The Representation of the Nude: Between Affirmation and Subversion
Gender Genres
20.11.2020 | Sibylle Vabre
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Laure Albin Guillot, Étude de nu, 1930-1940, © Laure Albin Guillot / Roger-Viollet
In academic art education as it was organised until the 19th century, the representation of nude models was indispensable for the conception of history paintings. For a long time women artists were excluded from life drawing classes for reasons of morality. Thus they could not claim to be equal to men in the noblest genre. The question of opening life drawing to women generated a heated debate and thus very early the representation of the nude was a true challenge in the training and career of women artists. While their access to classes was a point of contention, some found other paths outside the academies. Immediately part of a form of subversion, the nude was an open door to new artistic explorations and the vehicle for personal, professional and political affirmation.
While the live model was an element of study, the representation of naked bodies was also a means of touching what is most intimate and most universal in humanity. In the sculptures of Camille Claudel (1864-1943), bodies were the support of an expression of emotions through the ages.
Certain female artists took advantage of the narrative and symbolic dimension of the nude in connection to nature. Photographer Anne Brigman (1869-1950) staged nude women in Californian landscapes in images that personified natural forces. A similar association can be found in the sculptures of Maria Martins (1894-1973) that depict hybrid beings blending humans and vegetation in a surrealist vein. More recently, the photographs and videos of multidisciplinary artist Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) retain the traces of performances in which she became one with the elements. Summoning the evocative force of Latin American rituals and sacrifices, she metamorphically rooted herself in a land that was not the same as the one from which she originated, and investigated femininity through her own body.
Under the brush of painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) the nude became a pictorial subject in its own right. In her portraits of nude women and children she evoked motherhood, stripped of any mythological pretext, as well as in a famous 1906 painting where she herself appears pregnant, becoming a pioneer of the nude female self-portrait. Pan Yuliang (1899-1977) devoted herself to the same subject, exploring themes of female bathers and indoor nudes. Many of her drawings share an erotic connotation that was scandalous during her lifetime and considered inappropriate for women.
The canvases in which Lotte Laserstein (1898-1993) staged herself in her studio are an affirmation of the artist’s status. In In meinem Atelier (1928) the imposing presence of the model in the foreground, whose body is realistically detailed, implies an aesthetic statement and consecrates the image of the modern woman whom the painter portrayed several times in the guise of Traute Rose (1904-1997). Alice Neel (1900-1984) fed an emancipated representation of the canons of beauty. Characterised by a raw realism, her nude portraits are sexualised but not eroticised. The subjects appear charged with their condition, like pregnant women. Her frankness can be seen in a unique nude self-portrait that she began in 1975, where she portrays her own 70-year old body without any concession. In addition to the works by female artists, the nude is also an issue in the representation of women in institutions and collections, as highlighted by the actions of the Guerrilla Girls from the 1980s onwards.
Bringing the image of the body into play, some artists use the representation of the nude in a feminist approach to denounce the eroticisation of bodies in the male gaze. Sylvia Sleigh (1916-2010) reverses the scopic relationship by painting nude men in postures attributed to female models in art history, highlighting their erotic dimension by diverting it. Others draw their iconography from pornography. Censorship became the subject in the paintings of Joan Semmel (b. 1932) and in the Fuck Paintings (1969-1974) of Betty Tompkins (born in 1945), betraying the subversive force of sexual imagery. The same phenomenon struck in 1987 with the photographs of Florence Chevallier (born in 1955) from the series Corps à corps, which depicts a heterosexual relationship in its agonistic dimension.
New generations of artists continue to use the representation of the nude to mobilise the self-portrait and reveal the political inscription of bodies, as seen with Jenny Saville (born in 1970) and Allana Clarke (born in 1987), among others.
Referring to the intimacy, fragility and nature of the human being, the representation of the nude cannot leave anyone indifferent, as it also implies the revealing what is usually hidden. Through the above-mentioned works and those of other female artists, the representation of the nude manifests a great poetic and political force, while retaining a deeply subversive character.
1869 — Hawaii | 1950 — United States
Anne Brigman
1876 — 1907 | Germany
Paula Modersohn-Becker
1894 — 1973 | Brazil
Maria Martins
1864 — 1943 | France
Camille Claudel
1895 — China | 1977 — France
Pan Yuliang
1948 — Cuba | 1985 — United States
Ana Mendieta
1900 — 1984 | United States
Alice Neel
1945 | United States
Betty Tompkins
1985 | United States
Guerrilla Girls
1955 | Morocco
Florence Chevallier
1898 — Poland | 1980 — Mexico
Tamara de Lempicka
1937 | Spain
Esther Ferrer
1958 — 1981 | United States
Francesca Woodman
1939 — 2019 | United States
Carolee Schneemann
1971 | Mexico
Lorena Wolffer
1956 | Croatia
Vlasta Delimar
1848 — Spain | 1924 — France
Amélie Beaury-Saurel
1844 — 1933 | United-Kingdom
Annie Louisa Swynnerton
1948 — New Zealand | 2014 — England
Alexis Hunter
1959 — 2018 | United States
Laura Aguilar
1929 | Argentina
Ilse Fuskova (Felka)
1959 | Mexico
Silvia Gruner
1869 — 1937 | France
Clémentine-Hélène Dufau
1939 — 2020 | Algeria
Leila Ferhat
1898 — Prussia (now Pasłęk, Poland) | 1993 — Sweden
Lotte Laserstein
1951 | United States
Donna Gottschalk
1939 — 2019 | United States
Barbara Hammer
1954 | United States
Annie Sprinkle (aka Ellen F. Steinberg)
1951 | United Kingdom
Cosey Fanni Tutti (Christine Carol Newby, dite)
1970 | Turkey
CANAN (Şenol)
1916 — United Kingdom | 2010 — United States
Sylvia Sleigh
1962 | China
Xiao Lu
1962 | Turkey
Şükran Moral
1927 — 1977 | Bolivia
María Esther Ballivián
1959 | Greenland
Jessie Kleemann
1905 — 1985 | Bulgaria
Vaska Emanuilova
1893 — 1978 | Mexico
Nahui Olin
1951 — 1994 | Argentina
Liliana Maresca
1949 — United States | 2004 — Israel
Pamela Levy
1879 — 1962 | France
Laure Albin Guillot
1963 | Egypt
Ghada Amer
1929 — 2023 | United States
Ida Applebroog
1899 — 1925 | Hungary
Erzsébet Korb
1935 — Portugal | 2022 — Great Britain
Paula Rego
1951 — 2021 | Japan
Tāri Itō
1932 — 2022 | Japan
Asuka Tsuboi
1964 | France
Valérie Belin
1940 — 1993 | United States
Hannah Wilke
1908 — Germany | 1994 — Israel
Liselotte Grschebina
1968 | Albania
Ornela Vorpsi
1939 — 1968 | France
Clotilde Vautier
1970 | Austria
Elke Silvia Krystufek
1935 | Italy
Camilla Adami
1963 | Poland
Katarzyna Kozyra
1970 | France
Rebecca Bournigault
1947 | Poland
Zofia Kulik
1969 | United Kingdom
Cecily Brown
1965 | Sierra Leone
Patricia Piccinini
1942 | Yugoslavia (Serbia)
Katalin Ladik
1941 | United States
Sheree Rose
1956 — 2018 | Taiwan
YAN Ming-Huy
1942 | Spain
Mari Chordà
1904 — China | 1991 — France
Colette Richarme
1893 — 1975 | Argentina
Lía Correa Morales
1905 — 2008 | Japan
Tamako Kataoka
1896 — 1988 | Japan
Hisako Kajiwara
1972 | Israel
Rona Yefman
1951 | Singapore
