Pueyrredón, Prilidiano (1823-1870)
El baño (The Bath)
1865
Oil on canvas, 102 x 126.5 cm
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires
Currently, two nudes by Prilidiano Pueyrredón are known: El baño and La siesta (private collection), both of a similar format, with dimensions appropriate for salon painting, rather than for the small nude work for private consumption. These paintings were associated with erotic photography, by Laura Malosetti Costa, due to the lack of idealization of the female body. That is to say, the artist avoided the use of literature and mythology for the representation of the nude body, as was the usual mechanism for eroticism to maintain nineteenth-century decorum.
The reception of these nudes was not simply private, although they were not exhibited, since the press made comments about them that, although restrained, were complimentary: “There are some of these pages that cannot be talked about, but they are a delight to look at. We leave them because our word is not bright enough to be able to clothe the nakedness with which the painter shows that he is capable, with only the aid of a brush, a grain of ground earth and a thimble of oil, of robbing the arteries of their pulsations, the skin of its softness, and human forms of the eloquence that God has given them to speak to the senses and the affections”. Of course, he does not refer directly to The Bath – he also mentions another lost nude, with the theme of the model in the studio – but he indicates that Pueyrredón‘s nude paintings were not for the amusement of his small group of friends, but works exhibited to the chronicler of one of the main Buenos Aires publications. On the other hand, as can be seen in the portrait of Santiago Calzadilla, the nudes were hanging in the artist’s studio.
The moralizing comments of Eduardo Schiaffino and José María Lozano Mouján supported the myth of the solitary and lascivious painter, which was certainly dismantled by José León Pagano. Although, without a doubt, the realism of the representation is audacious for the year 1865, even more so given the portrait-like character of the nude depicted, lacking any idealization.
Of Pueyrredón‘s nudes, The Siesta has attracted the most attention due to the ambiguous position of both bodies, as if they were duplicates. However, The Bath is more radical in its execution: the space is dominated by a bathtub, slightly diagonally, which affirms the naked female body, rotund in its breasts but with the turbidity of the water covering the sex, and a light cloth, drawn and barely submerged in the water, which occupies the entire lower right corner of the cloth. The background is resolved in green bands, with darker vertical lines, remaining in shadows in sectors due to the light directed on the body from above. The facing of the body contrasts with the loose black hair behind the back that frames the mischievously smiling face; the head turned to the left as if noticing the arrival of someone expected. The viewer’s gaze from a high point of view is not questioned by the naked woman. The use of light projects the profile in shadow on the back of the bathtub. Thus, we are observers of an everyday moment charged with eroticism, but not virtually incorporated into it.
If we observe that The Siesta represents two women resting in the heat of the Buenos Aires afternoon, and one of the women has the same physiognomy as the nude in the MNBA, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the gaze is directed at the other woman. The same one found in the oil on copper Bathers in the Luján River (private collection), a landscape with nudes, which refers to the iconography of Susanna or the nymphs, but which assumes its erotic charge when we can identify among the bushes the hat and face of a man (the painter?) observing the scene.
The provenance of El baño is interesting, since the Moreno family – in which Francisco Moreno “el perito” stood out – maintained strong ties with art, being related to that of Rufino Varela. Finally, this is an iconic work of Argentine art and, among various citations, the sculpture by Juan Carlos Distéfano from 1975 stands out. (Roberto Amigo | MNBA)