprised – and are occasionally upstaged altogether – by the clouds of fantasy-fabric glory that trail so impressively from them. Van Dyck’s Countess of Castlehaven looks as though she is struggling to keep a straight face as part of her dress threatens to fly away into the sky. It is as if her clothing has come alive, and she is wondering what it will do next. In mythological or erotic scenes, painters used drapery as a form of surrogate caress, intruding great sweeping lengths of silky material to stroke an arm or feather a breast, communicating a sensual mood of  abandon to every inch of the canvas. It gradually became a convention which allowed for an almost startlingly free expression of feeling. In Baroque scenes of high drama, the draperies set the tone by fluttering and twisting in convolutions of displaced excitement or upset: fabric becamee the painter’s equivalent of film music or, it might be said, a way for the figurative artists of the past to express themselves in an almost abstract and purely emotional way. This pictorial liberation of drapery came to a climax in France around the mid- to late eighteenth century, in the impossibly draped, lavish, semi-real, semi-mythological  boudoirs of Fragonard, where it sometimes seems as though the whole world has turned into a flowing, liquidly expansive, unending piece of drapery, twisting and turning and coiling around a harem of peculiarly innocent-seeming naked female bodies.

Ms Hollander’s exhibition comes all the way up to the 1950s, to include modern painting, as well as taking sideways glances at fashion plate photography and film stills. Fred Astaire is seen as a latterday version of Delacroix’s inimitably suave Baron Schwitters; Marilyn Monroe, in decollete, as the twentieth-century reincarnation of what was an originally Venetian Renaissance ideal of womanliness. “Fabric of Vision” provocatively makes undress part of the story of dress, telling the tale of the undraped shoulder, the invitingly unconcealed cleavage, the flash of thigh. But above all its theme is the sheer exuberant pleasure that men and women have taken, over the centuries, in clothes and coloured stuffs. Unlike the rather dusty image of historical clothing made familiar by museums of costume – where mannequins woodenly model faded fabrics in darkened displays – paintings reveal what the people who actually wore it aspired to look like. Art, uniquely, brings costume to life, because it shows not just the garments of the past but also the dreams of glamour which they were originally tailored to fit.