The Last Straw: If you're travelling to Vienna on a budget during August, make sure to visit the city's Leopold Museum with no clothes on. That way, you'll get free admission to The Naked Truth, an exhibition of erotic 20th-century art. You don't have to be entirely nude, even: people in swimsuits get in free too. But the swimsuits must be reasonably scanty. If you turn up in a Victorian neck-to-ankles outfit, you'll probably have to pay the cover charge, writes Frank McNally.
The offer is partly inspired by a heatwave in central Europe. But the museum is also making an artistic point about the human body. Which is that, when you strip it of all the superficial trappings and reduce it to its raw, defenceless state, then you're pretty-much guaranteed press coverage. No - wait a minute; that's not the museum's point. The point, apparently, is that the human body is a thing of beauty.
Or, as a spokeswoman put it: "We find a naked body every bit as beautiful as a clothed one." This is a controversial opinion, and one that would be tested by an afternoon on the beach in Skerries. But it's an article of faith among the arts community.
Why, it was put to me only last week in a tent at the Galway Races, by a short-listed candidate for the best-dressed ladies competition who also happened to be a painter.
Explaining her choice of a dress that had gone beyond figure-hugging and was verging on something more intimate, she said, matter-of-factly: "I believe the human body is beautiful." And for a moment, surrounded by women who were not only short-listed, but in many cases short-skirted, I believed it too. Yet somewhere between there and the bar, I lost my faith. Suddenly, again, there were thousands of human bodies around me that I wouldn't want to meet on a dark night, never mind in a nudist art gallery.
As it happens, I have something of an artist's training myself, having once enrolled in an evening class at the NCAD. The class was called Drawing from Life, and I enrolled with no notion (I swear) of what it involved. My concept of "life drawing" was a broad one then, and included things like trees, and butterflies, and fields with cows. Imagine my surprise to learn that "life" had a particular connotation for the artistic community, and that naked women were central to it.
Over time, my teacher encouraged me to see the models not as bodies, but as patterns of light and shade, of mass and texture. Unfortunately I never stopped noticing that some light patterns were a lot more attractive than others. I suppose that if the course taught me anything, it was that there are different "ways of seeing"; and that my way of seeing, while valid, was the way of a muck-savage.
To this day, insofar as I view the average human body as art, I think it's in the same category as Turner's watercolours. As you know, these are exhibited only in January, when natural light is at its least harsh. I think most naked human bodies should also be exhibited in January; preferably in northern Lapland, where the sun doesn't come up at all.
Then again, even professional artists seem to be selective in their appreciation of anatomy. I saw the William Orpen exhibition in the National Gallery during the week and it struck me that, like most male painters, Orpen's love of the human form was limited. Maybe it's just a coincidence that all his nudes were nubile young women. But his biographers agree that in exploring their mass and texture, he rarely confined himself to paint-brushes.
ALSO, ALTHOUGH HIS war period is arguably the exhibition's defining element, it's noticeable that the gallery is publicising the show, not with a painting of the western front, but one of his mistress's front instead. Okay, it's his best picture, by a mile. But who knows? With such obvious marketing talent, the promoters may yet consider introducing free admission for naked people. After all, what they'd lose on ticket revenue, they might make up on programme sales.
According to an Associated Press report, "scores" of people took advantage of the Leopold's special offer last weekend. These included a certain Bettina Huth who, while wearing only sandals and a bikini bottom, "used a program at one point to shield herself from a phalanx of TV cameras". A nudist gallery could probably sell a lot of big, coffee-table books to people who lost their nerve.
But what I want to know is this. If you were a guide in the Viennese museum, and you were nervous about speaking in front of crowds, would it help to imagine them with their clothes on?