Art Historian as Artist’s Model
In 1982, I was invited by the late Sylvia Sleigh to pose for a painting as the Greek goddess Aphrodite. And I accepted my first and only venture into an artist’s studio as a nude model. In the painting I appear with the long dyed red hair I sported at the time, holding a quince, which Sylvia informed me was the true fruit known from Greek mythology as one of the apples of the Hesperides, standing ankle-deep in water, a nod to the mythological birth of Aphrodite/ aka Venus from sea-foam. According to the characterization in Wikipedia, Aphrodite is associated with love, lust, beauty, passion and procreation.
At the time, I was teaching the history of art in the Art Department of The City College of New York, and was also president of the local Manhattan chapter of the Women’s Caucus for Art. Many of us active in the women’s art movement of the time were working actively to promote the exhibiting and economic support of work by women artists, who were even more sparsely represented in gallery and museum exhibitions than they are at present.
Sylvia’s Aphrodite: Annie Shaver-Crandell, in oil on canvas 50 ” x 20,” (shown above) now owned by a private collection in Chicago, has turned up — the first time I’d seen it since Sylvia’s last session with me in her studio — in an exhibition currently on view in Manhattan at the Levy Gorvy Dayan Gallery, 19 East 64 Street. It is an exhibition entitled The Human Situation: Alice Neel, Marcia Marcus, Sylvia Sleigh. The exhibition runs until June 21, 2025.
These three women all portrayed people they knew, sometimes as themselves, or, in Sylvia’s case, sometimes as characters from mythology, or as riffs on the history of western art. One of her best-known paintings is The Turkish Bath of 1973, which portrays six nude men, one of whom was Sylvia’s husband, art critic Lawrence Alloway. In this work, she upended two traditions of European painting. One was the idea that only the bodies of women should be observed, idealized and, essentially, depicted as objects. Her immediate springboard for this painting would have been J.A.D. Ingres’s Turkish Bath, a 19th-century marvel depicting a harem-bath’s worth of nude (and mostly hairless) women in languid poses. As has been the norm in western depictions of the nude, male or female, faces, as well as bodies, have been generalized, idealized, and altogether rendered not especially individualized.
The other upended European artistic tradition is portraiture, which in my art historical experience generally includes the combination of likeness and artistic intention to record that likeness, and, generally, people’s clothing and surroundings. The combination of “nude” and “portrait” in one image may be more familiar now, but Sylvia Sleigh was a bit of a pioneer in drafting her friends and colleagues to allow both aspects of themselves to appear in a work together. Some balked at nudity but were portrayed as more modest deities.
As an art historian, I now acknowledge my entry into my field in a somewhat unusual way. Looking back, I can’t believe I agreed to pose nude, but in the process, I learned a good deal about how an artist operated, what could be expected of a non-professional model (payment was in the form of a bust-length, dressed profile portrait; lots of nice refreshments and gossip); the uncertainty of knowing where the image might have gone; and now the surprise of seeing it again, after more than half my life as a professional art historian, and, now, practicing artist myself.
