AND ANOTHER THING
For correctness doth make cowards of us all
PAUL JOHNSON
There is a deep, ineradicable human need to be shocked by words or images, and therefore a corresponding urge to cen- sor. I never believe people when they say they support total freedom of expression. They all have reservations in certain areas, which of course vary according to their cul- tural posture. A novelist or playwright who stuffs his work with four-letter words or `full-frontals' would be outraged if he heard someone refer to a 'nigger' instead of a black'. Conversely, many people who would like to abolish the Race Relations Act would welcome tougher obscenity laws and a revival of the powers of the Lord Chamberlain. The desire to suppress is per- manent in all our hearts; only the object changes. In due course, I dare say, 'black' may become censorable among the Politi- cally Correct, and 'negro' restored to favour. Political Correctness itself is a mod- ern variant of the old American Puritan tradition, once directed against witches, fallen women, the poems of Walt Whitman and burlesque shows. The woman academic at Penn State who recently objected to a Print of Goya's `Naked Maja', and obliged the university to remove it, speaks for this tradition. A hundred years ago she would also have objected, but on religious grounds: the Maja's nakedness would then have been an affront to 'decency', an insult to the 'purity of women'. Now she uses the cant term of the 1990s: it is a case of 'sexual harassment'.
A hundred years ago, one need hardly say, the print would not have been dis- played . in the first place. It would be instructive to know when it was first acquired and put up by the university authorities. I suspect towards the end of the 1960s, reflecting an earlier archaeologi- cal layer of progressive correctitude, when the need to 'abolish taboos' was paramount. For the painting is, and was Intended to be, an affront to the prudish. Indeed, it is disturbing in all sorts of ways. Like nearly all the great reclining nudes, Including those by Titian, Velasquez and Manet, it reflects the almost insoluble diffi- culties painters find in displaying the whole of a woman's nakedness and, at the same tune, suggesting repose. The girl's body is n ot sunk in the cushions, as it ought to be; it is as though she is holding herself rigid to Present the maximum display. Her legs are Particularly awkward and her feet unnatu- rally placed. Her arms are stiff and do not
support her head. Indeed, the head looks as though it belongs to another body and was simply stuck on, omitting the neck. I find it uncomfortable to look at this paint- ing, for reasons which have nothing to do with sex.
Nevertheless, it is also potent sexually, as its history suggests. When it came to Lon- don, together with its pendant, the 'Clothed Maja', in May 1990, the National Gallery published a little pamphlet, Goya's Majas, by Enriqueta Harris and Duncan Bull, set- ting out what is known — not much, alas about the pair, and I recommend it to any- one interested in this controversy. Until recently, Spain has always been a prudish country and it was rare for a painting of a naked woman to be displayed, even in pri- vate. Velasquez's 'Toilet of Venus' was an exception. Goya's Majas are particularly provocative, and the naked one even reveals pubic hair, perhaps for the first time in European art. Goya seems to have painted them for, or given them to, the all- powerful and lascivious minister, Manuel Godoy, who built up an enormous art col- lection at the turn of the 18th century. Most of it was for public display, but he also had a secret apartment or 'inner cabi- net', described by a visitor in 1800 as hung with 'pictures of various Venuses'. An inventory of 1808 says it contained not only 'Goya: Nude gypsy/clothed gypsy, both reclining', but also Velazquez's 'famous Venus', given to Godoy by the rich and emancipated Duchess of Alba, no doubt in return for a political favour.
The Duchess, who was a friend, patron and possibly lover of Goya, is often said to have provided the body, though not the head, for the two Majas. In 1945, the cur- rent Duke of Alba actually had his forebear exhumed, hoping by measuring her dimen- sions to disprove the tale, which has nonetheless persisted. Goya was 50 when he spent several months, in 1797, at the Andalucian villa of the Duchess, then a widow of 34. He not only painted a stand- ing figure of her, pointing to two words on the ground, 'Solo Goya', but filled a sketch- book with suggestive drawings of ladies. One of them is certainly the Duchess, showing her legs and backside bare, the rest clothed, and is possibly a joke allusion to the two Majas. Even amid the turmoil of French revolutionary Europe, there was something pretty shocking about Goya's artistic relations with the lady.
Goya was not only daring, even reckless, but a great survivor. He kept afloat throughout all the tempests which engulfed Spain in the early 19th century. The restorations of the Bourbons, however, involved the return of the Inquisition, and on 16 March 1815, when he was 68, he was summoned to appear before its Tribunal, under Section 11 of the Rules of Expurga- tion, to 'inspect' the two Majas, which the Tribunal was apparently holding, 'and declare if they are his works and why he made them, to whose order and to what purpose'. But no response from Goya has survived and there is no record of the pro- ceedings, if any occurred. In March 1815, of course, Europe was suddenly plunged in uproar again by Bonaparte's escape from Elba, and in the uncertainty the case against Goya may have been dropped. Or he got one of his innumerable powerful friends to intervene. At all events, Goya went unpunished and the two paintings sur- vived, to shock and intrigue future genera- tions.
The print to which the woman objected, on the other hand, was promptly taken down. Every American university, it appears, has a special body which listens to complaints from those who feel themselves `oppressed' or 'harassed', and there is an interstate enforcement agency which keeps them up to the mark. They both acted quickly in this case and the 'Naked Maja' was consigned to outer darkness. It is a sig- nificant comment on our times to compare the two attempts to censor the little wan- ton. In the year of Waterloo, the Inquisi- tion, symbol of reaction, in the name of tra- ditional morality, failed to get its way. In 1991, the forces of progress, in the name of Political Correctness, succeeded without difficulty. It seems to me that, in our sup- posedly enlightened age, there is a lot of prudery, intolerance and censorship about — and a good deal of cowardice too.
Previous page
