Sandra Chesterman: Figure Work

By T.J. McNAMARA

Figure Work: The Nude and Life Modelling in New Zealand is a decidedly odd book yet an entertaining one. The oddity begins on the cover: a painting by Mary McIntyre that is broadly ambiguous until you look down at the groin.

McIntyre is one of many artists who use the nude figure to convey a variety of values and attitudes.

Nudes weren't always respectable. In the popular mind artists were all immoral because they all did figure drawing from a naked model. One thinks sadly of Edith Collier who returned to New Zealand in 1921 full of exuberance and delighting in her control over drawing the human figure after nine years in Europe, only to have her paintings burned by her father in moral disgust at the nudity.

All this and so much more is explored in this quirky patchwork of a book which is full of good research, entertaining anecdote and fine, well-chosen illustrations.

It is as much a social document as a work of art history. There is an introduction about the nude in art and then we get a string of New Zealand works which have been seen fleetingly in exhibitions but are here brought together for the first time.

And how good they are. How strange and how varied. Most of them are seen from the rear; it took a long time to come to terms with pubic hair.

The chronicle includes the sunny nudes of Evelyn Page, the monumental heavyweight of a McCahon nude, the expressionism of Alan Pearson and the blatant sex goddesses of Philip Clairmont.

Unprecedented, unheralded but an absolute delight for what it shows of our artists, our society and our thoughts about people with no clothes on.

* Otago University Press, $59.95