Nudity and Art
So let’s get straight to the point. Nudity. Nakedness. Nekkid. However you want to say it, people get strange when the clothes come off. I was reading an issue of The Artist’s Magazine a couple years ago (a pretty terrible magazine by the way, I wouldn’t recommend wasting your money on it…explanation to follow in an article some time in the near future), and someone had written into the magazine that they thought nudity had no place in art and that she (I think it was a she) would do with the previous issue what she did with all the other issues in her collection that had artwork featuring nude models…paint clothing over the freaking models! So she could pass her collection down to her grandchildren someday.
Well. Allow me to get into how many different kinds of wrong that is.
First of all, I don’t know how old her grandchildren were or at what age she intended to give them a collection of bad magazines filled with mediocre art, but I think it’s a pretty safe bet that regardless, they’ve been exposed to nudity before. Their own at least…speaking as the mother of a four-year-old and one-year-old, little kids are pretty damn eager to go au naturale when given the opportunity.
Secondly, she’s making an already awful magazine worse (ok, I promise, enough ragging on TAM…for now). The pages will be weighted down, if she’s using the wrong type of paint (and she probably is – if you even one issue of the magazine, you can tell it’s read by the type of people who think oil paint is what makes you a “real” artist) the paper will be eaten away and destroyed in no time, and the images will no longer make any sense in context.
Thirdly, and this is my biggest issue with the scenario, how DARE she deface another’s work! How dare anyone deface another’s work! That, to me, is the worst kind of art-related despicable. What the hell right does anyone have to “fix” someone else’s art work? If the artist had wanted clothes on the damn figure, guess what? They’d have put clothes on the damn figure. I’m hoping my liberal use of italics, bold font, and all caps is getting my outrage at this across. Altering another’s work when you have not been invited to do so is art blasphemy. Would she care to have her “happy little trees” (yes, I’m stereotyping her as a Bob Ross wannabe…that’s how her letter struck me…I’ll post the letter as an update if I can find the issue it’s in) turned into gallows or lynching scenes? Somehow I think not. And yes, I know she’s only defacing copies in one private magazine collection, not the originals. But it’s the principle of it! What would really stop her from altering the originals to her own narrow minded standards if given the opportunity?
So some people aren’t down with nudity in art. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say these people probably aren’t down with nudity period. That’s fine, to each their own. But I wholeheartedly disagree with those people. Nudity has a very prominent place in art.
At its most basic level, nudity is an equalizer. Everyone starts out in life with a nude body, and then builds on from there. But in terms of art, it serves very specific and important purposes. Nudity can serve as both a symbol of or comment on many things in life. But the most important thing, is that nudity makes us good artists! The nude model builds an artist’s skill in a way that the clothed model, and most certainly not a photograph, just can’t. The human body is complicated and subtle. Drawing the nude model develops an artist’s sensitive touch, something absolutely necessary for good mark making and evoking feeling in one’s work. The different colors of skin (I’m not even talking about ethnicity, but within the same person) and both abrupt and gentle value transitions are amazing skill builders. A clothed model can really not come close. Photos are even more horrible substitutes…drawing from life demands an understanding and development of space. Drawing from a photo graph makes that space so much difficult to attain.
It’s about aesthetics too. The human body is beautiful. Look at yourself nude in front of the mirror sometime. Ignore all the crap society and the beauty industry have told you about what’s “wrong” with your body. Examine it carefully. Look at the way the muscles (and yes, any fat deposits too) roll under your skin like gentle hills. Look at you joints, flex and turn them and see how the shape and values of your body change as you manipulate them. Notice the complexity of your hair, your irises. Now think about going and signing up as a model for a figure drawing class, because my goodness, you are gorgeous!
Nudity is a very basic part of life. We’re nude in our showers and baths, we’re nude when we have sex, we’re nude in between sets of clothing, we’re nude when we just feel like it. As such a fundamental aspect of life, that makes it a fundamental aspect of art.