April 21-27, 2005

naked city

Bare Market

strip stakes: A student sketches a nude at Studio Incamminati. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Philadelphia artists are obsessed with naked bodies. But is the public buying it?

by Audrey Gray

On the warmest day of spring so far, 22-year-old Melissa Montiel sits high up on a stool, entirely naked. She's surrounded by a half-circle of men and women standing with feet apart and one arm outstretched toward her like a bunch of fencers. With messy, dark curls framing her brown eyes and what she jokes is a "classical French figure," Montiel has become a favorite model for the group over the last two years. Armed with paintbrushes and nubs of charcoal, they'll spend six hours trying to capture her curves on their canvases. The next day, they'll work six more hours "painting from life." And the next day, six more. Bodies in the buff are the curriculum at Studio Incamminati, an old-Italian-style painting school on 12th Street started in 2002 by one of America's most respected contemporary figurative painters, Nelson Shanks.

"The human figure, with its anatomy, rhythm and poetry, is an endless place for study," says Shanks. "Ten people can learn to draw an apple. Only one can learn to draw a figure well." Learning can be costly. Philadelphia's approximately 200 nude models charge $11 to $15 an hour to pose for classes, and some oil painting techniques require the same model to sit every day for a month. Students at Studio Incamminati each pay two hundred bucks a week for this figure training, and most expect it will take three years of continuous study to get it right. Even then, few believe they'll make a living selling finely rendered nudes. "If money was the concern, I'd have chosen another profession," says student Natalie Italiano, 50, who after years of working as a watercolor portraitist is back in school to learn advanced oil skills. "My kids are like, "Why aren't we going to Mexico for spring break?' 'Cause mom's a painter, that's why!"

So for all the time and effort put into painting images of naked humans, does anyone actually buy them?

What's actually selling in Philadelphia's fine art market is a matter of debate among painters, dealers and art critics. Trends are tough to track. "Information about the total sales of "nude' versus "nonnude' artwork really isn't available," says Nicholas Crosson, research coordinator at the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance. "Art is produced by many different artists and sold in many ways — by small dealers, in public auctions and in private sales. We know from the 1997 economic census that there were 111 art dealers in the Philadelphia metro area who sold $45.1 million worth of art. The retail market for art in the whole country grew 45 percent from 1997 to 2002 [from $3 billion to $4.4 billion] and a number of Philadelphia galleries and auction houses have reported rising sales."

Some dealers, like Rodger LaPelle of LaPelle Galleries in Old City, report that fine art nudes are an easy sell in Philadelphia. "I can't get enough of them actually. Customers snap 'em up when they see what they like." LaPelle charges anywhere from $1,000 to $20,000 a painting. He says nudes account for about 5 percent of his overall sales.

Charles More, however, who's been selling masterpiece paintings at his gallery on Walnut Street for the last 30 years, says nudes have made up more than 50 percent of his business. "Philadelphia is a traditional kind of town. There aren't too many trendy people here like in L.A. I'm not saying there's anything bad about that, it's just that people here like things they know, and the human body is something people understand. What sells best are nude drawings. They're smaller and you can put them anywhere." Drawings at the More Gallery start at $250. Paintings sell for from $1,200 to "the sky's the limit." More says his customers are drawn to classic and fairly chaste representations of nudes, like the view of a woman's back as she is bathing. When artists get edgier, he says, Philadelphia buyers hesitate. "Most middle-class people aren't ready for large anatomy on the living room wall."

That hesitancy could also be a result of the quality of the figurative work around town, according to local art critic Libby Rosof. She says Philadelphia galleries are too quick to show the work of young artists fresh out of the city's many art schools. (At least 14 schools and universities in Philadelphia offer classes in painting the human figure. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) has an international reputation as a school devoted to figurative training.) "It's tough to make a nude feel contemporary," says Rosof. "Nudes speak to me of art lessons. When I see them in galleries, it feels like a class exercise. What I'm complaining about are Academy [PAFA] students' work. That's what I see too much of around Philadelphia."

Philadelphia has a centuries-old tradition of both encouraging artists to learn the human figure and for shunning the results — a kind of train 'em and disdain 'em mentality. In the late 1800s, the Pennsylvania Academy (now PAFA) supported painter Thomas Eakins as he applied the study of anatomy to his own life drawing. But eyebrows rose when Eakins and his students began to experiment with nude photography as a study technique, and the academy finally fired him in 1886 after he allowed his female students access to naked models. Eakins continued to work and teach independently, leaving a legacy of great American figurative paintings as well as a generation of young artists who weren't afraid of portraying bodies sans the strategically placed fig leaf. PAFA eventually embraced these painters and became a school that prized figurative work even when most of the art world went abstract in the 1900s.

One of PAFA's early graduates was an artist named Roy C. Nuse (1885-1975). Nuse worked in an impressionist style, often painting his own children playing around outside their home in Bucks County. Last June, Philadelphia's Freeman's auction house, which runs four major painting sales every year, decided to put one of Nuse's kid paintings on the cover of their June catalog. They chose Three Boys at the Sheephole, Nuse's portrayal of his young sons skinny-dipping at their local swimming hole. Freeman staffers were shocked when they received complaints from Philadelphia customers intimating that the cover was a form of child pornography. "One e-mail in particular threatened to report us to the attorney general," says Alasdair Nichol, Freeman's senior vice president. "But nothing came of it, and the painting actually broke a world record for Nuse." It went for $311,750, more than triple the previous $80,500 top price for Nuse.

Artists working these days would plotz over a price tag like that. On First Friday in April, Philadelphia newcomer Brian Schumacher held court at the opening reception for his 22 oil paintings and drawings, a number of nudes among them, at the Artists House Gallery on Second Street. Prices on his work ranged from $350 to $3,200. Schumacher says he's made double or triple that when he has shown in New York, but a good friend and affordable rent convinced him to set up a studio on Girard Avenue a few months ago. Schumacher is a realist, both in painting style and in his market outlook.

"You know what sells?" he laughs. "Young female nudes sell. It's like a running joke. There are all sorts of paintings out there named things like Morning Sunrise with a woman on a couch with her legs kicked up. To not do that is to deny myself income, but for me, the subject of intimacy and tenderness is more important right now." Schumacher portrays both male and female nudes in symbolic but not erotically charged situations, like pouring milk out of a pitcher. By mid-April, eight pieces of his exhibition had sold. Schumacher says he'll keep at it no matter what's moving. "Artists keep coming back to the human body," says Schumacher. "We're all trying to get our hands around what's meaningful about it."