Doing nothing for a living is not as easy as it looks. That was the militant message from Italy yesterday where artists’ nude models climbed back into their clothes and went on strike for better pay and conditions.
The protesters — male and female — said that they wanted “professional recognition” and full-time contracts. Only 50 of about 300 models at Italian art schools are on fixed annual contracts, with the rest hired by the hour.
Antonella Migliorini, 42, said that it was “a tough, cold job” posing in the nude, often for eight hours a day. “We are not porn stars,” she said. “If you’re lucky enough to have a full-time job you might make 25 an hour.
However, there will always be people willing to do it, despite the poor pay. “It can be rewarding to be immortalised as great art,” said Rachel Campbell-Johnston, The Times’s chief art critic, who modelled for Eduardo Paolozzi and Euan Uglow. “But it can also be extremely physically demanding. Rodin used to twist his models into painful positions and make them stay like that for hours. Lucian Freud demands that you turn up punctually day after day. It can take years and you can’t walk out halfway through.”
The professional life model emerged with the rise of formal art schools and photography in the 19th and 20th centuries. The hiring of artists’ models has a long tradition in Rome, where it caught the eye of Charles Dickens in his travel book Pictures from Italy. It took a nude protest in the 1970s to secure full-time contracts.
Yesterday the models kept their clothes on for a protest at a ceremony inaugurating the academic year at La Sapienza, Rome’s main university. The main speaker at the ceremony was supposed to be the Pope, but the Vatican cancelled his visit because of alarm over student protests against his conservative views on science and ethics. About 30 models posed at the university entrance in imitation of famous art works, including Botticelli’s Venus, Degas’s ballerinas and Rodin’s The Thinker. - Via Times UK We won’t take this lying down, say nudes
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