Nude Women in Art

Throughout history, artists have depicted nude women. These paintings, sculptures, and photographs reveal a range of attitudes about the female body, from adolescent desire to a mature embrace of sexuality. While the sex symbol may be controversial, there is something to be said for depicting naked bodies in a more authentic and humane way.

The earliest representations of nude women appear to be functional—to depict the bodies of those who were not wealthy enough to have their own clothing, or who chose to dress simply for comfort or hygiene purposes. Even so, the depiction of such naked women was considered offensive by many societies until the modern era. It was not until the Renaissance that European art began to be more accepting of nude women.

In the seventeenth century, the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer produced a series of paintings and prints that focused on the beauty and sex appeal of a woman’s naked body. These works became very popular. In the 19th century, the Orientalism movement added to this acceptance with images of the odalisque, a kind of slave or harem girl. As a result, by the 1860s, reclining female nudes predominated in European painting. Then, in 1863, Edouard Manet’s Olympia debuted at the Salon and was criticized for its deviation from this formula.

Today, Brooklyn-based artist Kurt Kauper is working to challenge the expectations that linger over a depiction of a female nude body in the context of art. His current show at the Almine Rech Gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side features three larger-than-life figures against brushy orange, red and tan backgrounds. Their bodies are strong but not overly muscular. Their sexy curves, with their intricate convergences of shadow and light, have a sensual yet unreadable quality.

Although Kauper is not working in the Live naked women style of the Guerrilla Girls, who famously asked “Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get into the Met?”, he is challenging the idea that certain subjects can only be rendered by artists who want to evoke a specific type of desire. He sees his work as a reaction to the dichotomy between those who paint nude women in order to objectify them and those who rebel against such depictions.

He points out that when he was in graduate school, a return to figuration in painting was occurring, with artists like John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage and Will Cotton rendering female nude bodies in ways that elicit a sense of pleasure and desire. But Kauper was pointedly uninterested in joining that discourse. Instead, he took up the male nude, painting hockey players—clothed and naked—in suburban environments. He has also painted his own unclothed body. These enigmatic portraits are poetic and colorful, like the cubists of his time. Their shapes are generous and their curves are delicate. The nude forms become a metaphor for the sexy, beautiful, and complicated nature of the human body. But they are not sex symbols. Instead, these bodies are odes to the female form and its universality.