A New Way of Looking at the Nude
The artists redefining portraits of the human body for a more inclusive age.
By Julia Halperin
Excerpt:
Fresh interpretations of the nude are front and center in a wave of exhibitions on view in New York this spring. At Bortolami gallery, there is Philip Pearlstein, whose dramatically cropped, unsentimental figures were profoundly unfashionable when he introduced them in the early 1960s. Gagosian is presenting its first exhibition of the photographer Francesca Woodman, who, before her death in 1981 at 22, created hundreds of strange, haunting photographs in which she used her naked body as a prop. Then there is Emily Coan, 32, at Dimin Gallery and Clarity Haynes, 52, at New Discretions, part of a group of contemporary artists who are using their own bodies and those of their friends to explore how femininity, gender identity and queerness can breathe new life into this often-vexing tradition.
The story of the nude in Western art begins in ancient Greece, where sculptors sought to pay tribute to the gods by capturing them in idealized human form. When Renaissance artists revived interest in classical antiquity, the nude came along for the ride, mostly as a vessel to idealize the figures of the Christian faith and the Roman Catholic Church, which dominated Renaissance Europe. Some of these works had the suggestion of sensuality or, in the case of Donatello’s sculpture of St. Jerome, deflated classical beauty by focusing on a body in decline. Such notions violated the conservative sensibilities of the church, but it wasn’t until the 19th century when the nude truly began to skirt the borders of taste and propriety. Edouard Manet’s “Olympia” was a sensation. The combination of subject (a prostitute in the classical pose of a reclining female nude) and style (brushwork so flat that it highlights the artificiality of the image) was so shocking that visitors to the Paris Salon of 1865 tried to stab the canvas with their umbrellas. The painting was recently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York — only the third time it has ever left Paris, though it cast a wide influence on the next century or so of nudes, from the frankness of Gustave Courbet’s “Origin of the World” (painted the year after the debut of “Olympia”) to Picasso’s 1932 series about his mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, which brought explicit nudity into the world of abstraction.
