How does The Bathing Pool elucidate its Analysis?
The painting depicts an imaginary location with contemporary visitors. It has decidedly modern elements, such as 18th-century French cloaks and hoods, a woman pointing at a statue like a tourist, and a pair of modern pink shoes belonging to a bather. The contemporary allusions make the nudity atypical; 18th-century paintings normally restricted nudity to mythological and allegorical subjects.In his 2006 book Logics of Worlds, the post-Marxist philosopher Alain Badiou analysed the painting as an example of how "pictoral assemblage" fundamentally is about "distributing identities and differences". He saw the composition of temple, women, statues and water as "a subtle transcendental network of identities", exalted by "figurative differences", which place the painting in the genre of neoclassicism. Badiou concluded that "the world" of the painting is the juncture between eighteenth-century eroticism and pre-romanticism. Finally, he used the correspondences between the statues and groups of women, and the foliage to the left and the clearing to the bottom left, to argue that existence merely is a category of appearing.
French Alain Badiou post-Marxist existence neoclassicism appearing