I spent the weekend with several dozen nudes. it was thrilling!
There were women and men, big and small, young and old. They were bathing, washing, dancing. There were groups picknicking, drinking, playing. One (or two?) were sitting strangely in armchairs. One was trying on hats. Another caressing a dying young hero. One woman was even lying down as a fish.
And there was a couple kissing, or about to. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Flesh-like marble. Intertwined and interlocking. Erotically charged. Moving and alive. Only a true master at the top of his game could have created it, and it took him a decade.
Of course, I’ve seen it before. In protographs. But photographs can give only the suggestion of a story like this. The shadow, but not the substance. Nothing prepares you for the real thing, live and in the flesh and in front of you. There is nothing else in the world like it!
It took me several hours to walk around it — studying it, enjoying it, imbibing it — and I look forward to many more before it returns home in July. It seems to have the whole world in it, and create whole new worlds of its own.
If you have an ounce of soul yourself stiil unstrained, still unfiltered, then take it along to Auckland’s Art Gallery to see the Tate Gallery’s exhibition of nude masterpieces. Take an hour, at least, to walk around Rodin’s The Kiss. Any direction. Sit with it. Study it. if there is a greater work of art in the world, I don’t know it.
