Happy Nude Year (Day 7... the grand finale)

You know how they say save the best for last? Well, we think we did.

Meet Dorothy Iannone, apparently famous but a delightful and incredible find for us.

Iannone, an American-born self-taught artist, is known for wooden sculptures, mosaics and paintings that tell the story of her sexual experiences, especially those with her lover and muse (and artist) Dieter Roth. Not all of her work seems concentrated on “the nude” as a subject, but since all of her pieces manage to showcase genitalia, we think that counts.

Play It Again, by Dorothy Iannone

While her work seems to be a response to the feminist movement of the 1970s, Iannone was actually documenting her intimate love life through art in the 1960s. One particularly bold project, a book made listing all the men she’d slept with, appeared in 1967, and all of her work since has continued delivering the sexual overtones.

My Downtown New York of the '60s, by Dorothy Iannone... in the fine print there's a story about the first time she met Allen Ginsberg and he bit her on the stomach.

But… well… the sex, the nudity, it’s all so intimate, beautiful, colorful. It’s almost like a good relationship, complete with strength, power, vulnerability, security, demands and, most importantly, communication. No one can argue she’s not getting her message across.

Iannone, who had a run-in with fame in 1960 when she sued U.S. Customs for confiscating her copy of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (the title was banned in the U.S. at the time… the ban was lifted after a preliminary hearing), has been working without appreciation for most of her career and just started getting attention in 2005… in her 70s.

The Heroic Performance of Pastor Erik Boek... by Dorothy Iannone

A description of a show last summer at the New Museum called Lioness (which was Roth’s nickname for her) explained her work like this:

Inverting the gender paradigm of artistic inspiration, Iannone often painted Roth, her self-declared muse, depicting both him and herself as active lovers, comfortable with their desires and pleasure. By removing self-consciousness from her work, she dispels the taboo that so often surrounds sexuality, elevating it to an act of both bodily and spiritual union.

The bodily and spiritual union that comes from nudity is exactly why the LAL presents this exhibit every year. Our bodies, for all they do and all the represent, truly are heavenly.

[Via http://lexingtonartleague.wordpress.com]