Introduction
The action I have chosen to display is bathing, or showering. Personal hygiene sounds like a necessity today that no one really talks about bathing or showering anymore. All we care now is what shampoo makes our hair less fuzzy, what body lotion is not sticky but keeps our skin moist, or what razor shaves the body hair smoothly. It is not until 1920s-1980s that daily bathing became a habit of humans. One of the reasons that bathing is not publicly (or even privately!) discussed is its personal privacy and a concern of body image. It is one of the few activities that we do without any clothes on, and often alone.
Bathing has almost become a private moment one spend with one’s self everyday. Some people sing while they shower, some meditate, some simply enjoy the calming of the nerves while the body is immersed in warm water. By displacing the action of bathing (which is mostly done in a small confined spaced at home or the gym), I want to change the stereotype of bathing is something no one else is allowed to see. I do completely understand and respect the idea of bathing alone in private, the displacement wishes to merely be a reminder that we humans were used to bathing in streams and nudity is the most natural way for our body to be.
For the artworks I have found at the Met, most of them are painting while one is a sculpture. Each piece is directly depicting a woman bathing—in a bathtub or a natural stream of water. The paintings were created with oil on canvas or pastel and charcoal on paper and reveals exceptional portrayal of the female body. Speaking of this, I am also interested in the gender issue involves in bathing and classical paintings. It seemed to me that except the Greek mythical representations (either sculpture of painting) are the only artworks where the male body is not covered by clothes, while the female body is constantly portrayed in nude throughout history and across various art forms.
From the Met visit, I have selected five pieces of work for the exhibition. The first three pieces are by French painter Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), the last two pieces are by Edgar Degas (1834-1917) who was also French. The five pieces are as the following:
Artist: Edgar Degas (French, Paris 1834–1917 Paris) Date: ca. 1890 Medium: Pastel and charcoal on blue laid paper, mounted at perimeter on backing board Dimensions: 22 x 18 3/4 in. (55.9 x 47.6 cm)
Artist: Gustave Courbet (French, Ornans 1819–1877 La Tour-de-Peilz) Date: 1868 Medium: Oil on canvas Dimensions: 25 3/4 x 21 1/4 in. (65.4 x 54 cm)
Artist: Gustave Courbet (French, Ornans 1819–1877 La Tour-de-Peilz) Date: 1862 Medium: Oil on canvas Dimensions: 47 1/4 x 29 1/4 in. (120 x 74.3 cm)
Artist: Gustave Courbet (French, Ornans 1819–1877 La Tour-de-Peilz) Date: 1866 Medium: Oil on canvas Dimensions: 51 1/4 x 38 1/4 in. (130.2 x 97.2 cm)
Artist: Edgar Degas (French, Paris 1834–1917 Paris) Founder: Cast by A.-A. Hébrard et Cie (Paris) Date: modeled 1888–89, cast 1920 Medium: Bronze Dimensions: 8-1/2 x 17-7/8 x 16-5/8 in. (21.6 x 45.4 x 42.2 cm.)
Both Degas and Courbet portrayed the back of woman while she is in the process of bathing. In Bather Stepping into a Tub (1890), Degas used pastel to create smooth line and subtle color changes to distinguish between the bather and the wall. While the tube is located at the corner of the room, Degas was able to use colors ranging from orange to brown to portray the wall. The bathtub is in a darker purple, blue shade which contrasts with both the female body and the surrounding walls. The bather is in the motion of stepping into the tub, she has one leg in the tub and a hand on each side of the tub for support of the body. This gesture creates a diagonal composition the painting that not only allows the audience to appreciate the curves of the female body but also to balance the figures in the frame.
On the other hand, Courbet’s portrayal of the back of a bather reveals her full body from head to toe. The Young Bather (1866) positioned the female body vertically at the center of the canvas, while the surrounding background illustrates the dark green of a forest and gentle streams of water flowing from the right hand corner on the top. The clear streams of water goes past the bather and then gathered at her feet into a clear pond. Comparing wit Degas’ lines, Courbet has more defined edges and more delicate shadings. However, this may be due to the different media Courbet and Degas used. The distinguishable figure of the bather shows her ravishing youth. She seems to be completely blended in the nature around her.
While in The Young Bather (1866) Courbet portrayed a perfect female body bathing in the streams, in his other painting, The Source (1862) he rejects the portrayal of a conventional idealized female body. The painting features a bather, again, full body, on the left side of the portrait composition. She is leaning on one side of her body while the other foot slightly steps into the stream. Again, the background surrounding of the bather is nature. However, the season seems to be in the spring or summer while the trees have a lighter shade of green in chartreuse, lime green, and spring green. The stream below the bather also appears to be wider and extends to a broader field. The shadows on the bather’s bum, waist, and thigh portray her body realistically.
The next piece by Courbet is The Woman in the Waves (1868) is smaller in dimension and only features the bather from belly above. The bather in this painting is said to be Venus, the goddess born of the sea. Therefore, the action in this painting may not be strictly bathing but the figure is enjoying herself in the water of nature at ease. Hence, the painting depicts the relationship between water and human. Although the female figure has an ideal body and an elegant posture, Courbet again subverts by depicting the underarm hair of the subject. Body hair is also a controversial yet rarely discussed topic that is related to bathing. Most relative content we encounter on the street would be hair removal or waxing at spa.
The final piece is a sculpture created by Edgar Degas named, The Tub (1920). This is a bronze sculpture featuring a younger girl fitting her entire upper body into a round tub while resting one foot on the edge of the tub and the other on her knee. The body language of the little girl is portrayed as calm and playful. She seems to very much enjoy the bath she is taking. As water in the tub is also portrayed through the sculpture, many of the body features are revealed. However, her leges and head are delicately created. The cure of her right foot and the pointy nose give the work life. The way both arms of the girl is spread out to the sides and resting on the edge if the tub also brings the viewer to her pleasant, playful bath.
As mentioned earlier, these five works are placed together in the exhibition I am curating because they have many similar features. Both Degas and Courbet were artist of the 1900s France, their works all portray the action of a female bathing. However, the five works varies in their medium of creation, there is bronze, pastel and charcoal, and oil on canvas. These three materials create different sensations for the viewers. While the paintings demonstrate a two dimensional view of the subject, the sculpture provides a three dimensional perspective.
The curation is basically composed of 19th century French paintings and one sculpture on women bathing. If I take a feminine approach, the exhibition would be entitled “Water and the Female Body,” however, as mentioned earlier, what I want to convey through the displacement is a motive for the audience to rethink on privacy, intimacy, and the body’s relation to nature. It was only five hundred years ago that people started bathing indoors in individual cells where the sexes are separated.
I want to make my point clear in the exhibition title. So I decided to named the exhibition “500 Years of Indoor Bathing.” This way, when audience actually get to the exhibiting works, they find nothing about indoor bathing but rather the free, joyful outdoor bathing artworks created a hundred years ago. Despite these works being very prestigious and delicately created (which means they deserve to be put in an actual gallery or museum), I wish to put it in department stores where people who actually care about life would see. It would be ideal if the works are displayed in an open area such as the lobby on the first floor. This exhibition is more about creating a social reflection than a display of famous artwork.
For the actual display of the work, I want the paintings to be in one line as the following order and the sculpture by Degas right in front of the paintings at the middle. This way, audience can walk around the sculpture to see it in different angles. When one is standing in front of all the works, they can also get a sense that human bathing in the nature is not something so far away from today.
Conclusion
Overall, the experience of looking for my action in the Met was fun. I have been to the Met multiple times in the past years and have already had an idea of what they have and what they don’t have. For example, they would have ancient vessels instead of Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree. Therefore, I came to the Met a list of objects and actions, I wanted to see which I can find the most relative artworks for. Bathing was actually the last one that I found enough artworks for.
It was challenging for me because I knew the basic construct of the Met (which level has what and artifacts from which geographical area would be displayed where), however, I do not have enough knowledge to know in what time period at where certain actions or objects would be featured. Therefore, I ended up walking almost the entire museum to look for my artworks.
The bathing artworks were hard to find at first. I knew that it was hard to create sculpture on the action of bathing so I skipped most of the sculpture sections. I thought that European paintings would probably feature drawings of the female body so maybe I have a chance to find the female body bathing in European paintings. And there they were. The five pieces of work I chose for this exhibition were place one next to the other along with two more works of Degas. I immediately decided to do bathing from my list of actions/objects because the social message behind it is something that I am most eager to work on. I have to admit that I was actually very surprised that these artworks on bathing only featured females. It is true that the female body is often portrayed in art throughout history but it is still shocking for me how men’s nudity is only portrayed in mythical or biblical works.
