From Nude To Naked

"Women are the sources of life. We are the birth givers, the nurturers, the mentors and the molders of the present and the future. Because women are so much to so many, they have been depicted on cave walls and in oil portraits. They are a favorite subject of artists in all genres since they represent beauty and bounty, mayhem and madness, courage and constancy, seduction and sex, nakedness and style. They are the world to the world" (Claudia 1).

Although women are the dominant subject matter in art, they are not always represented or depicted in a positive manner. While one artist's representation of a woman may be wholesome and pure, another's may be risquÐ"© while indecently exposing the woman. Some may view the sexual depiction of women as inappropriate or unnecessary; others view it as an acceptable means of expression. "The nude as an art form and subject of art is characteristically Western in its conception" (Machotka 1). The female body, in the nude, was a common element in many eighteenth and nineteenth century works regardless of whether the tone was seductive and provocative or wholesome and motherly. The body in the nude had no tonal signals of its own, but the pose, facial expressions and setting are what determined the mood of the piece. This allowed the unclothed body to represent nothing more than the female figure in its essence. It was not until the turn of the twentieth century that the nude body suddenly became naked and figured in the natural became risquÐ"© and controversial images. With America taking strides towards a conservative era, the view of art and free expression came under scrutiny as it clashed with conservative values.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, almost all works of art depicting the nude female body were done by male artists. None-the-less, most were not intentionally geared to provoke any sexual emotion from the viewer, rather as just a natural form of self expression. The female anatomy was normally hidden, by cloth or an article of clothing. "The body was there but carefully covered, for there were no academies in eighteenth century America in which an artist could either study the nude from life, through original sculpture, or even in the form of casts" (Gerdts 29). The first American to go abroad for training was an artist by the name of Benjamin West. A series of paintings done by West, The Four Elements, depicted females read in terms of nudeness. "From the single revealed breast of Earth and Water to the half-nude Fire and then the almost totally revealed Air, the latter posed rather voluptuously with her sinuous form and outlines repeated in the curves of her drapery" (Gerdts 31). What really enabled the piece to be considered remotely sexual in nature was the pose/expression of the subject and its surroundings. In West's later works, the facial expressions and gestures were far more dramatic. His two versions of Venus of Adonis are very different in comparison. The earlier version depicts "Ð'...a gently mourning and modestly garbed Venus with a cupidÐ'..." while the later version shows "Ð'...a distraught goddess falling back from the supine Adonis, [ripping out her hair], while attendant maidens, swans, doves, and cupids not only try to comfort her, but also share in her grief" (Gerdts 31). As works got more and more intricate and correct, more people developed controversial views along with it.

"By the beginning of the nineteenth century, as the art progressed in the United States, the nude found a more established, if still controversial, place in American art" (Gerdts 43). Artists of this time brought a personal approach and personal experience to the same subject. For example, the comparison of Thomas Worthington Whittredge's The Bathers to The Swimming Hole by Willard Metcalf. "At the same time, their paintings achieved a perfect mating of an informal and natural presentation of the nude with the unclassicized, informal natural settingÐ'...nature, like the nude contained within it, was studied and presented naturally and shown to be in harmony with her human occupants" (Gerdts 128). In the late nineteenth century, an artist by the name of Abbott Thayer created a piece called Figure Half-Draped. This piece is one of the finest paintings of the theme in late nineteenth century America. "Remote, not enticing, the young woman reveals both her bare torso and the artist's superb understanding of anatomical construction" (Gerdts 135). As the nineteenth century came to an end, more and more artists were straying away from nude pieces, in fear that they would be looked down upon due to societal changes in attitude towards the pieces.

Instead of the nude body being alluring and natural, it was now being referred to as a naked body, that was seductive and risquÐ"© in nature. As the twentieth century came along, a different spin on sexuality arose. People were starting to turn the tables on many male artists and their motives for painting women in the nude. In Carol Duncan's essay, "Domination and Virility in Vanguard Painting," she supports this new philosophy by pointing towards "a long history in which the representation of the female body has been organized for male viewing pleasure. The subject of nude in art brings together discourses of representation, morality, and female sexuality, but the persistent presentation of the nude female body as a site of male viewing pleasure, a commodified image of exchange, and a fetishized defense against the fear of castration has left little place for explorations of female subjectivity, knowledge, and experience" (Chadwick 282). Therefore, now more than ever, women felt that they were being misrepresented in art, and that they were ultimately