nude study of Rectitude, Kenyon Cox

“I enjoy drawing from the nude, for its own sake,” Kenyon Cox admitted. He also found it, “a continuing and valuable discipline” in the preparation of The Judicial Virtues, his 1909 mural for the courthouse in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. In it the central figure of Rectitude dominates the composition. Her power in the final design results from the painstaking preliminary drawings of the live model. “I enlarge each nude study,” Cox explained, “as carefully as if the figure were to remain nude.” He thought, “the body is infinitely more expressive than the face,” hence the practice of figure drawing is, “one of the most intellectual and expressional of the arts.”
Cox was decidedly a traditionalist. “We [Americans] are, in all things, at bottom, a conservative people,” he said, “but in nothing are we so much so as in all matters concerning art.” He wrote a lengthy treatise titled The Classic Point of View. In it he admired the Greeks and Michelangelo, and deplored modernists like Matisse: “It is of no advantage to the abstract beauty of a figure that its joints should bend the wrong way, or that it should have no joints at all but resemble something between a block of wood and a jelly-fish.” In Cox’s art there are no jellyfish. CCE