Naked females have long held a complex relationship to power and sexuality. As the Cooltan ads demonstrate, nude images of white heterosexual women can be deployed in diverse ways to provoke different responses.
Whether representing the humiliation of Eve, the beauty of ancient divinities or Libertine liberation, they imply a desire for sexual gratification within patriarchal culture.
History of the Nude
The human body, and especially the female nude, has been one of the main themes in art throughout history. Naked females can be found in many paintings from ancient times: a naked Ishtar, the goddess of fertility in Mesopotamian art; or a fully-naked Venus, as in the famous sculpture of the same name by Michelangelo. In the Renaissance era, naked figures became popular again in painting thanks to renewed interest in plastic beauty and a rediscovery of Antiquity. The proportions of the body were respected, and realistic musculature was added. Artists also began to use live models, which allowed them to paint a more realistic figure.
In Christian art, the depiction of the nude body was mainly associated with certain liturgical events: Adam and Eve before the fall, the damned being cast into hell or the dead rising during the Apocalypse. However, this didn’t stop artists from experimenting with the nude in their paintings. Francisco de Goya was the first to show, in La Maja desnuda (1790), a woman with her pubic hair in all its naturalness and without any religious connotations.
During the Baroque period, painters used undraped women as characters in allegories based on classical metaphors. The art of Rubens, for example, shows a taste for women with generous figures and radiant flesh.
While in Greek art, both men and women were often portrayed naked, the Venus de Milo is the most famous depiction of a naked female. In ancient sculpture, the nude woman was typically a symbol of procreation and fertility.
During the 19th century, realist painters tended to portray nude women from lower classes. These were usually prostitutes or actresses. Schiele, on the other hand, preferred to portray emaciated nudes with sickly colors.
Francisco de Goya
One of the more famous naked female paintings is Francisco de Goya’s La Maja Desnuda, which was painted around 1800. It depicts a naked woman lying on a bed in a sensual pose. Although considered provocative at the time, it is now a landmark in modern art. Goya also created a fully clothed version of this painting, which is now part of the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid. The two works are often displayed side by side to give viewers a complete perspective of the Majas’ duality.
The subject of the painting is a Maja, a low-class Spanish maiden who was an idealized figure for many 19th-century painters. Goya was able to depict the Majas’ raw emotions and vulnerability, which challenged societal expectations of women at the time. His work also explored the duality of a person’s public and private self, which was a major theme in his Caprichos series.
Unlike many other Nude paintings, Goya’s work shows the naked body in its natural state rather than retouching it or adding a false veil. The painting also demonstrates Goya’s interest in capturing human emotions, such as anger and sadness. The bold gaze of the bare Maja in her natural state conveys Goya’s belief that human nature is not always fair or just.
While the identity of the Maja is unknown, it is known that the painting was commissioned by Prime Minister Manuel Godoy. The painting was hung in his inner cabinet along with other “questionable pictures” such as Velazquez’ Rokeby Venus.
Gustave Courbet
In the 19th century, photographs were often used by artists as substitutes for live models. These “studies for artists” served a practical purpose, but they also functioned as works of art in their own right. Two examples are Gustave Courbet’s Woman with a Parrot (1866) and Julien Vallou de Villeneuve’s Female Nude of 1853.
French society was scandalized by Courbet’s paintings, particularly those of naked women. One, The Sleepers of 1866, depicts two naked women asleep in each other’s arms. The painter even left discarded hairpins and a broken string of pearls in the bed.
Another of his most famous female nudes, L’Origine du monde (The Origin of the World, 1866) depicts a cropped torso of a woman, focused on her genitals. Although it’s been difficult to identify the model, recent research by a French literary scholar has led him to believe with 99 percent certainty that the painting’s model is the Opera ballet dancer Constance Queniaux. Queniaux was a mistress of the Ottoman diplomat Halil Serif Pasha (also known as Khalil Bey) when Courbet created the painting.
Unlike the snobby Venus of Cabanel or the sexy titillation of a brothel scene, Manet’s Olympia depicted an unattractive figure. The artist wanted to create an image that reflected real life, and his dedication to realistic representations set a precedent for later painters. Critics scathingly dubbed the canvas a female gorilla, a yellow-bellied Venus, and a queen of spades from a deck of cards. Only Emile Zola understood the work’s significance and sensed that it was not simply about eroticism but about social commentary. These works shifted the paradigm of feminine objectification from the realm of pornography to that of allegory.
Impressionist painters
One of the first Impressionists was an aristocrat named Edouard Manet. His work was controversial in its day because of his depictions of nude women in modern settings. His 1863 painting Le dejeuner sur l’herbe showed clothed men and nude women having an afternoon picnic (these weren’t classical nudes, but modern, possibly prostitute-like women in states of undress that were far more sexual than the nude paintings of his predecessors). It was displayed at the scandalous “Salon des Refuses” held to placate artists rejected by the more prestigious Paris Salon.
Mary Cassatt was another of the early Impressionists. A Pennsylvania native, she became an artist in France and exhibited with the group of artists who eventually came to be called the Impressionists. Her paintings focused on the private sphere of family life with women and girls being her main subjects. Her techniques, including flattening of three dimensional space and rapid brushstrokes that suggested motion, were ahead of her time.
Other Impressionists included Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, and Paul Caillebotte. Although their styles differed, they were united by a disdain for the academic standards of their era and an interest in capturing visual perceptions rather than actual objects. Monet’s works were often done outdoors using a technique called plein air. He captured the ephemeral beauty of nature with scenes of water, sunlight, and trees. He was known for his impressionist interpretations of nature’s flora and fauna as well as landscapes, portraits, and nudes.
Caillebotte was a relatively young member of the Impressionists who had considerable financial wealth and was able to patronize other artists as well as exhibiting his own work alongside theirs. His brushwork resembled that of Manet’s, and he was married to Manet’s brother.
Modern art
A female nude body is an incredibly powerful symbol, and it is often the subject of art that explores ideals of beauty or heroism. However, a male nude figure is less frequently depicted in art. This is because male and female bodies have different sexual associations, and a male nude body may be seen as more masculine. This difference is also reflected in the way that gender roles are explored in pre-modern art. For example, women are depicted more as mothers than as lovers in cave paintings, while men are usually shown having sex.
In modern art, the subject of a naked woman has become more commonplace. Artists like Harriet Leibowitz and Paul Cadmus use humour to highlight the sexuality of a naked woman, while others, such as Joe Cavallaro and Manabu Yamanaka, are more direct in their depictions of nude bodies. For example, Yamanaka’s photographs of elderly women show a taboo part of the human body that is rarely shown in art.
The nude form was popular in Renaissance painting, thanks to the rediscovery of Antiquity and the interest in plastic beauty. This trend continued into the 19th century, when the Impressionists began to detach the nude from its iconographic role and treat it as an independent motif.
Edouard Manet’s Olympia and Le Déjeuner Sur L’herbe were a huge scandal when they were first unveiled, but they also marked a crucial change in the representation of a nude woman. He wanted to represent reality, not the feminine ideal. His Olympia is no demure damsel, but a confident muse who is aware of the power she holds over her observers.
Cezanne’s Bathers is another work that challenges the conventions of the time, as he uses shapes to suggest the figures rather than painting them individually. The reclining women are not recognisable as individuals and appear to be merging with the surrounding landscape.