Stephen Bayley: Subtle and sexy, the back is a potent symbol in world art

Certain iconic images of the 20th century have preferred to highlight this less-exploited area of flesh
Actress Cate Blanchett arrives at the UK premiere of "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" at The Odeon Leicester Square, London on Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2012.
AP
14 December 2012
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Cate Blanchett has a dorsal thing! Eyes popped, flashes blitzed, chins wagged when impressively fine, featureless, pale flesh was exposed on Wednesday night. The back is one of the most familiar, yet mysterious, areas of the body. It is stranger when revealed than hidden.

Our largest unperforated area of skin covers an underlying anatomy of impressive complexity: a vertebral column and powerful trapezius muscles are the fundamentals of human architecture. It is our structural core. Thus metaphors and sayings about our backs — which might be to the wall or at breaking point — betray its profound psychological significance.

So much is obvious, but the mystery of the back has a practical basis. Unless we are contortionists or possessed of unusual arrangements with domestic mirrors, we can never properly explore our dorsal regions. Our own backyard is terra incognita. Nor can we touch all of it. The upper-middle part of the back is the only area of our bodies that is inaccessible. These features give the back a rich semantic power: invisible and inaccessible, a source of vulnerability.

But also, of course, powerfully erotic. Because it is normally invisible, inaccessible and always vulnerable, an exposed back is shocking. This is the reason for the widespread — and rather pleasurable — rippling sensation caused by Blanchett’s backless Givenchy gown, the latest version of a type that has its modern origins in the Twenties when Modern Woman first experienced sport, sunshine and, if all went well, free love.

Women spend only a little less time fussing about their ventral area than men do fantasising about it. But while necklines may shamelessly plunge and bras impressively lift up, in polite society it is rare to find women naked from the waist up. Except in a backless dress. It is flagrant, but deniable. Here in a backless dress is lust and its handmaiden, fashion, back to front. With a backless dress, when you take something away, you are left with more.

Go backless and the suggestion of nudity is frank, but equally clear is the maintenance of discretion. Cate is evidently not wearing a bra. She knows that we know. So much is explicit, but then so very much is also secret. This backless balance between overt and covert stokes the furnaces of desire. The ambivalence is more keen because while Cate knows what she is doing, she cannot see how it is achieved. At least until the pictures are published.

Other cultures know this. The Indian choli leaves the maharani’s lower back completely naked. In Japan, a geisha’s kimono modestly covers almost every part of the body … except the upper back and the highly sensitised nape of the neck, a favourite area for erotic speculation among the painters of The Floating World. Kenji Mizoguchi’s classic 1946 film Utamaro and His Five Women has astonishing images of the bijinga (beautiful face) artist painstakingly decorating the bare back of a naked courtesan. In a motif of weird psycho-sexual subtlety, the decoration comprises a woman’s front elevation.

Degas and Bonnard artfully exploited the expressive possibilities of a woman’s naked back. The latter’s infinitely touching seen-from-the-rear bathroom scenes have a beautiful intimacy that more frankly gynaecological nudes can never achieve. Subtlety reaches more profound places than outrage.

And two of the most potent images of the 20th century feature not a woman’s familiar front, but her less well-known back. First was surrealist photographer Man Ray’s 1924 Violon d’Ingres, a rear view of his mistress, Kiki de Montparnasse. Paris’s most liberated woman has a violin’s f-holes cut into her dorsal area: the reference is a double entendre. The great painter Ingres used to play the fiddle and a “violon d’Ingres” became a French expression for a hobby. Kiki, this image says, is Man Ray’s not-so- innocent pastime.

Then there is the famous photograph taken in 1939 for Paris Vogue by Horst. The laces of a lavish corset by Mainbocher are just beginning to give way to pressures of various sorts. An outer garment has already been discarded. We cannot see the woman’s face, but her sensual back, only temporarily contained by the straining corsetage, tells us all we need to know of her mood and intentions. This sensational image has passed into racial and fashion memory.

Criminal and youth cultures know the semantic possibilities of the naked back as well as its tempting scope for transgressive decoration. You can find a tattooed tramp stamp at the base of the spine of a young woman with a point to make. The incarcerated communities of the Soviet gulag developed an intricate language of dorsal tattoos which expressed degrees of honour among thieves. Even the sedate National Gallery uses the back view of a man extravagantly tattooed with an octopus as the lead image of Seduced by Art, its current photographic exhibition. The intention? To advertise that the granny of the art world is hip.

Cate Blanchett’s naked back has shown that empty canvases can be expressive too. For centuries the chief fetish of heterosexual men has been a woman’s frontal aspect. Maybe now a competitive market will open up for the neglected back and its expressive possibilities. “In your face” means aggressive. Maybe “watch my back” will eventually come to mean seductive: Eros belongs to a travelling circus.

Meanwhile, physiologists know that therapeutic back massage sends blood to the pelvic area, which stimulates it. Backless dresses have a similar effect. As we know.

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