Nude Women in Art History

It is important to identify the difference between nudity and nakedness when discussing the significance of nude women in art history. John Berger explains this beautifully in his book Ways of Seeing by stating:

Anna Currence O'Neal, Thermal, 2023. Acrylic on canvas board. ANCO Artistry.

“To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude. Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is on display. To be naked is to be without disguise. To be on display is to have the surface of one’s own skin, the hairs of one’s own body, turned into a disguise which, in that situation, can never be discarded. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.” (Ways of Seeing, 54)

**This article was written for the Modern Art History course Anna took in the Fall of 2015 for her BFA degree with an Art History minor. Original 2016 writing. To see the formatted original version, download the file below. Images included.

Nude Women in Art History.

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“Impressionism [a late 19th century art movement] is characterized by the artistic attempt to accurately and impartially portray reality, as well as an idealization of the female body as a metamorphic representation of ideals such as beauty or purity. According to art historian Tamar Garb, Renoir gained a reputation among the impressionists as ‘above all, the painter of women’.” (Serendip)

While Renoir professed to close friend and fellow artist, Georges Riviere, how “disagreeable” he found it to be around women, he also found them to be his ideal subject. Renoir believed that women were essentially amoral and lived much like children, “according to the logic of their instincts.” His son is quoted as saying the artist wanted to create art that had no subject, art that had “no story at all...something that everybody knows,” indirectly implying that Renoir believed women had no narrative, a common opinion at the time, especially among men. He is quoted saying, “My models don’t think at all.” 

A visual reflection of his belief that women were not intellectually aware can be seen in his painting Study of a Nude (1). The young woman in this image is nude from the waist up and surrounded by ambiguous nature. Renoir has adorned her head, miniscule when compared to her voyeuristically contorted body, with a vacant expression. 

“Indeed, the only purpose of the woman in Study of a Nude is to be aesthetically pleasing and showcase her beauty without any threatening undertones of intellectual presence or thoughtfulness. This is not a conscious choice made by the women represented in Renoir's nudes, but rather a byproduct of the male gaze.” (Serendip)

John Berger attempts to explain this male gaze and its effects to his readers by saying, “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object - and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.” (Ways of Seeing, 47) 

Edgar Degas, another late 19th century artist (also male), is famous for his paintings and drawings of ballerinas and female nudes. He spent years depicting the women and girls at the Paris Opera, showing all of the little moments, from yawning and weird positions to the ever-present men leering at them. One of his most famous works is a sculpture of a pubescent ballerina called La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans (2), or The Little Dancer of 14 Years. Degas made twenty-nine castings of this sculpture as well as creating a nude version that was only exhibited once during his lifetime as it was rejected by critics and the public. “Recent research is held to have proved conclusively that the nude figure was not a preparatory study for the clothed one, but an individual work, of which Degas had a casting made in bronze.” (The Guardian, Degas) The public found the sculpture disturbing, some even calling it ugly, but there were mixed reviews among critics. One said, “it is the first truly modern attempt at sculpture I have seen.” Another, Paul Mantz, stated, “With bestial effrontery she moves her face forward, or rather her muzzle - and this word is completely correct because the little girl is the beginning of a rat.” The adolescent corps de ballet at the Paris Opera were known as petits rats. (The Guardian, Degas) 

“If the nude figure is disturbing, it is because the child is under developed for her stated age, because her breasts are mere buds on her narrow ribcage, because her pelvis is shallow and unformed and her belly slack and protuberant, because her thighs are wasted and her knees almost rachitic. This is what passed by gas footlight for a sylph - an undernourished child for whom dancing was a one-way ticket to prostitution.” (The Guardian, Degas)

This is a figure of a ballerina going through her ballet poses, not posing angelically for an artist. Although the subject of this sculpture can inspire compassion, there is no evidence of sentimentality. Degas stripped the figure of childlike cuteness, displayed her poor health (a result of her already hard life) and touched on the unfortunate destined path of her and her peers at the ballet school (a cover for prostitution), all of which are reflections of the Realist trend at this time. Pretty, neoclassical nude images were what was acceptable in the academic art world. Degas was a Realist and had no interest in sugar-coating what he saw. 

The subjects of Degas’ paintings and drawings were also of the same ballerinas, but in addition to the girls (clothed or not), his compositions often included the figure of the sexual predator, a constant in Degas’ image-making. It was the harsh reality for girls being trained as ballerinas at the Paris Opera, an obvious front for a high class brothel at the time. 

“Portly gentlemen in solid black are forever watching the girls, in their dance classes, in the dressing rooms, in the wings, from the stalls. One of his monotypes, entitled Pauline and Virginia Conversing with Admirers (3), shows a group of four top-hatted gentlemen towering over two tiny dancers they have cornered in a backstage corridor. Degas captures the cocky bravado of the little girls, who are looking to make the best of an inescapable situation.” (The Guardian, Degas) 

Édouard Manet, a cross between a Realist and an Impressionist, represents a pivotal point in art history, specifically in depictions of the nude female form. He submitted his painting of an odalisque, entitled Olympia (4), to the Paris Salon of 1865 and was accepted into the exhibition. When the exhibit opened, there was an outcry of shock from those who viewed Olympia, not because of the nudity, but because she stares confrontationally out at the viewer: a confident, poised and independent woman rather than the passive female figures of traditional images depicting the same subject. That, along with the details Manet included clearly identifying her as a prostitute and not a nude woman cloaked in mythology (not a Venus, like odalisques before it), is what cause such an uproar in the artistic community. Manet also painted her staring directly out at the viewer, defiantly challenging her role as a sexual object. 

The tradition of passive femininity continued in academic painting, but in the late 19th century, avant garde artists (such as Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, and the German Expressionists, etc.) were beginning to embrace the ‘realism’ of the prostitute as a financially stable and independent woman as well as a representation of this ‘new modern woman’.

The voyeurism of the female nude continued into the 20th century, but, simultaneously, there were feminist movements working against that tradition and its inherent hypocrisy. One of the most famous displays of this defiance was the slashing of the Rokeby Venus (5) by feminist activist Mary Richardson on March 10, 1914. The Rokeby Venus (6) is a revered painting by the Spanish artist Diego Velazquez completed between 1647 and 1651 and had been described by The Times as “perhaps the finest painting of the nude in the world.” Ms. Richardson was a member of the feminist group Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and had carried out many acts against her government’s refusal to recognize and protect  women’s rights both politically and socially. The leader of her group, Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst, had been arrested for her militant actions and Richardson was protesting her imprisonment. She issued a statement to the WSPU explaining her actions that was subsequently printed by the Press. It read:

“I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the government destroying Mrs. Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history. Justice is an element of beauty just as much as color and outline on a canvas. Mrs. Pankhurst seeks to procure justice for womanhood, and for that she is being slowly murdered by a government of Iscariot politicians. If there is an outcry against my deed, let everyone remember that such an outcry is an hypocrisy so long as they allow the destruction of Mrs. Pankhurst and the other beautiful living women, and that until the public cease to countenance human destruction of this picture are each an evidence against them of artistic as well as moral and political humbug and hypocrisy.” (Sex Museums: The Politics and Performance of Display, p. 78)

Violent acts against paintings of nude women, most often committed by men, are spoken about with a rhetoric of rape. “The language that describes these violent acts feminizes the object attacked, likening it to the victim of sexual abuse. Vandals view paintings as living women with whom they possess a vengeful sexual dynamic.” (Sex Museums, p. 78) The reason for Ms. Richardson’s attack on the female nude was quite different. Her resentment was directed toward the object itself, at the authority that was attached to the object. “In a sense, she symbolically wounded and sought to murder the material object as an accessible and vital organ of the authority of the state over women’s civic and social bodies.” (Sex Museums, p. 79) This was one of many attempts by Richardson and the many women like her to protest towards suffragette goals in the early 20th century. This was also one of their last destructive protests as the WSPU suspended all militant actions in light of the impending World War that would begin the same year, 1914, their leader Mrs. Pankhurst stating, “ It is no time for dissent or agitation.” (Emmeline Pankhurst, Wikipedia)

At the conclusion of World War I in 1918, there was a return to antiquity and traditional representation by many artists that had previously employed more experimental artistic expressions. One such artist was Pablo Picasso, co-founder of Cubism. In the 1920s, Picasso stepped back from Cubism and returned to a more traditional representation of the figure in paintings such as The Large Bather (7) in 1921. The woman in The Large Bather is well over life-sized and crammed into a space that can barely contain her, a far-away look in her eyes as she runs the fabric covering her genitalia between her fingers. A likely explanation for her thick form, is his viewing of classical art, such as the Grecian sculptures in the British Museum, frescoes from Herculaneum and Pompeii, and frescoes by Michelangelo and Annibale Carracci in Rome. Picasso also looked at the works of Renoir and Maillol because, like him, they approached the classical tradition with an inventive spirit.

“The Large Bather owes much to the monumentality [Renoir and Maillol] sought in their representations of the female nude as a kind of earth-goddess. For at one level that is what the imagery of this painting alludes to the female nude as the traditional symbol of nature and fertility. The sense of warm earthiness is increased by the soft Renoiresque modeling of her body and its hot luminous color glowing against the steely gray drapery.” (Visual Arts Cork, The Large Bather, Picasso)

The article goes on to compare Renoir’s sensual scenes inhabited by beautiful, soft, willing, girls and the physical self-confidence of Maillol’s women to the apathetic and awkward woman inhabiting Picasso’s painting. “The overall effect of the painting is not only physically overbearing [possibly a comment on the increasing independence among the female gender and women ‘encroaching’ on the traditionally male sphere] but also sad and mournful. As with Seated Woman (8) made in 1920, we sense an elegiac, nostalgic meaning. [Is he yearning for when women were more oppressed and less threatening to the fragile male psyche? Or just yearning for a time that was more balanced and stable but can never be returned to in his post-war world?] The allusions to the classical tradition demand the spectator’s recognition, but it is only the outward shell of that tradition, manipulated and distorted, not its moral core, that is retained.” (Visual Arts Cork, Large Bather, Picasso)

Fernand Leger, a fellow Cubist and peer of Picasso, also returned to more traditional forms. However, just as Leger created his own individual style of Cubism, nicknamed Tubism for his use of cylindrical shapes, he had his own way of re-embracing Classicism. He “combined a machine aesthetic with solidity of form which reflected his strong faith in modern industry and his vision that, together, art and the machine age might help to plot a new course for the working people of France.” (Visual Arts Cork, Leger) Three Women (9), painted in 1921, is one of Leger’s best-known images. It depicts a trio of seated and reclining nudes drinking tea, or possibly coffee, in a modern apartment. Their skin is not soft and supple, but hard and machine-like. The nude female form has been synonymous with beauty for centuries. By painting these women this way, he is demonstrating his love and aesthetic appreciation of modern machines as well as referencing the balance and beauty of the art from antiquity. His work is a great example of synthesis of modernity and antiquity.

About a decade and a half later, after the formation of the Bauhaus school in Germany, Hitler’s power was in full swing and his regime dictated the art that was ‘acceptable’ for his public to view, namely traditional academic art. The Four Elements (10) by Adolf Ziegler, which hung over Hitler’s fireplace, is a great example of the aesthetic tastes of Nazi Germany and, more specifically, the aesthetic preferences for nude art during the Nazi Era. This kitschy work epitomizes Hitler’s ideal depiction of nude women in art: traditional, balanced, voyeuristic and cloaked in the mythology of a goddess or the personification of elements.

Hitler and his followers attacked those in the modern art circle, eventually shutting down the relatively new cross-training art education program at the Bauhaus and forcing many avant garde artists to flee Europe for the safety of the United States, resulting in a shift in the location of the center the art world. For the first time, there was an influx of innovative European artists in the United states influencing a whole new generation of American artists. This migration resulted in the formation of many art movements, including Pop Art. Pop Art is characterized by artists who incorporated popular imagery into their work and was part of an international phenomenon from the 1950s onward, but is most widely recognized as a group of New York artists that worked in the 1960s. 

Tom Wesselmann was a prominent pop artist who focused his attention on the female nude for the entirety of his career, culminating in his series The Great American Nude (11). “Sex is the thing that made Tom Wesselmann great, sometimes hated, and an oddity among his pop art peers. Unlike Warhol, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg and co, the painter chose the nude as his enduring subject, charging his work with a sexuality as earnest and joyful as it is overt.” (The Guardian, Tom Wesselmann) Tom Wesselmann’s youngest daughter, Kate, and his former model and assistant, Monica Serra, believe that his work has been largely misunderstood as sexist by critics. Kate is quotes saying, “It was so completely the opposite of who he was and how he treated women in real life.”

Those large-scale, flat and frictionless renderings of red-nippled nudes bothered plenty of people. Maybe it was the juxtaposition of still-life objects with female bodies that led some to accuse Wesselmann of equating one with the other – that women, in other words, were there to be consumed like the sliced white bread or Coke bottles that flanked them. The critic David Cohen sees it quite differently: “It is not [...] that he was revealing the eroticism of a Coke bottle so much as the fizzy delight of a nude.” (The Guardian, Tom Wesselmann)

During the era of Pop art was the first time female artists were beginning to be seriously considered in the art world. There were also the first Feminist Artists in the “second wave” of feminism during this time period. Feminist organizing effectively ceased between 1920 and the late 1960s, but women's concern about their role in society remained. Some artists expressed this in their work and have been posthumously identified as proto-feminist. Women such as Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois entered that art scene and created works containing imagery that dealt with the female body, personal experience, and ideas of domesticity, even though the artists did not explicitly identify with feminism. 

Throughout the history of modern art, there has been a monopolization by male artists of nude female representation as the epitome of beauty and purity. They represented women purely as sights with no narrative of their own. They were only there to sexually appeal to men or be a motherly type. There were only two options for the generally accepted role of a woman in society. With the entrance of the Pop Art era in the 1960s, women were finally being allowed to contribute, however minutely, to the conversation of how they were represented in visual form and how their role in society was and is portrayed.

Author: Anna Currence O'Neal

Originally Published: Fall of 2016

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