Art, Gender Images in

Images of Beauty: The Nude and the Naked

Most university courses in art history at least until the 1970s began with a lengthy exposition of classical Greek and Roman art, primarily sculpture, as if art had suddenly sprung into being in the 5th century BC and was limited, at that time at least, to the southern tip of Europe. When acknowledged, non-European artistic traditions were either evoked as terms of comparison for Western aesthetic strands or reconfigured under the guise of “primitivism” as stylistic sources for artistic movements, such as cubism. However, a feminist analysis of the conventional Eurocentric origins of art exposes the ideological assumptions, workings, and silences of “traditional” art.

In his influential study of The Nude, Kenneth Clark also limits his scope to Europe, from the classical era to Picasso, because according to his definition, the nude is not merely a subject, that is, the portrayal of the human body unclothed, but a form of art that was invented in Greece in 5th century BC. In this new form, the representation of the naked body was merely the pretext for allegorically conveying a series of culturally important ideas, such as harmony, ecstasy, and humility. Although erotic, religious, or mythological images of nakedness can be found across the globe through the ages, only in the European tradition was the naked metaphorized as the nude—namely, nakedness invested with meaning. In the nude, the human body is found in its most overdetermined state, simultaneously containing the ideal of physical beauty and exemplifying the highest aesthetic achievement of its cultural setting. Clark privileges sculpture over Greek vase painting because the naturalism and sexual explicitness of (often male same-sex) sexual encounters that are found in the latter do not support his argument.

Critiquing his position from a feminist perspective, Lynda Nead notes that despite refusing to explicitly gender the nude as form, Clark mostly discusses female nudes from the point of view of a male spectator. Nead interprets this implicit gendering as a manifestation of a pervasive sexual division of labor in visual culture, including fine art, which places femininity on the side of the model, the embodiment of ideals and the aesthetic object of contemplation, while masculinity is identified with the artist, connoisseur (expert), and consumer of representations and their pleasures. Furthermore, Nead claims, the process by which the naked is turned into the nude has a special affinity to notions of femininity: The nude represents flesh tamed by culture and reshaped through aesthetic ideals into lithe and contained form. Clark alludes to prehistoric statuettes of corpulent female fertility figures as out of control and undisciplined bodies that were gradually contoured and framed in the idealized [Page 44]Venuses of classical antiquity and the Renaissance. Women's bodies—in but also beyond their representations—are suited to the nude not because they are naturally predisposed to the aesthetic contours of the genre, but precisely because they are not. The female nude, more than the male, embodies the taming of the naked, nature disciplined into culture, because it requires much more disciplining to become idealized. If Clark's interpretation reinforced the passive-active division of labor between the maker/consumer and model/object of art, it did so only in a highly sublimated manner, that is, by concentrating on the nude as pure aesthetic form, carefully distancing it from sexuality, albeit with only partial success. According to the active/passive heterosexual division of labor, a phrase coined by Laura Mulvey to describe the gender dynamics of vision and desire, men look, women are looked at, and analogically, masculinity is the subject desire, while femininity is confined to being its object. In the latter half of the 20th century, the nude erupts back into the naked: In popular visual culture (film, print advertising, etc.) as well as art, the passive-active division of labor acquires the sexual dimension previously suppressed by aesthetic form, and this newly exposed sexuality throws a new light on the power structures underlying representation.

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