Page 236
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Jauqeline turns the whitewashing of the nude mural into a comic attack on public relations, respectability, and a city that distrusts unsold sensuality.
Her speech is satire, but its logic is sharp: the nude is acceptable only when attached to transaction, cocktail respectability, or advertising control. Davenport's restated escape line then folds that civic critique back into the page's restless motion.
The artist 'disembarked from her mosaical painting leaving the public to decide if a nude is justifiable when she has nothing to sell,' and as 'long stick mops reached for the last of the bosoms' Jauqeline performs a whole monologue in shifting voices. Her satire is exact: the 'advertising sensual slaughter house' deems nudes 'a hazzard when not bought and sold,' permitted only where 'a cock-tail is seen as the means of transaction' - the city made 'sexless' by commerce. Davenport's flat 'I'm on my way out' bends the critique back into the page's restless motion.