Figure Painting

FIGURE PAINTING

Figure painting is a compliment to portrait painting, but it tends to emphasize the universal human body rather than the individualism of the human face. Like portraiture, figure painting is an ancient art but the Greeks, who had developed an artistic theory of perfect Beauty, crafted their sculptures to represent a universally perfect person and developed a figurative artistic style that would influence the rest of Western art.

The Romans’ did little with this artistic legacy from Greece and the Medieval Christians shunned all things Greco-Roman. With the Renaissance, a revival of the human body as an art form returned; Michelangelo’s work in both painting and sculpture and Leonardo Da Vinci’s scientific sketches of the human form.

While portraiture highlights the individuality of the person being painted, figurative painting spotlights the artist’s uniqueness. In Northern Europe, Rembrandt used his skylights to give a glorious drama to his nudes and Rubens’ nudes became so celebrated that his name is used to describe a figurative type. The Italians who followed the Renaissance painters, especially Titian and Tintoretto, glorified the human body in rich colors, but the eventual proliferation of feminine nudity in Western Art has led to a few people to suggest that it had a semi-social taboo.

Although the French painted nudes it to a degree during their Rococo style, it was the Neo-Classical revival of historical art that produced the greatest amount of figurative work in France. Jacques-Louis David’s Sabine Women was chocked full of barely dressed Romans and Ingre’s Turkish Bath provided the 19th century audiences with a painted glimpse of a room filled with nudes. By mid-century, the British were also providing a number of fashionable artists who painted figurative work, especially the Pre-Raphaelites, who attempted to return art to the days of Raphael.

Like portraiture, figurative painting underwent a number of changes during the modern art movements. Possible the greatest painters were Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, both of whom painted nudes in their own styles. The most famous nude of the 20th century was probably Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending A Staircase, a cubist deconstruction of the title. The whole genre probably reached its nadir with Willem DeKooning’s abstractions of nudes that some suggested was an attack on women.
Figure painting is a very important compliment to the art of portraiture. To be skilled in one requires that you should be competent in the other. While Photography now dominates the field of commercial portraiture, a good painting of the human body is still recognized as a work of art.

Other works of Fine Art you may enjoy:

The Connections Of Mary Cassatt

Bend In the River, an oil painting

Silence In the City, a cityscape painting