WITHOUT TRADITION OR CLOTHES

...Strange that the innovators of such lovely architectural proportions should have produced all those stone athletes with their empty faces, overly perfect "pecs" and absurdly neatened genitals...

...These fantasies may have religious significance, but they must have originated in biological reality...

...There hadn't, but LaFarge is on record as having seen a Gauguin show and thinking nothing of it...

...John LaFarge, a friend of Emerson's and a painter of some talent, was capable of producing a female centaur in 1887, despite having been to Paris where he presumably acquired his sophisticated brush stroke...

...While the architectural philosophy of Greece was gracefully adapted to newer eras, the transition of their physiological standards was a disaster, as Benjamin West's Death of Hyacinthus testifies...

...Figures by Elie Nadelman, Gaston Lachaise, Saul Baizerman, Leonard Baskin, Peter Agostini, and Mary Frank do duty for one side of modernism, with George Segal's Girl on a Bed III and John Andrea's fiberglass facsimile of a live model-earrings, goosebumps, tired feet, and all-standing for the other...

...The show's premise is familiar: American art has been laggard in coming to grips with the undraped form because of early repressive Puritan and Victorian influences...

...Stranger still when one considers how long and unsuitably this archetype survived...

...It is quite understandable that in northern latitudes, for instance, nudity became bowed down with sexual license...

...The selection, made by William Gerdts, author of The Great American Nude, and Leslie Cohen, the Center's associate curator, will travel to Minneapolis and Houston...

...These details suggest how simplistic history can be, with its inadequate attention to the way the mind actually works...

...Some of the more preposterous of these creations, from the ancient Greeks, happen also to be the more puritanical in implication...

...But whether they concern nudity, marriage between blood relatives or smoking in the subway hardly matters-they have nothing demonstrably to do with the quality of a culture's art...

...In the lower left corner, one of the nymphs is embracing a white mutt, his tongue lolling out very pinkly, in order to restrain him from joining in the romp...

...If puritanism is fussing about moral stance before putting brush to canvas, to use an archaic metaphor, then artists working today are as puritanical as ever, whether itemizing each pubic hair or thrusting a pregnant abdomen into one's face...

...Although it does appear that our artists have at times approached the naked body with either undue veneration or downright dislike, one feels that as incriminating a survey could be mounted from any country that has felt the Protestant lash...

...On Art WITHOUT TRADITION OR CLOTHES BY VIVIEN RAYNOR Three Centuries of the American Nude" (New York Cultural Center, through July 13) comprises 168 works, 111 of them paintings and the rest drawings, prints and sculptures...

...Otherwise, Shaker artifacts alone would be a powerful argument for celibacy...

...George Bellows, too, gave faces and expressions to his nudes, and though the varnished surfaces of his paintings can be intrusive, they have certainly kept the color dewy, as in his 1920 Nude with Fan...

...There is sufficient material here to promote lively interest and some general conclusions...

...Moreover, puritan-ism with a small "p" should not be blamed so reflexively on the Puritans, it being inherent in all forms of Christianity and Judaism, not to mention Islam...

...Eakins, on the other hand, scraped an honorable mention for his Cello Player and Salutat, the latter being the famous study of a prizefighter acknowledging the crowd's cheers, included in the present show...

...One of the dottier manifestations of this desire is Julius Stewart's Wood Nymphs, painted in 1900...

...Of the early 20th-century pieces, John Sloan's small Prone Nude (1912) is outstanding for its atypical restraint and the Boucher-like luminescence of its flesh...

...Possibly a circumspect attitude toward nakedness is due to climatic conditions rather than religion...

...Typifying the last 10-20 years are efforts by Larry Rivers, Philip Pearlstein, Lennart Anderson, Alice Neal, Paul Georges, Al Leslie, Jack Beal, and John Koch...

...But there's something affected about its calculated primitivism, making the artist appear the precursor of the self-consciousness that was to come...

...Similarly, no one watching the first sunbathers of summer can fail to be shocked by the sight of excruciatingly white flesh, as vulnerable-looking as a plant root and as obviously in need of being stored away in a dark place...

...Nevertheless, it is an absorbing exhibition both for the individual paintings and for the way that they collectively subvert the author's argument...

...It is, besides, a terrific way of dodging the issues, and for a number of contemporaries, these mean basic skills...

...Breathing down the neck of straight painting is, of course, Pop-as evidenced by Tom Wesselmann-and photorealism...

...On this occasion it is of little concern (except to the artist) that some works are ill-chosen, or that the show is heterogeneous to the point of messiness...

...There was something distinctly American starting to emerge in West's work-Hyacinthus' proportions are too long and lean for Europe, his posture too loose-but later artists continued to bark up the Neoclassical tree...

...Stewart and LaFarge, along with William Merritt Chase, Alden Weir and Abbott Thayer, are part of the group of Eakins' rivals on view here...

...Hartley's Madawacka-Acadian Light-Heavy (1940) looks strong in this setting, bursting with muscles and chest hair...

...The anecdotal detail of shucked-off slippers on the floor doesn't spoil it...

...Perhaps it has become easier to see the magnitude of the colonial trauma for artists, especially since the immigrants had found no settled native tradition, as the Spanish had found in Mexico, to graft their perceptions on to...

...Now for some reason they arouse empathy...

...The Puritan may linger within and without," writes Gerdts in the catalogue introduction, "but for the moment the nude has been stripped of all pretense.' Even if pretense was the main problem, many of the contemporary works included here make one wish some of it could be stuck back on...

...Even his teaching techniques haven't been further developed...

...Before the advent of efficient heating methods, the body could have rarely been seen except when that license was being taken, or else during infrequent ablutions...

...Howard Chandler Christy's dreary canvas of belles simpering under a beach umbrella is a sobering reminder that in the Paris World's Fair of 1900, he, as a 28-year-old, won a bronze medal for God knows what...

...The Greek ideal has been overthrown at last and replaced by individual archetypes based more or less on the artists' visions of themselves...

...And when someone did provide that basis, as in the case of Eakins, there was never a successor to take advantage of it and help construct a tradition, as distinct from a fashion...

...The young godling, having being zapped by the discus of Zephyrus, looks dreadfully gay as he leans against his lover Apollo, who applies a compress of leaves to his injured brow...

...The collective state of mind-knowing that one could always go home-couldn't have helped either...

...Two years later, as a result of a visit to the South Seas, he portrayed a Tahitian boatman so evocative of Gauguin that I checked to see if there had ever been an encounter between them...

...Until recently, these parodies served only to illustrate the ineptitude of provincial painters, even when, like West, they were successful expatriates...

...Revolutionary as the new republic was, its artists were quite conservative...

...Neither LaFarge nor Thomas Eakins responded to the ferment beginning in Paris in the '60s-they were hungry for a solid tradition...

...It may be a necessary part of the human psyche, without which civilization and survival would be impossible...

...It was painted in 1770 at the end of West's Neoclassical period, shortly before the artist embarked on the Death of Wolfe, marking the beginning-and not a moment too soon-of his Romantic period of historical pictures...

...American art has, whatever its subject, been in a continuous state of taking two steps forward and one back...

...Explicit sex in art can be a tremendous lift, particularly when it is as cleverly done as in the huge pencil pastiche of Japanese copulation by Larry Rivers...

...An intimate picture of a real woman, it has her lying on a bed, smiling and extending her hand...

...There has been no serious shortage of exceptional personalities and sensibilities, yet their accomplishments have rarely produced a firm basis to build on...

...Sculpture gets scant attention...

...However, there are enough diminutive white marble nudes to convey the spirit of the 19th century...

...Among those represented who are not normally associated with this oeuvre are Childe Hassam, Maurice Prendergast and Marsden Hartley...

...Aside from their being tall and statuesque in the Charles Dana Gibson style, the picture has a quietly bizarre touch as American as Dogpatch...

...Yet, in benign climates, where unclothed bodies are at ease in the open air, artists stylized the human form to fit one ideal or another as well...

...It consists of a group of girls wearing Grecian drapery scampering in a field...

...and never have these realists seemed more disparate...

...Tanning itself is a very new human ritual...

...After all, the fabric of a society depends on its taboos, and on their being observed once they have been decided upon...