Nude

About

The unclothed body has been a central subject since the carved figurines of the Palaeolithic. Classical Greece made the athletic male nude an ideal, and Praxiteles's Aphrodite of Knidos (4th century BC), known through copies, gave the female nude monumental standing. In 1956 the historian Kenneth Clark distinguished the nude, a body reshaped by art, from the merely naked.

That distinction has been tested ever since. Giorgione's Sleeping Venus (c. 1510) and Diego Velázquez's Rokeby Venus (1647–51) present the goddess as a body on view, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres lengthened the back of his Grande Odalisque (1814) well beyond anatomy. Women artists answered from the other side of the easel: Suzanne Valadon painted herself nude beside her lover in Adam and Eve (1909), and Alice Neel portrayed her own body at 80 in Self-Portrait (1980). Lucian Freud's heavy, closely observed sitters refuse idealisation altogether.