by Some works of art are iconic once they are created, such as the Mona Lisa or Warhol’s soup cans. Others become famous in more complicated ways. Frederic, Lord Leighton’s late 19th century painting Flaming June was forgotten and lost for much of the 20th century, and when it arrived in the 1960s nobody wanted it except Andrew Lloyd Webber, who claims to have tried £50 to borrow from his. her grandmother to buy it, and the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico, which jumped into a place where young Lloyd Webber failed. It has now been lending its store to the Royal Academy for nearly a year while it remains closed after an earthquake. This loan has been heralded by the UK as a triumphant return of a British masterpiece, and other museums around the world have shown it with great excitement, ultimately an overnight success.
It’s easy to see why it was a hit when it was first shown at the Royal Academy in 1895: it allowed Victorians to enjoy a sneaky sensual peak. The June flame is a symbol of Summer. With her red hair and fierce clothes, a model curls up on a marble seat, allowing us to look at her with her eyes closed. Respectful viewers could not fault its light aesthetic. But although Dr. Jekyll smugly approved, any Mrs. Hyde visiting the exhibition could notice the nipple that was firmly visible through her dress, and how the firm glowing skeleton revealed the vastness of her thigh flesh. rose.
Leighton plays a double game, the ultimate Victorian hypocrite. He turns the respectable conventions of his time inside out by using his model’s cover not to hide but to accentuate the curves of her androgynous body as she turns herself into a slender human coil. It is a huge artistic joke: at the end of his very successful life, which he saw in his Lord shortly before his death, Leighton has a good laugh about what is nudity, the body and sensuality.
One thing that bodies of art don’t have is the impression that they are living human forms. RA emphasizes the point by displaying his celebrated painting alongside chestnuts from his collection that the students once used to draw the body as artistic rather than biological fact. The Belvedere Torso, a muscular trunk with no limbs or head, and the Laocoön, in which a father and his young sons are taking the life out of the big snakes, are very interesting. A painting attributed to Zoffany shows 18th century art students painstakingly drawing these replicas.
Leighton emerges in this fascinating encounter as one of the last great exemplars of that “academic” tradition in which you learned to see the human body through the lens of classical art. A cold stone masterpiece inspired by Flaming June, Michelangelo’s sculpture of Night in the New Sacristy, Florence. It is from this statue of a woman whose right leg is raised to emphasize a powerful hip that Leighton finds a similarly raised leg that bulges through the orange diaphanousness.
Neither artist was necessarily interested in the female body outside of its artistic possibilities. Michelangelo’s Eve is famous for having two peppercorns stuck on her chest far apart for breasts. And we shouldn’t make any assumptions about the sexuality of Leighton, who lived alone in his house with his lush north African-style tiles.
In fact, the Royal Academy exhibition begins with a cast of The Sluggard, an extremely sensible male nude by Leighton. He is a Michelangelesque youth who stretches and relaxes, unconsciously showing us his bare body as he does so. Except in the medium-sized cast in the UK collection, his genitalia, which were happily exposed in the original, are replaced by a juniper leaf.
Perhaps this president of the Royal Academy was gay or bisexual, or perhaps he avoided all arrests in order to vent his complex desires in art – and Flaming June seems to announce. It is art for art’s sake, a cool and funny machine of a painting that distracts the eye while leaving the brain free to appreciate Leighton’s fine art. It is as if the father of conceptual art Marcel Duchamp had collaborated with a skilled figure painter to create a piece of ironic erotica.
Is it a masterpiece? No, obviously not. Our age of the simulacrum likes it because it works so well in reproduction: it’s as smooth and clinical as a photograph. Successful Victorian painters like Leighton were adept at bringing the clarity of the camera to their art, which was popular in Britain from the 1850s onwards. For all its references to high art, Flaming June is a populist work, completely unambiguous and unpoetic: an effective painting that makes an immediate impact and provides a quick glimpse of visual satisfaction. Drink in that orange. Notice that nipple.
It has no soul at all. In this beautiful lesson Leighton gives nothing of himself and leaves nothing to the imagination – or the heart. It’s a cliche to call classic nudes “cold” but I felt the cold looking at Flaming June. Like an English evening in early summer, this is not all it promises.
• At the Royal Academy, London, until 12 January
