Last week, the
Edinburgh Airport briefly censored a Picasso poster after a passenger
complained about the nudity. In a brief piece I wrote in Sunday’s Washington
Post, I opine that the problem is less the nudity than the art. The woman is
blue, her hair is green, and she has a breast growing out of her sternum; it’s
my contention that if the image were more realistic, it would bother people
less, and that it’s the very unfamiliarity of the depiction (“unfamiliar” 80
years after it was painted) that makes some viewers resist. What are your
thoughts?
This is not unrelated to classical music. I always tell the
story of seeing a woman at a quartet recital sleep happily through Mozart and
Brahms and bristle like a wet cat throughout the Lutoslawski, perhaps not
realizing it was the only piece on the concert that she actually heard. I think
that more literal representations of the female form might be akin to Mozart:
people are able to perceive them as simply “pretty” and let them fade into the
background.