Constantly battling with society to depict their bodies, women found ways to resist artistically. Emilia Clarke, star of Game of Thrones, has been praised and mocked for her refusal to strip for filming nude scenes.
Beginning with Manet’s Olympia and Dejeuner sur l’herbe, the female nude became untethered from myth, as exemplified by Francois Boucher’s Brown Odalisque.
History of the Nude
The female nude has always walked the razor’s edge between artistic and pornographic representation. Early prehistoric sculptures of naked women like the Venus of Willendorf and the Near Eastern goddess Ishtar embody fertility deities and evoke life-giving energies. Later, Greek sculptors created idealised versions of the goddess Aphrodite with soft forms, large breasts and a pear-shaped body. These sculptural canons set a bar that is difficult to meet. When christianity arrived with its emphasis on chastity, the sculptural tradition of naked women became all but extinct in Europe.
But the reemergence of nude figures in Western art is not due to a simple change in societal attitudes. It is the result of a complex web of formal ideals, philosophical concerns and cultural traditions.
Female nudes have been at the centre of many significant artistic movements throughout history. The Renaissance’s iconic depiction of the naked Danae, the daughter of Zeus and the goddess of love, beauty, chastity and procreation, was an innovative departure from the classical canon of veiled female figures. This externalization of the female body and its eroticism was further developed in the Baroque period with Mannerist eroticity, and continued to be exploited in a variety of allegories, as well as to immortalize mainly mythological events.
As a result, the classical nude, especially of the female form, is often presented as lascivious. For example, the reclining nude became an extremely popular subject during the heyday of Orientalist art as a symbol of Turkish harems. Likewise, the odalisque was a common theme in the paintings of Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Manet.
In the modern age, female nudes have become an important tool for women to fight a system that would sexualize them at will. For this reason, they have been used by artists to explore themes of repression and liberation. The reclining nude in particular is a favourite for female artists, as it can convey both a sense of relaxed daytime repose and a sexual allure. However, more recently, artists have challenged the traditional perception of nudes with subjects who are aware of being observed. For example, the anonymous subjects in Francisco Goya’s The Nude Maja and the Marchesa Casati seem to be weaponising their own nakedness, while the stoic female in Anne Brigman’s The Embrace of the Muse is utterly unflinching.
Artistic Approaches
As the female nude was used to convey a range of different ideas, beliefs and values, artists developed multiple modes of representation. Kenneth Clark famously distinguishes between “nude” and “naked.” A nude is a naked body that looks comfortable without clothes; whereas, a naked woman is not only exposed but appears to be uncomfortable as she stands in her nakedness. In the 1400s, the Renaissance resurrected interest in classical art, and workshops began teaching sketching of human nudes as an essential skill. The Italian artists of the time used both surviving classical works and newly excavated sculptural masterpieces to train their eyes on the human form and to practice their skills with the nude model.
The era’s fascination with human beauty and power also gave birth to a range of themes that explored sexuality and raw human emotions. These erotic images, ranging from the lustful Venus to the muscular heroes of Greek mythology, often provoked censorship by the Christian Church. Printmakers, who favored eroticism as an artistic genre, were particularly vulnerable to censorship.
When the female nude became untethered from myth, as it did in the 18th century, painters probed the physical world of the human body with greater freedom. The artists of the Age of Enlightenment and the following Romanticism created a range of virtuosic paintings of sexy, nude women.
In the 1900s, the modernist movement of Expressionism, Impressionism and Fauvism reworked the concept of the nude to express new ideas and styles. The artists used abstract forms and ringing colors to convey emotional expression and even torment. Artists such as Schiele portrayed nude young girls with simplified forms and a focus on the unconscious dimension of the female body.
The female nude is still a subject that challenges the limits of what is considered beautiful. Contemporary artists are exploring the nude in a variety of ways, from Edgar Degas’s oil paintings of women bathing to Modigliani’s reclining nude to Cindy Sherman’s photo-based installations. The artists of the moment have reworked the definition of beauty to reflect their own social, political and cultural concerns.
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Rock Art
Rock art is the collection of drawings, paintings or engravings on stone walls and surfaces created by prehistoric indigenous communities in caves, rock shelters and open-air rock outcrops. Ancient rock art often depicted human figures, animal drawings and geometric designs. In some cases, petroglyphs (inscribed symbols or signs) were used to communicate ideas, such as prayers for rain, hunting magic (indicating where a hunter might find game in the wild), or astronomical indicators of seasons and the movement of celestial bodies.
The female nude appears in rock art as early as the Tassili n’Ajjer area of Algeria, where women are immortalized in a more streamlined realistic style than male subjects. This reflects the prevailing notion that women were equal to men in ancient spiritual beliefs and in achieving power through a combination of rituals, ceremonies and sexuality.
Many contemporary artists embraced the landscape as a canvas and a way of reclaiming female power, especially in the works of East Coast feminist artist Mary Beth Edelson. Her 1970s performances and photographs of herself in a rocky canyon with her arms outstretched and head turned toward the sky evoked female goddess archetypes. She also created a series of self-portraits that included reclining nude images near railroad tracks, echoing the proto-feminist landscape photographs by Carolee Schneemann.
By the late 1960s, Schneemann was one of a number of women artists who began to challenge the idea that only men could be image-makers and image-women. Her reclining nude self-portrait on tracks paralleling each other, like the railroad stereo photographs of American pioneers, called attention to gendered landscapes and questioned whose role it was to make and to be seen.
In her 1974 work, “Creek,” Ana Mendieta reworked the story of Ophelia, Shakespeare’s heroine who drowned in a pastoral body of water. By burying her nude body in the earth and letting flowers grow over her, she established herself as an active agent of healing and renewal in nature.