Sexy naked women are a must-have in any art lover’s collection. Not only are they beautiful, but they can also inspire awe and admiration. They are a symbol of sensuality and erotic perfection.
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Rembrandt’s Danae
While it’s not Rembrandt’s most famous painting, Danae is still a stunning piece. It depicts the story of Danae, the mother of Perseus in Greek mythology. Her father, King Acrisius, foresaw that he would die by the hand of his grandson and chambered Danae so nobody could see her beauty. But fate intervened and Zeus, disguised as a golden rain, visited her and impregnated her.
The life-sized painting allures the viewer with its soft, warm light and mellow chiaroscuro. Its chromatic richness and psychological subtlety made it one of Rembrandt’s most popular works.
One of the most important exhibits in the Hermitage collection, Danae was painted between 1636 and 1647. It was probably reworked by Rembrandt himself, and the last change took place in about 1643. The painting was first exhibited at Pierre Crozat’s gallery, but it has been in the Hermitage museum since the 18th century.
Unlike many of Rembrandt’s other paintings, Danae was modeled on a real person, his young wife Saskia. But he later replaced her face with that of Geertje Dircx, who was his lover at the time.
The painting has been subjected to many attempts at damage and even destruction. On June 15, 1985, a man who was later found insane attacked the painting and threw sulfuric acid on it. This damaged the central part of the composition and turned it into a mixture of spots, splashes and areas with dripping paint. The restoration process was extremely difficult, and it was not until the late 1990s that the painting went back on display.
Titian’s Venus of Urbino
For centuries Titian’s Venus of Urbino was interpreted as a picture aimed at fostering chaste marital virtue. This is no surprise: the aristocratic patron who paid for it was Guidobaldo della Rovere, the Duke of Urbino. He was the same man who named the painter, Titian. Then scholars began to discover a different interpretation of the picture, one with considerable sex appeal.
It is based on the hand positioned suggestively between Venus’s thighs. Unlike the other hands in the picture, it isn’t flattened out by clothing or drapery. It is a hand with a finger stretched into the space between her legs, a gesture that resembles the climactic arousal that is so central to the eroticism of pornography.
When you add to that the fact that the picture is a full length reclining nude, you can begin to understand why it’s a sexy naked women pic. For Renaissance men like Titian – heirs to an artistic tradition that stretched back 2000 years – the handling of the female body was a subject of great interest.
Yet despite her sensuous pose, there is something quite serious about Venus of Urbino. Unlike Botticelli’s Venus, whose demeanor has been taken as an indication of her divine status, Titian’s heroine lacks classical propriety and seems alert rather than diffident. She has a powerful figure, and boobs that are certainly not of the chaste kind. In fact, they could push the needle into the red on the Scoville scale.
Edouard Manet’s Olympia
Edouard Manet’s famous painting, Olympia, caused quite a sensation when it was first exhibited in Paris. It showed a naked woman reclining confidently on her bed, wearing nothing but a black ribbon around her neck, gold bracelets and Louis XV slippers – symbols of wealth and sensuality. A black cat lies at her feet and a servant is bringing her a bouquet of flowers from her client.
While women were not uncommon subjects of paintings in the 19th century, this one was different. It was not a classical goddess or nymph and the woman’s face conveyed a cold and uncaring stare that was a sharp contrast to the docile figures typically depicted in art at the time.
The painting was a scandal when it was exhibited, as it depicted a woman engaging in the sexual activities that made up her daily life. Prostitution was rife in 19th century Paris and the painting’s provocative image of a woman displaying her body and acting in the company of others who were involved in prostitution was very controversial.
Manet’s use of shadow and light was also quite unusual for a painting of this kind. The lighting was not used to highlight specific areas of the body but was rather to create a sense of space and depth in the picture. The modeling was also very flat, especially on the model’s hands and feet – a feature that accentuated the fact that she is a working class girl.
Another striking aspect of the picture was the inclusion of a black maid, Laure. At the time, images of Black people were either exoticized or purely ethnographic. Manet’s portrayal of Laure as a modern working class Black woman in Paris was highly innovative and sparked much discussion amongst academics about the artist’s intentions.
Eva Wilke’s The Starification Object
Using her own body as the canvas of her art, feminist artist Eva Wilke explored the limits of gendered identity and reclaimed the female genitalia from its history of objectification in art. From the late ’60s through her death in 1993, she worked with a wide range of old and new mediums, from pastel drawings to ceramic and performance, but her most famous works are the gum wads arranged into grids that resemble vulvae. Wilke’s erotic expansion of feminine form also prefigured the work of her feminist foremothers, including Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro.
In her 1975 “S.O.S (Starification Object Series)” exhibition, Wilke presented herself topless while adorning herself with chewed-gum wads that were sculpted into vulva-shaped forms on her upper body. Then, she had a photographer take pictures of the performance, which she called “performalist self-portraits.”
Wilke’s photos of herself in this series show her striking flirtatious poses, as if she is modeling for a fashion shoot. They are erotically charged, but also point to the ways women’s bodies are commodified and sexualized by the media.
Like Hesse, Wilke understood erotic as more than libido or a drive for power, according to the curatorial notes in the exhibition’s catalog. For her, it was a force for life that created a different sense of future-focused power. It’s a concept that can be seen throughout the entire exhibition, from the streetwise pedagogy of her So Help Me Hannah performance in 1978 to the way she incorporated the ray gun wings of an air compressor into the installation Mouse Museum/Ray Gun Wing at MoMA PS1. The exhibition traces their shared interest in exploring how the body creates new senses of freedom.
Eva Modersohn-Becker’s Woman
In Modersohn-Becker’s paintings women are naked at last: stripped of the masculine gaze, deprived of male desire, frustration, possessiveness or domination. Her work is a dialogue between the artist and herself and it luxuriates in femaleness, even while insisting on adornment and presenting femininity as part of nature.
Modersohn-Becker painted this self-portrait just before her return to Bremen from Paris in 1906-1907. She had moved away from the natural landscapes championed by her art colony peers and instead focused on still life and portraits with a strong emphasis on nude subjects. This painting is a half-length depiction of the artist holding a pink flower in each hand — a flower motif which also appears in other self-portraits by Becker. Her hair is pulled back and she presents a confident face which conveys a sense of sexy strength and certainty.
The portrait also shows a closeness between Modersohn-Becker and her stepdaughter, who is sitting in the chair behind her. This may be a gesture of love and protection towards the child. It could also be a reminder of her own childhood experiences with the death of her young cousin in an accident.
During this time in her career, Modersohn-Becker struggled with an unhappy marriage which was often disrupted by her travels to Paris to paint. Her husband resented her desire for independence and remarked in 1907 that her paintings are “ugly, bizarre, wooden… mouths like wounds… faces like cretins.” In contrast to the repression she faced at home, the depiction of this woman and child suggests an unmistakable sense of liberation. The portrait was given to Somerville College, Oxford in gratitude by German Jewish classicist Lotte Lobowsky.