Nude in Visual Arts

Etymologically, the English word nude comes from the Latin nudus meaning "naked" or "bare," as in a state of undress or primordial nakedness. The phrase in the nude or the nude, however, has come to signify works of art, cultural conventions, and socioreligious attitudes in the West. Thereby, the category of the nude connotes a Western cultural ideology, while nudity is a universal human condition of being without clothes or cover. As sex is biological, art works representing sex depend upon the reality of physical characteristics from broad shoulders to genitalia. Gender, however, is a social and cultural classification of masculinity and femininity historically defined; thereby, artistic depictions of gender are a result of the cultural processes of defining sexual and social identity. Present throughout the history of Western art, the decision to portray the nude and the affixed characteristics of gender are more than an artistic conviction to present an object of art, beauty, or anatomy; rather it is a decision premised on a moral issue simply stated as: What is the character and meaning of nudity?

CRITICAL DISCUSSIONS OF THE NUDE

While earlier critics, historians, and cultural commentators discussed the artistic or religious values reflected by works of art, whether literary or visual, in which the figures were described as naked, it was the British artist Walter Sickert who wrote (in 1910) the first formal critical discussion of the nude as a convention of academic art. However, it was the presentation of the 1953 Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts by the art historian Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) that defined the categories of analyses for both the meaning and motif of the nude in Western art and cultural history. Both Clark's lectures, and his 1956 book, were subtitled "A Study in Ideal Form," thereby signifying that this motif was not simply an iconographic or visual theme but rather an idea supported or negated by particular cultural, philosophic, religious, and societal attitudes toward the human body and sexuality. To be nude was more than a state of undress but rather the embodiment of the classical Greek philosophic, religious, and social understandings of the human person, human dignity, human anatomy, and artistic creativity. To be naked was to be deprived of one's clothes, signifying that state of human finitude and guilt premised on what was characterized by Clark as the Christian attitude toward the human person, the human body, and thereby sexuality.

Since the 1956 publication of Clark's now-classic The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, a variety of responses have come to shape discussions and interests in the nude. The most obvious have been his initiation of critical analyses of the distinctions between the naked and the nude, and the role of the nude as an artistic category, and the academic debate as to the positives and negatives of Clark's well-honed thesis ranging from the architect and social historian Bernard Rudofsky's The Unfashionable Human Body (1971) to the art historian Margaret Walters's The Nude Male (1978). Perhaps the most provocative and far-reaching "contra Clark" presentation was the Marxist analysis offered by John Berger in both his BBC television series and the companion book Ways of Seeing (1972), which focused on the relationship between the viewer and the nude. An early attempt at what was later identified as "response theory," Berger's study called attention to the erotic and the materialist responses situated in the spectator of representations of male and female bodies in various media—paintings, sculptures, photographs, cinema, television, and advertising. Thereby, Berger opened the door for the emerging feminist arguments about woman as subject, object, or creator of works of art as he emphasized in his discussions the female nude and the (sexual) response of male viewers.

The 1960s movements of the marginalized—that is, groups previously unstudied or neglected, including women, racial and ethnic groups, and regional and class identities—brought new questions and new attention to Clark's discussion of the nude. Feminist scholarship expanded the boundaries of the questions raised against the idea of the nude, especially those related to images of the female versus the male nude—the former denoting passive sex object and male voyeurism and the latter expressing male power and societal authority. Art images, particularly those of women as subjects or objects, were no longer perceived as being benign or neutral expressions of aesthetic values or artistic creativity. For feminist artists, critics, and scholars, the nude was a social and political minefield created by male artists for a male audience as signified by le regard, or the gaze, and by male art historians voicing admiration for the figuration of male beauty and cultural power. As the feminist movement gave birth to a multiplicity of academic and critical modes of analyses premised on sex and gender, including gay studies, men's studies, and eventually gender studies, new questions were raised related to the object, subject, creator, patronage, and spectator of the nude. Further, as the twentieth century gave way to the twenty-first, the growing presence and confidence of what were previously identified as "alternate lifestyles"—from homosexuality, both gay men and lesbian women, to interracial heterosexuality to transvestites, bisexuality, and androgyny—furthered the categories of sex and gender as well as the questions and interpretations of the nude. As gender stereotypes were challenged, the psychology of response voiced, and the social dominance of white men criticized, the boundaries and categories for the nude, as defined initially by Clark, were expanded.

Finally, the academic and wider cultural investigations centering on "the body" evolved in the late 1980s into additional new ways of seeing and interpreting the nude. Not necessarily limited by cultural or societal definitions of gender or sexuality, these investigative analyses sought venues through the ever-increasing attitudes shaped by modern medicine and medical advances, the growing recognition of multicultural perceptions of the human body as a category of ethnic and racial as well as individual identity, and the insights offered by careful analyses of particular aspects of the body proper, such as Marilyn Yalom's A History of the Breast (1997), or of bodily effluvia, such as Tom Lutz's Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears (1999). Combined with this recognition of the reality of multiculturalism and globalization, the interest in the body has brought new challenges to the artistic presentations and critical discussions of the nude.

SURVEY OF THE NUDE IN WESTERN ART FROM THE MIDDLE AGES INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Found in every civilization in human history, artistic representations of the male or female figure as nude are premised on a visual legacy bequeathed from ancient Egypt, India, Persia, and Cyprus to classical Greece and Rome to Renaissance Florence and Baroque Rome to nineteenth-century Paris and twentieth-century New York. The reality, however, is that there are vast differences in cultural, philosophic, religious, and societal attitudes toward these artistic images. Without doubt, Western art is premised on the classical Greek legacy but tempered from the early Christian period by two distinctive attitudes toward the nude as the ideal perfection of humanity and as the physical witness of human finitude and guilt. From the formal beginnings of Christian art in the fourth century, contemporary to the theological treatises of Augustine and Jerome, the human body was rarely rendered artistically in a naturalistic manner. Presentations of nude, or naked, figures were either reserved for biblical personalities or rendered as "secular art" (read pornography). The biblical narrative of Adam and Eve was interpreted as that of the "primordial nudes," and as Christian history evolved they became the sign and symbol of what should and should not be exposed. Sadly, from an artistic perspective, the first biblical presentation of the nude was within the context of the "forbidden fruit."

As the early Christian and Byzantine worlds evolved into the Middle Ages, the artistic presentations of the nude—whether male or female—were transferred into biblical figures such as Bathsheba (at the bath). Although perhaps the most numerous in medieval art, the figure of the Virgin Mary while depicted as the role model and ideal for Christian women was characterized as disembodied in terms of female sexuality or feminine sensuality. The visual and thereby the cultural emphasis was on the spiritual values she represented, from motherhood to piety and salvation. To characterize, then, the medieval attitude toward sex and gender in the visualization of the nude, attention must be given to the majority of images that can be identified under the umbrella of Christian art. Fundamentally, whether male or female in biological identity, these figures are appropriate to the narratives of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures; therefore, Adam and Eve, Bathsheba, David, Susannah, Salome, and Jesus of Nazareth are presented in states of total or partial undress totally dependent upon the narrative episode. The fundamental interpretation of nudity as a sign of shame was highlighted by the postures and gestures of these individual figures. Regardless of biological sex, these figures did not stand erect with their heads held high or their shoulders relaxed in the posture of the classical Greek nudes. Instead, these "Christian nudes" were identifiable by their stooped stances, forward bent heads, hunched shoulders, and attempted coverings wrought by bent arms and open palms. Alternatively, demons and devils are identified, if not characterized, by artistic presentations of their almost celebratory nudity, which connotes wanton sexuality and unbridled sensuality—two traits deemed inappropriate for Christians. Further moralistic lessons related to sex and gender in the nude in the visual arts can be read into the late medieval development of Weibermacht, or power of woman, by which naked women physically or sexually maltreat men; Weibermacht illustrates the uncontrollable sexual lust of women to which many medieval Christian theologians, following Augustine and Jerome, credit the fall of humanity through Adam and Eve.

Renaissance artists (and writers) voiced an interest in gender issues, especially the changing societal role of the feminine, in light of the humanist discussions of the nature of woman and the position of the female in the larger culture. This new perspective was hampered by the emergence, or actually the reemergence, of the Aristotelian interpretation of women as imperfect and inferior to men. Whereas the depictions, particularly the portraits, of women connote the archetypal definitions of beauty and social propriety, those of men are identified through the emblems of their professional or social status. Feminist commentators on Renaissance art identify the lesser presence of female figures—in postures and positions of dominance—as a continuation of the traditional Christian perspective of woman as either virgin (ideal) or whore (misogyny), but there are other criteria to be considered especially with regard to the artistic depiction of the nude.

For example, the recognizable "nakedness" of both Adam and Eve in Masaccio's (1401–1428) famed Expulsion from Paradise can be described fairly as being within Clark's characterization of the Christian depiction of the otherwise naked form as sign and symbol of finitude and guilt. However, the expanding borders of cultural, philosophic, and religious attitudes in light of the advance of humanism, even unto Christian humanism, supports the visual innovation of a classical nude goddess in the recognizable pose of the Venus pudica in the mythological landscape of Sandro Botticelli's (1445–1510) Birth of Venus was a metaphor for the new cultural and philosophic order represented by the Renaissance. Alternatively, the classical nude was reaffirmed in its dialectic of masculine activity and power versus feminine passivity and inertia when Giorgione (c. 1477–1511) introduced his new motif of the reclining female nude in Sleeping Venus (c. 1510). This Renaissance topos was characterized by the frontal presentation of the figure who was asleep or in reverie, the absence of pubic hair, and the presence of jewelry in contrast to the absence of clothing. This new way of seeing the female nude in relation to both the male artist and the viewer was taken to the next level of artistic and erotic engagement by Titian (1488 or 1490–1576) in his many presentations of a reclining or sleeping Venus, most famously in his Venus of Urbino (1538–1539).

A visual survey of Western images identified as "erotic"—and, thereby, the key focus of late-twentieth-century interpretations of gender in art—is dependent upon the crucial identifying elements of nudity and female sexuality. Artists of both the Renaissance and the Baroque period continued to validate, and expand, these two descriptors in light of the medieval category of demonology transformed into female sorcery and witchcraft. Popular in the works of northern European artists such as Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553) and Hans Baldung (called Hans Grien; c. 1484–1545) as the Renaissance turned into the Baroque, witches were a cultural move fostered by the evolution of the Reformation and reformist culture, especially in its attitude toward women. Given the Aristotelian stance that women were imperfect men, and the Christian tenet of uncontrollable lust as basic to female nature, women were identified as more susceptible to witchcraft, and the earlier cultural idea of female sorcery evolved into witchcraft. The eventual publication of the Malleus maleficarum (1486; Hammer of Witches) was prompted by the growing fear of women, especially of the power of woman, and resulted in the witch-hunts and trials that destroyed the lives of more than a million women. Such gender-related activities influenced the arts as paintings, and the less expensive and more accessible prints and engravings featured profane nudity as unsightly, naked witches "turned the world upside" as they rode their broomsticks, physically tortured or raped men, and swallowed infants and children.

Alternatively, the northern European Baroque painters Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) and Rembrandt (1609–1669) created extraordinarily intimate portrayals of female nudity in the former's Hélène Fourment with Fur Cloak (The Furlet; c. 1638–1640) and the latter's Bathsheba at Her Bath (1654). In these works, and others like them, the female figure is rendered with a realistic naturalism, so that the classical idealization of the female form and Christian misogyny were eliminated from the frame. The fundamental categories of femininity—bodily softness, physical warmth, and emotional power—evidenced herein witness the development of an alternate approach to both gender and nudity, and the relationship between artist and model enlarged the traditional dichotomous approach to woman as either virgin or whore by the consideration of woman as wife, companion, and lover.

The modern convention of the nude is premised on the duality of the political, social, and cultural revolutions of the late eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries, and the eventual revolutions wrought by the marginalized in the mid- to late twentieth century. Perhaps the greatest artistic exponent of the modern nude was the French realist painter Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), who freed the nude from the conventions of mythology and religion in works as enigmatic as The Painter's Studio (1855) and as rebellious as The Origin of the World (1866). Courbet's innovations led to later nineteenth-century artists such as Édouard Manet (1832–1883) and his paintings of defiant prostitutes and Edgar Degas (1834–1917) and his paintings of bathers; in both of these artists' portrayals the nude, and the female nude in particular, garnered new interpretive meanings and status. As Clark would attest, the reference to the nude in the classical world was to the male figure, but by the mid-nineteenth century this reference had shifted in both gender identity and cultural attitude to the female figure. This transformation was accompanied by the formal admission of women into art academies and eventually into life drawing classes (with male nude models), an act that raised the question of whether the so-called male gaze was clearly related to sex or gender, could be emulated by women artists, or perhaps more dramatically could be challenged by a "female gaze."

An alternate but perhaps equally significant artistic perspective on the nude in the nineteenth century arose with the emergence and maturation of Orientalism in the arts. Initially a Romantic expression of the allure and mystique of the exotique in the paintings of Eugène Délacroix (1798–1863), Orientalism and Orientalist nudes in the later works of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingrés (1780–1867) and especially Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) are visual examples of the continuation of sexism and patriarchalism merged with racism and voyeurism. Gérôme's images of the female nude, as in The Slave Market (c. 1867), are a paramount example of woman as sex object on display for the voyeuristic pleasure and power of a male audience—both inside and outside of the frame. Similarly, the depiction of the snake encircling the nude male youth in Gérôme's The Snake Charmer (c. 1870) denotes the erotic and sexual fantasies otherwise sublimated in the Western "high art" tradition that are somehow acceptable when placed in a location outside the West. The eroticism of gender identities expands beyond the boundaries of appropriate social mores and behavior through a depiction of desire in "the other."

Meanwhile, other artists vacillated between the asexuality and eroticism of the nude in Western art. Academic painters such as Adolphe-William Bouguereau (1825–1905) continued to paint their idealized and curiously asexual nudes into the early twentieth century, while the Symbolists such as Gustave Moreau (1826–1898), Art Nouveau artists such as Aubrey Vincent Beardsley (1872–1898), and fin-de-siècle painters such as Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) infused blatant sexuality and eroticism in depictions of the nude, especially of the female nude. Throughout the twentieth century, artists continued to grapple through a variety of artistic styles and media ranging from the cubist fragmentations of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) to the surrealism of Salvador Dali (1904–1989) and Paul Delvaux (1893–1994) to the abstract expressionism of Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) to the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989) to image the nude as object and subject, as a carrier of cultural meaning and social mores, and as a significant venue for societal discussions of sex and gender.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Smith, Alison. 1996. The Victorian Nude: Sexuality, Morality, and Art. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

Üster, Celâl, ed. 2003. "Nude in Art." Spec. issue, P Art and Culture Magazine 9.

Walters, Margaret. 1978. The Nude Male: A New Perspective. New York: Paddington Press.

                                Diane Apostolos-Cappadona