THE LASTING IMPACT OF NUDE IN ART
Beauty is the erotic perception of time and shape. And sometimes, apparently, a reason for starting a theological argument. What if art has always been a form of worship?
1. .Nude Reclining on a Navajo Rug, gelatin silver print by American photographer Imogen Cunningham, 1968© Imogen Cunningham via Monovisions Magazine
2/3 Silk by Ruth Bernhard,1968 fine art photography / Man Ray, Nu encordé (Blanc et noir), 1928 via Art Basel
Not necessarily the Sunday-best, hands-folded, please-don't-touch-the-statues kind, but something older, messier and considerably more human: an attempt to communicate with whatever we imagine to be greater than ourselves.
The muses, the gods, the Goddess, the universe, the person we cannot stop thinking about at three in the morning.
4/5 Edward Weston, Untitled (Tina on the Azotea, with Kimono), 1924 Palladium print via Artsy / Georgia Engelhard by Alfred Stieglitz, 1920, palladium print, National Gallery of Art · Alfred Stieglitz Collection
Call it inspiration, lust, divine energy or an exceptionally persistent creative obsession. Artists have been trying to make the invisible visible for as long as anyone has been leaving images on walls. And what if erotic photography belongs to this ancient conversation, too?
An image can be a celebration, an invitation, a confession, a declaration of independence or a little piece of visual troublemaking. It can express love and lust, agony and ecstasy, shame and pride, holiness and profanity.
6/7 Henri Oltramare, Nu à la balançoire, Tirage citrate c. 1890-1900, Publié par Lapetitemelancolie / Henri Oltramare- Etude de nu couché,, vers, 1895, Tirage argentique
It can expose the body while concealing the person, or reveal something about the person that ordinary life has taught them to hide.
Sometimes it does several of these things simultaneously, which is inconvenient if your cultural categories prefer everything neatly labelled. Perhaps the erotic photograph is not always an object to be consumed.
8/9 Standing Female Nude aka Mariette, Marie-Christine Leroux as Phryne, photographed by Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) for Jean-Léon Gérôme's Phryne c. 1855. Salted paper print from Tate Britain / American artist's model and silent film actress Audrey Munson, photographed by Arnold Genthe, Library of Congress She is widely considered America's first supermodel via The Art Newspaper
Perhaps it can also be an offering: an ex-voto to the unruly gods of desire, a hymn to the body, even an exorcism of the shame attached to it. Between the sacred and the profane, the devotional and the deliberately provocative, the camera has always had more than one prayer in its repertoire. Naturally, not everybody will agree.
Some will call this a romantic attempt to dress pornography in a priest's collar. Others will argue that sexuality and spirituality are not mutually exclusive, and that treating the naked body as inherently unworthy of reverence says more about our cultural baggage than about the body itself.
10/11 Unknown maker, French late 19th century - Nude Study of a Black Female - Google Art Project / Vintage Nudes Erotica (1920s) via Monovisions Black White Photography Magazine-01
Both positions deserve a hearing. After all, the history of erotic imagery is also a history of people arguing about who gets to represent the body, who gets to look at it, who gets paid for it and who gets to decide whether the result belongs in a museum or behind a password-protected screen.
And what would happen if we built a museum around the idea that the erotic image could be an act of reverence?
12/13 Henri Oltramare – Nu c. 1900 Publié par Lapetitemelancolie
Not a temple to perfect breasts, impossible waists and the eternal tyranny of good lighting. Something more ambitious: an imaginary Eros Museum where photography becomes a meeting place for art, desire, identity and the many competing ways human beings have imagined the divine.
Welcome to the darkroom. Please silence your phones. The Goddess may be speaking.
14/15 František Drtikol, Nude with drape,1923 Gelatin silver print via Christie's / Adrianne Ames, From Ziegfeld Girls Portfolio, photographs taken between 1917 and 1931 by New York photographer Alfred Cheney Johnston © Frank Gerald Hegewald.deTHE GODDESS HAS A BODY PROBLEM
Western culture has spent centuries negotiating a curious arrangement with the female body. It adores the Virgin, venerates the Madonna, commissions endless paintings of Venus and places the naked female form on museum walls.
Yet the same culture can become spectacularly uncomfortable when a living woman claims ownership of her own sexuality.
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