There are several editions of the sculpture titled Venus Restored by the American artist Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky, 1890-1976). First made in 1936, from a plaster cast of the ancient Greek marble torso known as the Venus de Medici, to which Man Ray added a piece of rope, this sculpture – properly called an assemblage – is a knowingly-staged female goddess on a pedestal whose lack of a head, arms, and legs, together with the rope, emphasises her frozen contours and a kind of imprisonment, despite a suggestion of movement made by her slightly projecting right breast and thigh. It is a modern commentary on the beauty of the ancient original in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, although Man Ray's choice of title also brings to mind the Venus of Arles, found in three fragments in that city's Roman amphitheatre in 1651 and restored by François Girardon, Louis XIV's favourite sculptor, into a perfect erotic whole.
When Man Ray's Venus Restored was chosen to publicize the Plenary Assembly of the Pontifical Council for Culture in Rome (February 4th-7th, 2015) and its discussion of "Women's Culture: Equality and Difference", the choice led to a scandal. The Catholic reform group 'We Are Church Ireland' deemed the work "deeply disturbing" and Soline Humbert, writing in The Irish Times, claimed it was typical of the "sadistic streak" in Man Ray's artwork in its "male fantasy of power over women." In her blog, Bridget Mary Meehan, of the Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests, felt "this naked woman image" reflected "the Vatican's patriarchal, dysfunctional view that holds women in spiritual bondage. This image denigrates women's bodies and souls and reflects a deep misogyny."
In these and other reactions, Man Ray and his art were attacked while the emotions of the controversy were not tempered by the words of Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the Vatican’s Cultural Minister, who claimed Venus Restored was an appropriate choice because the Pontifical Council aimed to discuss head on how “many women, alas, are still struggling for freedom (bound with rope), their voices and intellect often unheard (headless), their actions unappreciated (limbless).”
Similarly, Micol Forti, director of the contemporary art collection at the Vatican Museums, defended Man Ray’s sculpture by calling it an “anchor to generate new ideas”, although her description fell on deaf ears.
The sad irony is that Venus Restored was and remains a very progressive work, produced by an artist born in Philadelphia to Russian-Jewish immigrants and living in Paris in the- inter war years. Man Ray aimed to bring together politics (national, racial, sexual, gender) and art in objects which made the familiar (the classical nude) strange (corseted in rope). Produced at the time of the Spanish Civil War as the clouds of the second World War loomed over Europe, Venus Restored was a deliberate comment on power and tradition in culture and society, a call for questioning of the status quo in hope for a better reality. In an essay in the Surrealist review Minotaure in 1933, Man Ray portrayed himself as an opponent of convention for whom outrageous art was "preferable to the monstrous habits excused by etiquette and aestheticism."
His Venus Restored was part of a larger questioning of art. He frequently took banal, mass-produced objects and transformed them through creative juxtaposition. Gift (1921) was made from an iron onto which he added a spine of thumb tacks, remaking its domestic function as a statement against violence. And in the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris, Man Ray and fellow Surrealists restaged 16 mannequins from a department store in a foreboding art gallery street scene which visitors navigated with flashlights while recordings of hysterical laughter and German marching tunes played in the background. The summer after the exhibition, the Nazis invaded France.
Whatever reactions it inspires, Venus Restored must be understood in its historical context and as a key work in modern art's challenging of perception and traditional values, and encouragement of an active rather than passive response. Man Ray used the erotic female body knowing full well its power to seduce and excite as well as to outrage and offend. Those who have recently attacked Venus Restored have reminded us of the power of art. But given Man Ray's questioning of classical tradition, patriarchy, consumerism, and war, why not use Venus Restored as a spur for urgent debate? Images of bare-breasted females have long suggested the beauty and bravery of the female warrior (the Amazons), the goddess (Diana, Venus), the spirit of the French Revolution (Marianne), and the inspiring selflessness of motherhood (Mary). Man Ray's image of bound breasts and torso is no doubt challenging, but it builds on this established and inspiring tradition. The recent controversy, however, has only led to censorship.
In deciding to remove Venus Restored from its publicity, replacing it with the much more decorative work of the late 19th century Swiss Symbolist painter Ferdinand Hodler, the Vatican, its critics, and its supporters have missed a rare opportunity to truly engage with a work of art whose complex beauty was designed to interrogate gender equality and difference and to ask how the future can learn from the past.
Dr Alyce Mahon is Senior Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Cambridge and the author of Surrealism and the Politics of Eros (Thames & Hudson, 2005) and Eroticism and Art (Oxford University Press, 2007).