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Contents
INTRODUCTION
The Recycled Nude
ONE
The Nude: Its Life, Death and Resurrection
TWO
Body Art: The Journey into Nakedness
THREE
The Changing Room: Female Perspectives
FOUR
Forgive Me, I’m a Painter
FIVE
The Naked Portrait
SIX
After Rodin, Is There
Anything Left To Say?
SEVEN
Going to Extremes
NOTES
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
CREDITS
INDEX
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FRANCES
BORZELLO
The Naked Nude
FRANCES BORZELLO
The
Naked
Nude

Jemima Stehli, Strip, 2001, set of ten chromogenic photographs mounted
on aluminium. In the photographic Strip series, Stehli gradually removes her
clothes in front of five men from the art world (representing the male gaze).
She asked each to use a cable shutter-release to photograph her during her
striptease. Her aim was to record the response of a male caught in a position
of some vulnerability as he is looked at while he looks.
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51
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62
The Changing Room: Female Perspectives
LEFT Paula Modersohn-
Becker, Self-Portrait, 1906,
oil on card. Surely art’s first
naked, pregnant self-portrait,
Modersohn-Becker’s painting
was made, according to its
inscription, on the occasion of
her sixth wedding anniversary.
As far as is known, she was
not pregnant when she
painted it, which suggests
that this is a work of personal
exploration as she wonders
about the effect of pregnancy
on her life.
OPPOSITE Lotte Laserstein,
Morning Toilette, 1930, oil on
panel. The large feet, sensible
hair cut and sturdy legs of
Laserstein’s depiction of her
model washing suggest
strength and purpose and are
far from the passive female
body beloved of male artists
of the past.
Naked_Nudes_Blad_spreads.indd 62-63 21/02/2012 12:59
masculine imaginings of a frightened girl by stressing her gawky subject’s difference
from the younger adolescents that form the frieze behind her. By extending the young
girl’s arms and legs, the artist emphasizes the idea of a body that runs slightly ahead of
its owner. There is less stress on sexuality than in the Munch and more on the strange
new body changes, which must surely stem from a female insider’s point of view.
It has been assumed that in the absence of any opportunity to study the life
model, something men took for granted, women in the past who were serious about
their art would try to learn about the body from drawing themselves without their
clothes on. Gwen John did several watercolours and drawings of herself naked in
her Paris apartment. To make money to support herself in Paris, she modelled, and
one of the people she modelled for was Auguste Rodin. The inevitable happened but
unfortunately, as also tends to happen, her passion outlasted his. A watercolour of
herself sitting on a bed naked, painted about 1908–9, is one of a fascinating group of
LEFT Edvard Munch,
Puberty, 1894–5, oil on
canvas.
FAR LEFT Elena Luksch-
Makowsky, Adolescentia,
1903, oil on canvas.
Munch seems to emphasize
the sexual terrors of the young
girl sitting self-protectively on
the bed. In contrast, Elena
Luksch-Makowsky
concentrates on the physical
gawkiness of the young
woman’s arms and legs,
which seem to be growing
rapidly away from her.
Gwen John, Self-Portrait
Sitting Naked on Her Bed,
c. 1908–9, gouache and
pencil on paper. Gwen John’s
watercolours and drawings of
herself reveal her confidence
in the body that had been
brought to life by her lover,
the sculptor Rodin.
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bodily appearance and the historical one of idealization.’ However, his way of doing so
is extremely singular for an artist. He has no desire for the casts of his body to carry any
aesthetic value or interest in their own right. Instead, their value lies in the uses to which
he puts them. ‘I think of the work as a catalyst or resonator whose value or significance is
not intrinsic but is generated in relation to the viewer and to its context.’ 5
Since 1997 Gormley has been populating a series of landscapes with iron casts
of his own body. Among the most ambitious of Gormley’s sited sculptures is Horizon
Field, situated high in the Austrian Alps and composed of a hundred iron bodies spread
over seven valleys with all of the sculptures positioned at a height of 2,039 metres to
create an artistic field that makes its own horizon. He says such works represent his
attempts to ask a simple question in material terms: Where does the human being fit
in the scheme of things? ‘Sculpture doesn’t need a roof or a label. You don’t need to
pass over the threshold of an institution in order to experience something that engages
your imagination and, with luck, your body. When placed in the outdoors in rain and
sunshine, in summer and winter, in daylight and moonlight, sculpture, in my view,
begins to live and its silence becomes a potent marker in time and space. People may
well ask “What the hell is this thing doing here?” and the work returns that question and
it responds reflexively “What the hell are you doing here?”.’ 6
Despite Gormley’s denial of the usefulness of the art of the past, it is hard to
divorce his nudes from it, even if just as a point of comparison. There is something of
Ron Mueck, Dead Dad,
1996–7, mixed media.
Everything about this work
operates in opposition to the
notion of the ideal nude.
Instead of generalized
perfection, Mueck
reproduces every wrinkle, hair
and vein in his detailed
portrait of his father’s body.
the Renaissance about his goal of using his body as a kind of surrogate for us to view
the world. Is that so very different from the miraculous one-point perspective of
the 15th century, which offered an optimum spot from which the viewer could see a
painting in its full three-dimensional glory? A journalist once put this link to humanity
and to the sculptural tradition in a less elevated manner: ‘Some lonely art lovers have
probably spent more time scrutinizing his rough-cast bottoms than they have a living
human’s. In the world of sculpture only Michelangelo’s David and the Venus de Milo
are more gawped at.’ 7 In 2011 Gormley faced up to his sculptural heritage – literally.
Invited to show at the Hermitage in St Petersburg, he ‘deplinthed’ a group of classical
sculptures by sinking them into a false floor, enabling visitors to come face to face with
these personified icons of human character at its best. For the adjoining courtyard, he
constructed a group of pixelated, blocky humanoids, crumbling and wavering in the
confusions caused by life today. His aim was to present a modern dystopian contrast to
the classical confidence of the perfect body.
Hyperrealism and change of scale are the tools of Australian sculptor Ron
Mueck, who has taken great pains to leave behind the traditional materials of sculpture
and to choose as subjects any body other than the ideal. His sculptures seem closer
to the art of making waxworks than to the bronzes and marbles of high art. Mueck is
Ron Mueck, Mother and
Child, 2001, mixed media.
A first in the history of art is
this larger-than-life sculpture
of a mother and newborn
child with attached umbilical
cord. Its replacement of the
classical ideal of exterior
perfection with the interior
functions of the body makes
this indisputably a nude for
our time.
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