[NSFW] A Brief History of Nudes

4. Naked and Afraid in the Middle Ages

With the arrival of Christianity, nakedness all but disappeared from Western art, except for depictions of Adam and Eve, whose nakedness revealed their sin, and Jesus, whose naked body revealed his wounds. Being naked was no longer associated with male athleticism and female fertility, but rather with weakness and defenselessness. Bare-breasted, nursing Madonnas and naked baby Jesus’ were an exception to this rule, their bodies exposed for theological reasons.

The Gothic nude was very different from the Greek and Roman classical ideal: Gothic bodies were long and slender, rather than shapely and athletic, and Gothic painters emphasized women’s rounded stomachs rather than their hips.

6. Males with Breasts?

Renaissance sculptors such as Donatello and Michelangelo helped bring male and female nudes back into classical art. Donatello’s naked David (1408-1409) was the first free-standing statue of a nude since antiquity. A few decades later, Michelangelo made a larger-than-life version. Even though Renaissance sculptors may have had access to female models, they preferred to use male models.

By consequence, Michelangelo’s women often appear to have male bodies with the addition of breasts. Although some historians argue that this was because of Michelangelo’s preference for the male form (it’s commonly thought that he was homosexual), others say that the normative human body in the Renaissance was male. The most beautiful female bodies would be those that were the most androgynous.

7. Shock value

Nudity was a popular feature of mythological and allegorical genre painting in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Western art. But the French Impressionists pushed against the conventional notion of allegorical nudes by painting and exhibiting bold, and sometimes surreal, nudes. Edouard Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’herbe was an example of how the Impressionists refused to conform to convention.

The woman has no explicit reason to be naked--she is not a mythological figure but a normal lunch companion--and her partners are both clothed. The nudity wasn’t even the almost shocking part of this painting though. Manet’s painting style and his refusal to make subtle gradations between the light and dark part of the painting, as well as his deliberately shallow depth and perspective, were also considered avant-garde.

8. Nudity and Japanese modernism

The nude body was mainly absent from Japanese art for centuries. Although male and female nakedness was a routine part of life, specifically within bathhouse culture, Japanese artists didn’t develop an interest in representing the naked body until the nineteenth century, when their work became influenced by Western art. Laws in Japan allowed painters to depict nudes if they were allegorical, although painters often bypassed this rule.

Tetsugoro Yorozu’s Nude Beauty (1912) is important because it showed Japanese audiences a non-idealized, ‘Japanese’ body rather than that of the idealized Western woman typically featured in nineteenth-century Japanese art. The woman wears a red koshimaki, or traditional Japanese female underwear, and is shown reclining against a Japanese landscape. Yorozu’s refusal to ‘justify’ the nudity of his woman by putting her in Western surroundings was radical for its time.

9 . The Female Gaze

Since most artists documented in art history are male, the female nude has often been associated with the “male gaze” - the idea that women (both within and outside of art) are meant to be passively ‘looked at’, while men are in the active position of viewer. The rise of female artists in modern and contemporary art allowed women to explore this issue in their own work. Contemporary women artists such as Marina Abramovic, Yoko Ono, Nan Goldin, and Vanessa Beecroft are known for using their own nude bodies or bodies of other women to make statements against sexism within art history as well as society at large.

For this 1999 performance for the Kaldor Public Art Project, the 40th in Beecroft’s series of works, 20 models stood in formation for periods of two and a half hours. Dressed in red Wolford tights and Prada heels, the models were given a sheet of papers with 54 rules such as “hold position; look plain, boyish, quiet.” As Beecroft explained in the exhibition statement, “The practice is to stand, not talking, and to wait until it ends, being watched as a picture and photographed as though on a photo shoot.” Beecroft turns the ‘male gaze’ on its head, and interrogates femininity and desire within modern consumer culture.