Naked ladies

I've always liked paintings. Those horrible Roman generals thought it most effeminate of me, and so did the hardliners, the Zealots, the priests - all that nasty lot. But two figs for them I say, and anyway, they're all dead now, so it looks like I win.

I've also always liked girls. So - I went to an exhibition: Waterhouse, he painted girls - some naked. He even painted Mariamne, though there was no trace of likeness of course. At any rate, I thought the exhibition a great lark, though very crowded. I did miss my burly Egyptian bodyguards, as the oldies (how old everyone gets these days!) jostled gently around me.

But just as I was feeling pleased with myself, and everything, and John William Waterhouse in particular, I recieved a message from a new friend which made me think twice. It's his account of a visit to the exhibition - is he right to be so harsh?

Mon Cher M. Ant,

I was interested to hear that you were visiting the Waterhouse exhibition this week. I went some days ago, and jotted down my thoughts and impressions of the occasion, which I have copied below. I wonder if my sentiments tally with your own.

Amitiés,

S.

- - - - -

The three rooms at the top of London's Royal Academy were crammed with nodding heads - heads which sprouted the black tendrils of the audio-guide, which, like an invasive parasite, was feeding a bland poison of mild and scholarly approval into its contented hosts. The heads drifted around the room like melons in a stream, bunching into groups and then breaking apart, and all the time bobbing up and down in appreciation.

Which was all wrong. Wrong, because on the wall were paintings whose superficial prettiness and skillful execution should not have masked for a second the fact that they were deeply deeply corrupt. The early works, which aspired to the glossy orientalism of Alma-Tadema, and which were alright as far as they went, soon gave way to a parade of pubescent Victorian virgins that chilled the blood. They were nymphs, and sorceresses and sirens, here a Naiad, there a Circe or Penelope, and of course a doleful Lady of Shalott scowling from a boat on the end wall, but they were also all the same - young, pale, entirely without expression, they projected an overwhelming vacancy that betrayed an artist who had fatally failed to connect with womankind.

In one, St Cecilia, 12 years old, lay exposed on the snow. The story goes that god sent a blizzard to restore the modesty of her martyred and ravaged corpse - better than nothing one supposes - but not here. Rather, the child had been given the milky, budding breasts that could be seen peeping out of smocks and togas on every canvas. All the women on the walls, with their personas and mythologies and rich layers of story, had been transfigured by the painter's eye and brush into the same blank-eyed late-victorian masturbatory vision, a figure painted with endless lust, but also entirely without any of the character of an actual woman.

Of course we're still doing it. The gulf between the feminine and the erotic in public life is always being opened wider by the latest size-zero, or the impossible glow of the airbrushed glamour model. The real eroticism - of a sweating gripping hand, or the smell of the nape of someone's neck, first thing in the morning, or the crease of a belly hugged tight - is something we're still losing. It's something that the great artists understood. While Waterhouse was painting his necrophiliac kiddie porn in London, people like Bonnard, or Toulouse-Lautrec were making art that pulses with erotic charge. Waterhouse's nymphets become so much less forgivable when one remembers that the man was painting at the same time as Picasso.