Thursday, Ron Kroutel, professor emeritus of painting, will headline the fifth Inside/Outside: Art Talks of this academic year at the Kennedy Museum of Art with “Naked Bodies: Contemporary Issues in Figure Painting.” The discussion will explore the role sex plays in society and the media today while also seeing if it is possible to paint nudes without exploiting the body.
“With painting a nude figure, there’s all this history and sexism attached to it,” Kroutel said. “For anybody to paint a nude, especially a man, right away people think he’s unconsciously fitting into this cultural attitude to commodify women. My talk is how to navigate all that and still do serious work.”
It’s a topic that Gladys Bailin-Stern, president of the Friends of Kennedy Museum, which sponsors the art talks, finds very relative to this modern age.
“It’s something that’s going on in our culture,” she said. “It’s ever-present. We see references to bodies and women in everything, like in advertising. There isn’t a magazine that you open that isn’t selling something with a partially-clad lady. … Look at how bold movies have become.”
Many years ago, Kroutel worked with figures in his paintings but then moved to only focus on landscapes. Recently, he said the figures have reappeared in his paintings and are included with the landscape. Those figures have also begun to appear nude.
“At one point, I put the nude into an environment and it changed tremendously from being clothed,” he said. “The nude figure expresses more emotions: vulnerability, a strength of confidence in the body.”
Elise Sanford, the chairperson of the Inside/Outside Talks committee of the Friends of Kennedy Museum, said she is looking forward to seeing Kroutel’s explanation of the naked versus nude body, an argument found in John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, an essay analyzing the use of nudes in old European paintings.
“Usually, the nude is an artistic concept and the naked body is the erotic body,” she said. “He is going to connect art history and art criticism.”
If You Go
What: Inside/Outside: Art Talk: Ron Kroutel
When: 5:30 - 6:30 p.m. Thursday
Where: Kennedy Museum of Art
Admission: Free
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