Nudity again today - and back to the National Gallery in London - as we look at one of its Rembrandts in the company of a young painter, WK Lyhne. In a series of oil paintings called The Stream she pictures her own responses to Rembrandt's Woman Stepping in the Stream, responses that include smearing herself with oil and portraying her naked legs dripping with this dark gooey stuff. In Rembrandt's painting, a woman raises her skirts as she steps into water. In Lyhne's paintings, the artist literally steps into oil, figuring her relationship with Rembrandt's painting as an immersion in its medium. In the pictures, this viscous coating on her skin is reflective, ridiculous, and sensual.
As Lyhne has recognised, Rembrandt is erotic. There are two very sexy paintings by him in the National Gallery - not only the tender bathing scene she has meditated on but also another great portrait of his lover Hendrikje Stoffels, in nothing but jewellery and a fur wrap, looking back at you out of dark eyes from a pale soft face. Rembrandt is an artist who contradicts the idea of the "nude" as a classically perfect form - an outline - and, like Titian, paints flesh as texture, tries to evoke touch and intimacy. In his paintings in the National Gallery he touches womens' skin against suggestive substances - water and fur - to heighten the sense of warm physicality. His portrait of Stoffels is a direct response to Rubens's portrait of Helena Fourment in a fur wrap; both men want to stress they are painting their own companion, their lover, in an intimate moment rather than simply an imagined goddess.
Throughout art history, there is this tension in the nude between intimacy and objectification, between the tenderness of Rembrandt's lover looking back at you and the deliberately distanced, coldly erotic regard of Degas in his superb pastel in the National Gallery of a woman's back. Velazquez - once again, in a painting you can see in the National Gallery - melts the two extremes in his marvellous Rokeby Venus: the perfect goddess shows her back to us but in the mirror her face is vulnerable.
Lyhne studies her own body in these ambivalent ways - as flesh smeared in oil, as a person stepping into the stuff of art - in her paintings that return again and again to Rembrandt's Woman Stepping into a Stream. Art like this proves not just that young painters still turn to tradition but that the nude is still a genre that marries art and life. There was a frisson when an artist painted a woman naked 400 years ago and there still is, today. Lyhne's paintings can be traced back - through Rembrandt and Rubens - to one of the most sensual painterly scenes of nude bathers ever created, Titian's Diana and Actaeon, still on view at the National Gallery as the campaign to save it for the nation approaches its December deadline. Go to the National Gallery, feast on nudes and leave a donation, however small, in the Titian collecting box because every donation is evidence to the government of popular support for saving a masterpiece for our time.
